Since the emergence of modern Catholic Social Teaching at the end of the 19th Century, the Catholic Church has presented its social teachings as "a third way" between liberal individualism and communist collectivism. Since the *aggiornamento* of the Second Vatican Council, the sacred dignity of the human person and the preferential option for the poor have become the two leading principles of contemporary Catholic Social Thought. The presentation will examine the tensions that remain within Catholic moral universalism between: a) the individual good and the common good; b) between gender equality and the discourse of "gender ideology;" and c) between the particularistic "national interest" and the universalist interest of global humanity.