Fostering a Catholic commitment to the common good: An approach rooted in virtue ethics

The author argues that virtue ethics offers a potentially fruitful framework for approaching Catholic social thought. A virtue-based approach provides a means of connecting a Catholic understanding of social justice to issues of personal morality and moral formation. Three overlapping virtues are proposed as foundational to this approach: solidarity, compassion, and hospitality. The cultivation of these three virtues involves developing habits of thinking, feeling, and acting that concretely express a vision of Catholic social teaching.