Centesimus Annus in 2021

First Things, 06 May 2021

There are many points of unity between Leo XIII and John Paul II, but in social teaching they might be considered the great champions of human freedom.

May 1 brought back happy memories for devotees of St. John Paul II. On that date ten years ago, Benedict XVI beatified his predecessor in a St. Peter’s Square still echoing with the “santo subito” chants of six years earlier. It was the last great beatification or canonization in Rome in the John Paul style of celebration—that of the massive international festivals that marked the elevations of Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, Padre Pio, or Mother Teresa.

Under Pope Francis, the ceremonies have been subdued in the extreme, even for his personal heroes, St. Paul VI and St. Oscar Romero. In 2019, he canonized Sister Dulce Lopes Pontes, the “Mother Teresa of Brazil” and a national heroine, without mentioning her name.

May 1 this year was also the thirtieth anniversary of Centesimus Annus, John Paul’s 1991 landmark encyclical, which Bishop Robert Barron says “sums up Catholic social teaching better than any other document.”

The greatness of teaching documents can be measured by how well they stand up to changing circumstances. The “centennial year” that Centesimus Annus marked was 1891, the year of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. In that charter for contemporary Catholic social teaching, Leo diagnosed the Marxist solution to the plight of workers as a “cure worse than the disease,” 26 years ahead of the Bolshevik revolution.

Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire has published an excellent compendium of texts entitled Catholic Social Teaching Collection. It is not your typical treatment of the subject. In the section on witnesses to the tradition—from the Church Fathers to contemporary saints—the longest section is given to Dorothy Day, who explains her support for striking workers “not on the ground of wages and hours and conditions of labor, but on the fundamental truth that men should be treated not as chattels, but as human beings, as ‘temples of the Holy Ghost.’”

The pope of solidarity would have agreed. Indeed, John Paul wrote an entire encyclical on the dignity of work in 1981, Laborem Exercens. It didn’t make it into the magisterial documents part of Barron’s collection. Notably, the only two encyclicals included in their entirety are Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus.

Such was the greatness of the former that it became customary for Leo’s successors to issue their own treatments of Catholic social teaching on its decennial anniversaries: Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra in 1961, Paul VI’s Octogesima Adveniens in 1971, Laborem Exercens in 1981. Pope Francis would have customarily published something this year, but his encyclical on human fraternity, Fratelli Tutti, was published last year so as to appear ahead of the American presidential election.

There are many points of unity between Leo XIII and John Paul II, but in social teaching they might be considered the great champions of human freedom. Each taught that the social order must recognize the freedom proper to individuals, to families, to business associations, and to labor unions—to all the “subjects” whose freedom contributes to the common good.

John Paul strongly defended economic liberty, but noted that “economic freedom is only one element of human freedom.” Man is meant to be free; economic freedom is not the most important freedom, but it is vital, as so much of daily life is dedicated to economic activity.

Thus the “free economy” (John Paul preferred that term to “capitalism” or “market economy”) serves human freedom as a whole:

When it becomes autonomous, when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by alienating and oppressing him (#39).

John Paul knew well that a free society is not a machine that runs itself. The most stinging lines in Centesimus Annus are: “democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.” At thirty years' distance, those lines no longer sting; they are a simple description of the current state of the democratic project.

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