A leading Jesuit called last night for a renewal of the sense of global justice found in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio.
Provincial of the Irish Jesuits Fr John Dardis was speaking at the National Gallery in Dublin at the launch of The Development of Peoples, a book published to mark the 40th anniversary of the encyclical.
He said he felt a sense of tragedy at the anniversary as the encyclical was "still so relevant".
He reflected that had political and business leaders the intuitive sense of justice he had witnessed among the poorest of the poor in Peru and Chile this summer, there would be no need of such events as last night's launch.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, said Populorum Progressio was "the first social encyclical after the Vatican Council which saw a new way of looking at the relationship between the church and the world".
He spoke of the need "to attend to the fostering of a spirituality of social activism" and commented on how founders of Irish religious orders involved in education and healthcare were "in most cases also mystics".
He emphasised that, though Catholic social teaching was anthropocentric, that did not mean it placed the human person in a position that allowed him or her disregard nature and the rest of creation.
Fr Tony O'Riordan, director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice said the injustice of global inequality and poverty could be called "a mega-blasphemy" in the words of theologian Fr Jon Sobrino, one of the contributors to the book, which has a foreword by Mary Robinson and is published by Columba Press.