What we can say, based on historical reflection, is that any Christian articulation of social justice that seeks to hand the poor over to government for dependency and control is antithetical to the concept of justice within the history of Christianity.

While the term “social justice” means different things to different Christian and other religious organizations, an historic use of the concept in theological ethics was conjoined to a discussion of the common good that sought to explain the importance of private property, free enterprise, and the threat of big government.

On May 15, 1931, Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno (QA) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. As explained by Christine Fiber Hinze in a commentary of QA, Pope Pius XI has been credited with introducing the term “social justice” into the lexicon of Christian ethics. When Protestants started using the term will require more research, but the Catholic usage was fairly easy to trace.

According to Hinze, Italian theologian Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio introduced the term into Catholic social ethics in the mid-1800s to rearticulate potentially misunderstood concepts like “legal justice” and “general justice.” Gustav Gunlac and Oswald von Nell-Breuning were particularly influential in inserting the language into QA. The concept was officially described later in 1937 in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris, which attacked atheistic communism…

For Pius XI in QA, social justice referred to the central and necessary set of conditions where each person makes free, non-government-coerced contributions to the common good. It included keeping in check the power of the State and the freedom of Christians to form their own institutions in civil society.

Read More: http://online.worldmag.com/2010/09/15/social-justice-has-christian-history/