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Six: The Political and Economic Realities of the Modern World and Their Ethicaland Cultural Presuppositions: The Encyclical Centesimus annus
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SIX The Political and economic realities of the Modern World and Their ethical and Cultural Presuppositions The Encyclical Centesimus annus The Place of Centesimus annus in the history of the Social Doctrine of the Church Centesimus annus,1 the third social encyclical of John Paul II, was published in 1991 on the occasion of the centenary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum .2 The latter was the first of the social encyclicals of the popes; with it the Church’s social doctrine began to take form as a more or less systematic body of teaching, adaptable to contemporary problems with the passage of the years. The compilation of the encyclical coincided with the epochal events of 1989: the fall of communist regimes, the failure of planned socialist economies, and the resulting “triumph” of constitutionalism, liberal democracy , and the capitalist market economy. To better understand the place of Centesimus annus in the whole of Catholic social teaching, some (necessarily brief) historical background would 173 1. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of “Rerum Novarum” (1991). Citations from the encyclicals and conciliar documents in this chapter—namely, Centesimus annus, Rerum novarum, Quadragesimo anno, Pacem in terris Gaudium et spes, Laborem exercens, Sollicitudo rei socialis, and Evangelium vitae—are taken from the official Vatican translations found at www.vatican.va. After the first reference to a given document, paragraph numbers are indicated in parentheses. 2. Pope Leo XII, Rerum novarum (1891). 174 The encyclical Centesimus annus be useful. The first social encyclical of 1891 began a process of a systematic elaboration of the Church’s social doctrine. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the decisive contributions to this doctrine were made by the Jesuit Heinrich Pesch (1854–1926) and his students and confreres Gustav Gundlach and Oswald Nell-Breuning. The “solidarism” proposed by these authors was presented as a kind of specifically Christian “third way” between liberalism and socialism, both viewed at the time as the unhealthy fruit of modernity, and intimately linked to each other. The culminating point of this tendency was Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno: On Reconstruction of the Social Order, Fr. Nell-Breuning having a fundamental role in its redaction. The encyclical presents the social doctrine of the Church as a real alternative with respect to both “individualistic” liberalism and collectivist socialism. The Church’s traditional antimodernism, but probably also the alarming experience of the world economic crisis, with the failure of large credit institutions and the resulting poverty of the masses, convinced the Church of the necessity to propose an alternative conception of the ordering of social and economic life, based on the eternal principles of its moral and anthropological teaching and capable of offering a practical orientation to believers. Against socialism, the Church’s social doctrine beginning with Rerum novarum had emphasized the dignity and transcendent destiny of the person, and in particular the right to private property (including ownership of the means of production) as a right founded on human nature. Against liberalism—accused of being based on an “individualistic” conception of the person—the state’s function of regulating and organizing economic life was emphasized, as was the concept of “social justice,” an expression used in Quadragesimo anno to indicate that justice that regards, not the good of individuals , but the common good, and that must be capable of constructing “a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life” (no.88). Added to this was the increasing tendency of Catholic social doctrine to base itself on natural law and on the social sciences: theological reflections were not seen as useful for the eradication of society’s evils at their roots; rather, a comprehensive natural law vision of society and the economy was seen to be necessary. This Catholic social doctrine based on the social sciences and natural law certainly had great merit. In Quadragesimo anno, Pius XI emphasized above all how the duty to fight against the misery of the great mass of humanity derived not only from Christian charity, but was also suggested— [35.173.178.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:32 GMT) The encyclical Centesimus annus 175 and this indeed primarily—by the demands of justice. Also important was the idea that the capitalist form of the economy—in fact not rejected in principle in Quadragesimo anno—requires an adequate juridical-political order, which is provided by the state. Nevertheless, the solidaristic inheritance...