Part Two: The Bridge Merton Built.

Part Two: The Bridge Merton Built: How to Actually Read Catholic Social Teaching

Here’s what Merton understood that most of us miss: Catholic Social Teaching isn’t a textbook. It’s a way of seeing.
When he read those insightful encyclicals—the ones that make your eyes glaze over in theology/religion class—he wasn’t looking for bullet points to memorize. He was looking for a bridge. And he found one. Actually, he found several.
Let me show you the bridges Merton built for us, because once you see them, Catholic Social Teaching stops being a dusty archive and becomes a living practice.

Bridge One: From Abstraction to Lived Reality

What we usually do: We read “human dignity” and nod vaguely. Sure, dignity. Great. Next topic.
What Merton taught us to see: Every time an encyclical speaks about “human dignity,” it’s pointing to specific people being crushed by specific systems right now.
When Rerum Novarum (1891) talks about the dignity of workers, Merton reads: “Look at the actual human being fed into the industrial machine. See the exhaustion. See the family that can’t survive on those wages. See the soul being treated as a cog.” The encyclical isn’t giving you a principle to agree with. It’s saying, “Open your eyes to what’s actually happening to your neighbor.”
The bridge for us today: When you hear “algorithm,” “platform worker,” “content moderator,” “data subject”—those are real people. Catholic Social Teaching, read as Merton read it, forces us to ask: Who specifically is being harmed? Who is being reduced to a metric? Whose dignity is being violated while we scroll?
Stop reading for principles. Start reading for faces.

Bridge Two: From Documents to the Gospel

What we usually do: We treat the social encyclicals as a separate category—”social justice stuff”—over here, while “real spirituality” is over there.
What Merton taught us to see: The encyclicals are the Church’s attempt to translate the Sermon on the Mount into the language of each historical moment. They’re applied Gospel.
When Pacem in Terris (1963) speaks of human rights and the immorality of modern warfare, Merton hears “Blessed are the peacemakers” spoken into a world with nuclear weapons. When Quadragesimo Anno (1931) insists on just wages, he hears: “I was hungry and you gave me food,” translated for an industrial economy.
The bridge for us today: Don’t read Catholic Social Teaching as if it’s secondary commentary on the “real” Gospel. Read it as the Church trying to figure out what “love your neighbor” means when your neighbor is a gig worker paid by the task, or a teenager whose self-worth is being destroyed by algorithmic feeds, or a Global South laborer mining rare earth metals for your smartphone.
Ask yourself: What is the Beatitude hidden in this paragraph? What is the parable of the Good Samaritan trying to say through this teaching on economic justice?

Bridge Three: From the Personal to the Structural (and Back Again)

What we usually do: We split the world into two. Either we focus on personal conversion (“be nicer!”), Or we focus on systems (“change the structures!”). Liberals pick systems, conservatives pick personal virtue, and everyone talks past each other.
What Merton taught us to see: They’re inseparable. The encyclicals know this. Personal sin creates unjust structures. Unjust structures deform persons. You can’t address one without the other.
Merton’s genius was to show that contemplative prayer isn’t an escape from structural justice—it’s what makes you capable of seeing it clearly. When you encounter God in silence, you discover your true self beneath all the ego and propaganda. And then you can see clearly how systems lie to us, how they make cruelty look normal, how they teach us to ignore the suffering of others.
The bridge for us today: You can’t fight autonomous technology effectively if you’re still enslaved to your phone. You can’t challenge surveillance capitalism if you haven’t learned to be present to your own life. You can’t advocate for humane AI if you’ve never experienced being human beyond productivity and efficiency.
Read Catholic Social Teaching as an integrated path: personal conversion through contemplative awareness and structural change through solidarity and advocacy. Not either/or. Both/and.

Bridge Four: From Reading to Discernment

What we usually do: We read the documents to extract answers. “What’s the Church’s position on X?” Then we apply the answer like a formula.
What Merton taught us to see: The encyclicals teach us how to discern, not just what to think. They model a practice: read the signs of the times, judge them in light of the Gospel, act in truth and love.
Gaudium et Spes (1965) literally tells the Church to read the “signs of the times.” That’s not a one-time instruction for the bishops. That’s the method. Every generation has to do it.
The bridge for us today: Catholic Social Teaching gives us the See-Judge-Act framework:
See: What’s actually happening with AI right now? Not what tech companies promise, but what’s real? Who’s being harmed? Who’s profiting? Look honestly.
Judge: What does human dignity require here? What does the common good demand? What do the Beatitudes say about automated decision-making in healthcare, or algorithmic hiring, or deepfakes?
Act: What concrete, nonviolent response is possible? Not what would make me feel righteous, but what would actually serve my neighbor’s dignity?
Merton shows us: the encyclicals aren’t answer keys. They’re training in moral discernment for new situations.

Bridge Five: From Individualism to Solidarity

What we usually do: We read Catholic Social Teaching as individuals consuming information. “What should I believe about economics?”
What Merton taught us to see: These documents are addressed to the whole Church, calling us to become a people who embody an alternative. The encyclicals imagine communities, not isolated moral heroes.
Merton lived this in his monastery—a community of prayer organized around values different from those of capitalism. He knew you can’t live Catholic Social Teaching alone. You need others.
The bridge for us today: Don’t just read about solidarity. Practice it. Find others who are asking the same questions about technology and human dignity. Study the encyclicals together. Discern together. Act together.
Maybe it’s a parish group that commits to smartphone-free family dinners and studies Laudato Si’ on Sundays. Maybe it’s tech workers forming a reading group around labor rights and Catholic Social Teaching. Maybe it’s parents organizing for digital dignity in schools.
Merton’s reading of the encyclicals was always communal, even in his hermitage. He wrote to activists, monks, writers, and workers. The bridge he built connects persons to persons.

Bridge Six: From Text to Practice

What we usually do: We read, we agree, we do nothing.
What Merton taught us to see: The encyclicals are performative—they don’t just describe what should be, they call new realities into being through communities that embody them.
When Rerum Novarum affirmed workers’ right to organize, it didn’t merely recognize this truth—it helped create the Catholic labor movement. When Pacem in Terris proclaimed human rights and condemned the arms race, it emboldened peace activists.
The bridge for us today: After you read about human dignity in the algorithm age, you have to do something. Even something small:
  • Delete one app that’s making you treat people as content.
  • Support one organization fighting for tech workers’ rights.
  • Have one conversation about AI ethics grounded in Catholic Social Teaching.
  • Make one choice that prioritizes community over efficiency.
  • Practice one technology Sabbath a week.
The bridge from text to practice is built by small, concrete acts of faithfulness.

How to Actually Use These Bridges

Here’s a practical method, borrowing from Merton’s contemplative approach:
  1. Read slowly. Take one paragraph from an encyclical. Not a whole document. One paragraph. Sit with it as you’d sit with Scripture.
  2. Ask: Who is being seen here? What specific human reality is this paragraph trying to make visible?
  3. Ask: What Gospel passage does this echo? Where have I heard Jesus say something like this?
  4. Ask: What in my world right now needs this word? Where around me—in my work, my community, my technology use—is this truth being violated or could be embodied?
  5. Ask: What one concrete thing could I do? Not ten things. One. What small act of faithfulness is possible today?
  6. Pray. Because Merton knew: without contemplative grounding, our activism becomes self-righteousness, and our reading becomes ideology.

The Bridge Is a Person

Ultimately, Merton taught us that all these bridges—from abstraction to reality, from documents to Gospel, from personal to structural, from reading to discernment, from individualism to solidarity, from text to practice—all lead to the same place: encounter with the person of Christ in the suffering neighbor.
Catholic Social Teaching, read through Merton’s contemplative eyes, becomes a way of training ourselves to see Christ everywhere the encyclicals point: in the worker, in the poor, in the peacemaker, in the one whose dignity is denied.
In our age of autonomous technology, that means seeing Christ in the content moderator traumatized by violent images, in the warehouse worker monitored by an algorithm, in the artist whose work trains AI without consent, in the child whose attention is being weaponized for profit, and in the Global South community bearing the environmental cost of our digital infrastructure.
The bridges Merton built don’t lead away from the world into pious abstraction. They lead deeper into the world, where Christ waits in the faces of those the systems ignore.
That’s how to read Catholic Social Teaching. Not as a student cramming for a test, but as a contemplative learning to see.
And once you see, you can’t look away.

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