The editor is a professor of moral theology and a consultor to the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He, along with five of the other eight contributors, is attached to the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the Roman institution entrusted to the care of Opus Dei. The brief volume is a translation and revision of a work published in Italian in 2015.

In his foreword to the volume, Cardinal Peter Turkson uses the neologism catependium to describe the book. That is, it summarizes the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (CSDC) and does so using the question-and-answer approach of catechisms, hence “catependium.” One of the reasons for this new work is to incorporate “encyclicals and other documents that deserve a place in any summary of the Church's social teaching” (viii) since the appearance of the original Compendium in 2004. Besides the CSDC, the bibliography is composed entirely of documents issued by popes, Vatican agencies, and episcopal conferences with just two exceptions: the Summa of Aquinas and a Youth Catechism by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna.

One of the problems with the CSDC when it was issued was the heavy reliance upon the writings of John Paul II. That pope was quoted more than all other popes combined in the Compendium. Indeed, John Paul II was cited more often than all the documents of Vatican II, all the patristic authors, and even more than the Old or New Testaments. Granted the significance of John Paul's papacy for Catholic social teaching, many reviewers of the CSDC thought it was a bit overdone. So, an update that would add the insights of Benedict XVI and Francis, as well as new documents from official church agencies, must have seemed worth publishing and might serve to broaden the sources for Catholic social teaching.

The volume pretty much follows the layout of the Compendium with regard to the order in which topics are treated. A feature of the book not found in the CSDC is the use of six Special Topics sections on matters that have come to the fore in a way that was not foreseen at the time of publication of the Compendium. The six special topics include bioethics, gender theory, immigration, aging, hunger, and social media. In several of these cases, the CSDC does not serve as the basis for the material, but other documents issued by the church hierarchy do. Somewhat surprisingly, many of these other documents are not recent texts issued after the 2004 Compendium, but earlier documents that predate it. For example, on the topic of gender theory, a 1983 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, John Paul II's 1995 letter to women, and the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church are all cited as source material for the answers to the author's questions.

I am uncertain of the book's value as a teaching tool. Certainly, at the graduate level such a book would be inappropriate given its summary overview of what was already a summary. For undergrads, I find the question and brief answer format to be less than ideal. In truth, I would not employ the original Compendium as a text, but favor the use of the primary documents. For those, however, looking for a student-friendly introduction to Catholic social teaching, there are other synthetic overviews that do a better job than the book under review. The texts of Bernard Brady, Thomas Massaro, and Judith Merkle all come to mind as helpful volumes for undergrads to learn about Catholic social teaching.