Thesis advisor: James Keenan / Nigeria is richly endowed with an array of natural resources and human capital. It is unarguably the largest economy in Africa, with an estimated 2023 gross domestic product (GDP) of $477.38 Billion. However, the superlative epithets of Nigeria with glaring upside economic potential are marginal vis-à-vis concrete socio-economic and demographic benchmarks such as per capita gross domestic product, life expectancy, Human Development Index (HDI), and the development paradigm of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) such as access to food and potable water, housing, employment, human rights, and security. This dissertation seeks to provide a hermeneutic for understanding Nigeria’s developmental quandaries as well as a solution. Drawing from Catholic Social Teaching (CST), Liberation Theology, and insights from critical realism, it argues that the tripartite concepts of developmentalism, assistentialism, and social structures are key to unraveling the origin and presence of Nigeria’s development challenges. Undergirding the proximate causes of Nigeria’s underdevelopment, such as egocentrism, tribalism, violent conflicts, and corruption, and the remote causes, such as developmentalism and assitentialism, are some impersonal mechanisms that incentivize, condition, sustain, and perpetuate factors of underdevelopment in Nigeria. Additionally, the notion of development that Nigeria adopted shortly after independence put Nigeria on the trajectory of underdevelopment and mis-development, which is evident today. Catholic social teaching, while cautioning against the dangers of a restrictive notion of development, offers a notion of development that is integral and genuine. The anthropological presuppositions of CST make it well-suited for development in the Nigerian context. This work seeks to demonstrate ways in which Catholic Social Teaching, given its interdisciplinary character, provides for a program of integral development in Nigeria through the Catholic Church. While it is the proper function of government to provide a program of development for its citizens, this work will contend that the Catholic Church in Nigeria, but even more so, the Archdiocese of Abuja, given its strategic location within the Federal Capital Territory, its historical relational trust and accountability and equipped with the theological language of CST and Liberation Theology can contribute to the development of Nigeria. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.