Several years ago I had an experience that I imagine will resonate with many readers – of something very familiar suddenly becoming so fresh, so striking that it is as if you are encountering it for the first time. I had gone to Mass and there was something that was concerning me and making me anxious. Then, just after the prayers for the Consecration ended, I heard the priest say as if I’d never listened to the words before: “Lord, protect us from all anxiety.” Just hearing the prayer gave me a sense that no problem would be insurmountable if we could trust God, if we could rely on Christ’s mercy.

The belief that God can ease us in our troubles is a familiar one in Christian thought. In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ is recorded as saying: “Come to me, all you that are weary and heavy-burdened and I will give you rest.” Cardinal Newman, whose beatification was announced this week, wrote a hymn that powerfully evoked how we can turn to God: “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom.”

Most people would consider these appeals to God to concern their spiritual troubles, or their emotional anxieties. They yearn for his comfort as they struggle to cope, say, with bereavement, or a crisis of conscience, or a growing doubt about God’s own existence.

But there are other undoubted anxieties that affect us, particularly in the current economic circumstances. Will we lose our job? Will our employer exploit us, knowing that there is a queue of people waiting to take our post? Might we have to take a wage cut because our employer is in trouble? What if the firm thinks it can get people abroad to do the job cheaper? What can God do about that? What relevance does it have to our faith?

According to the Roman Catholic tradition, it has everything to do with faith. But concern with people’s employment and the way we engage with the world is something that is not so much God’s concern but our own as believers. We have a responsibility to society and others that is integral to our faith. Practising our faith is not something that can exclusively affect one part of our life and be ignored in others. It has as much to do with the decisions we make about savings and investments and the way we treat colleagues at work as it has to do with loving our children and caring for our friends.

This week the way in which faith is integral to all aspects of our lives was made evident in a new teaching document — otherwise known as an encyclical — published by Pope Benedict. Called Caritas in Veritate (Love in truth), the encyclical is a wide-ranging treatise on business, poverty, unemployment, overseas aid, investment and finance. In some 50 pages the Pope paints a picture of a discredited system of capitalism that has led the world, through greed, into crisis and even financial meltdown. It calls for a new way of living with a new set of values, observing that capitalism is flawed because of its model of man driven by self-interest. Instead it offers fraternity as a more humane concept and urges people to work together, motivated by service rather than profit. At its heart is a belief in the common good — a belief that we should aspire to the collective welfare of society and which has much in common with philosophical concepts of social justice. It sees people as both sacred and social, achieving fulfilment in community. This is not individualistic morality but requires an imaginative engagement with the whole of society.

Pope Benedict’s encyclical is influenced by another theory at the heart of what is called Catholic social teaching. This is solidarity, a sense that there is a unity that binds us together and works to help the most vulnerable in society — whether they are refugees or the orphaned and widowed. Even if language or culture or distance separate us, we remain our brother’s keeper.

This may well be a puzzle to those who think that the business of religion is saving souls. But in the Catholic tradition, the spiritual and social justice go hand in hand. “Authentic human development,” says the Pope in Caritas in Veritate, “concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension”. Or, to use the words of the late Cardinal Bernadin, faith is a seamless garment, something integral to my whole life. And if my neighbour is to be protected from anxiety, then it is part of my vocation to ensure that he is not sunk by the encircling gloom.

Catherine Pepinster is editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly