Cardinal Seán Brady said yesterday that the case needed to be made for tax increases in order to provide better social and health services for more vulnerable members of society.
The primate of All-Ireland said a better balance could be struck between the pursuit of individual wealth and our duty to the common good in the form of better education for children and better health services for children.
"We need to strike such a balance. We need to reawaken our duty to provide for the common good, while at the same time we would all like to see the best possible public services delivered. I'm raising these points to get a debate going on this," Cardinal Brady told The Irish Times.
"There is a lot of comment of how much wealth people have, not so much comment on how people acquired it and how it is being used . . . There are deep questions to be asked over what is the purpose of human existence and how do we use the fruits of the Earth."
Cardinal Brady was speaking after opening a conference yesterday on the theme "Who is my neighbour?" based on Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est (God is Love).
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, chaired the one-day conference which was organised by the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs.
The conference also heard that there was much greater scope for human rights groups and the church to work together in the common goal of achieving social justice.
Divisions have emerged between the Catholic hierarchy and groups such as Amnesty International, which recently adopted a policy in favour of limited rights to abortion.
However, Prof Conor Gearty of the London School of Economics said the Catholic Church shared a great deal of common ground with the international human rights movement.
"Each is sceptical of the power of the market to deliver a just and a fair society. Each believes in human dignity and in the proposition that we should all be esteemed equally wherever we are from, whatever our race or ethnicity and however fat our wallets," he said.
"Catholic clergy and non-governmental organisation should be able to work together by sharing the common goal of spreading social justice and human rights around the globe."
Prof Gearty said that in practice each group was committed to a "preference for the poor", while eschewing Marxist-inspired collectivism. He said human rights activists were as scathing about the failures of modernism and the "aimless vacuities" of post-modernism as was any well-educated bishop.
For example, he said it was not surprising that the interventions of the head of Amnesty International on issues such as Guantanamo, war and poverty often read like secular encyclicals. Similarly, Pope Benedict's reflections on the outreach of love in his first such letter could be reconfigured without too much difficulty into a human rights manifesto.
Prof Gearty suggested that a concord could be established between the church and human rights groups in which they could establish their common ground, while acknowledging their differences.
Speaking after the conference, Cardinal Brady indicated that such moves were already afoot.
"We respect the good work done by so many agencies. Some have raised questions which cause difficulties for us. The way that can begin to progress is through dialogue and see what the real position of people is.
"We're in the process of doing that. I've heard that discussions are taking place. The church doesn't use its charitable work to proselytise - at the same time, we don't leave our moral principles at the door when we provide support," he said.
