This article explores the links between Christian social doctrine and history from the perspective of the historical path of this theological discipline as well as its contemporary developments. The analysis has a three-part approach. The first thematizes the appearance, or lack thereof, of the topic of history in the writings of Christian social doctrine. The second investigates the type of understanding that historiography applies when dealing with the notion of history, which could lead theology to place pressure on making this concept an issue. The third relates the manner of understanding history on the part of Christian social doctrine with the effective insertion that the Christian world has had in historical reality. As a hypothesis it is postulated that the realm of the strictly historical concurs as a theological place with the advent that the Second Vatican Council constituted for social moral theology, that this emergency was linked with wider disciplinary developments, and that it was translated into a committed, solidary and comprehensive worldly insertion, that on no few occasions situated Christians as precursors of socio-political movings, especially in Latin America.