Thirty-five years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his most developed social encyclical, Centesimus Annus; its title signaled the author’s intention to honor the centenary of Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which launched the modern papal social magisterium.
Yet Centesimus Annus, while paying due homage to Leo XIII’s enduring insights, was far more than a papal traipse down nostalgia lane. Rather, John Paul II used Rerum Novarum and the papal social encyclical tradition it inspired as the intellectual baseline from which to look into the future, as the Polish pope proposed certain moral and cultural prerequisites for the free and virtuous society of the 21st century.
Centesimus Annus was a call to think about free politics and free economics—democracy and the market—as more than mechanisms. Democracy and the market, the pope insisted, are not machines that can run by themselves. Absent a virtuous citizenry, he cautioned, political and economic freedom would decompose into various forms of self-indulgent license, thereby throwing sand into the gears of democratic self-governance and the free market.
John Paul thus understood the free society of the future to involve three, not just two, interlocking parts. A vibrant public moral culture, inculcating and supporting the virtues that make it possible to live freedom well, was essential to guide the workings of free politics and free economics. And it was the task of the Church to shape that public moral culture through its teaching and witness.
In 1991, it seemed that the century-long tradition of papal social teaching would continue beyond Centesimus Annus by developing John Paul II’s insights in light of unfolding 21st-century circumstances. A bit of that happened: Benedict XVI usefully added the notion of “human ecology”—a public environment conducive to personal flourishing and social solidarity—to the Catholic social doctrine vocabulary. In doing so, he fleshed out John Paul II’s teaching about the priority of culture in shaping political communities and economic systems in which freedom could be lived nobly rather than crassly.
In the main, however, the social teachings of Benedict XVI and Francis were more ad hoc; they did not build out from what we might think of as the “intellectual scaffolding” that had been erected, layer by layer, from Rerum Novarum through Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (written for the fortieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical) to Centesimus Annus.
So in the retrospect of thirty-five years, Centesimus Annus looks less like the opening of the next chapter in an evolving papal social magisterium constructed using the same architecture of principles, and more like the concluding chapter of Catholic social doctrine in its classical form.
However the papal social doctrine tradition develops in the future, though, that evolution would do well to take seriously one of the enduring truths in Centesimus Annus: John Paul II’s trenchant analysis of why the communist project crumbled in the Revolution of 1989.
Communism failed for many reasons, of course. Communism was based on idiotic economics. Communism created cruel — lethally cruel — forms of politics. Communist culture was ugly when it wasn’t simply banal. Above all, however, communism got the human person wrong: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rest of that sorry lot misconstrued who we are, where we came from, how we build authentic communities of solidarity, and what our ultimate destiny is. All four of those mistakes grew out of communism’s godlessness. As John Paul II put it in paragraph 22 of Centesimus Annus:
…the true cause of [the communist crack-up] was the spiritual void brought about by atheism, which [could not satisfy]… the desire in every human heart for goodness, truth, and life… Marxism had promised to uproot the need for God from the human heart, but the results have shown that it is not possible to succeed in this without throwing the heart itself into turmoil.
The attempt to create utopia without God ended up in the desecration of man and an unprecedented slaughter of human beings. Which means that there can be no authentic “human ecology” capable of sustaining societies of freedom absent a recognition of what St. Augustine wrote when he summed up his own search for the truth of things, seventeen hundred years ago: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
That yearning for an encounter with the divine is hard-wired into the human condition. It was boldly proclaimed by Centesimus Annus, as John Paul II analyzed the late-20th-century signs of the times. It must be just as boldly proclaimed today.
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I miss the days of Pope John Paul II was our pope.
Too often missed in the layered and lengthy Centesimus Annus are a few very concise compass points for the future. Some of these are:
“(n. 32, beyond the vocabulary of Rerum Novarum) In our time, in particular, there exists another FORM OF OWNERSHIP which is becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this kind of ownership than on natural resources…initiative and entrepreneurial ability becomes increasingly evident and decisive”—NOT TO BE READ APART FROM nn. 58, 37-39, below;
“(n. 39, policies that are) POISONING the lives of millions of defenseless human beings as if in a form of ‘chemical warfare [then saline abortions, now mifepristone]”;
“(n. 46, Christian truth…is NOT an ideology [not a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism]; Christian anthropology…(n. 55) the Church’s social doctrine ‘belongs to the field…of theology and particularly moral theology [citing Rerum Novarum, n. 143, and not reducible to social science or mongrel versions of synodality]”;
“the preferential option for the poor…is NOT limited to material poverty, since it is well known that there are many other forms of poverty, especially in modern society—not only economic but cultural and spiritual poverty as well (n. 57)”;
“(n. 58) the promotion of justice….REQUIRES above all a change of lifestyles[!]…of models of production and consumption, and of the established structures of power which today govern societies [this leading point is omitted by some as a pious remnant]”;
“(n. 38) Man receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend EVERY social order so as to move toward truth and goodness…the decisions which create a human environment can give rise to specific structures of sin which impede the full realization of those who are in any way oppressed by them. To destroy such structures and replace them with more authentic forms of living in community is a task which requires courage and patience [we must say a theology of liberation vs “liberation theology”]”;
“(nn. 38, 39) the human environment…safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic ‘HUMAN ECOLOGY’ [a focus introduced here rather than later by Benedict, and as interrelated with but also distinct from] the ‘ecological question’ which accompanies the problem of consumerism [n. 37, the neologism of an “integral ecology” comes later in Laudato Si]”.
SUMMARY: Equally neglected with Centesimus Annus (equality!) is Veritatis Splendor which appeared two years later (1993): “a no less grave a danger [than Marxism] …is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism” (n. 101); “the commandment of love of God and neighbor does not have in its dynamic any higher limit, BUT it does have a lower limit, beneath which the commandment is broken” (n. 52).