Centesimus Annus, Research Paper Example

Pope John Paul II was the pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church on Earth, for the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. He preceded the current pope, Benedict XVI. His papacy lasted twenty-six years and was the second longest in history behind nineteenth century Pope Pius IX. When the Papal conclave selected the Pole in 1976 he became the first pope from outside of Italy since the sixteenth century. He also became the second youngest man to ever be named pope, only after Pius IX. Both of these facts would significantly influence his term, in its length and its aims.

The pope today currently only has political authority over Vatican City, the world’s smallest independent nation with a population under one thousand, yet he is generally one of the most important and powerful men in the world. While the days of the Holy Roman Empire, in which the pope was instrumental in choosing the emperor that would rule the majority of Europe, are gone, his influence is not. The Roman Catholic Church has over one billion members, meaning more than one in seven human beings on Earth saw John Paul II as the head of their religion (Georgetown). This distinction obviously brings the ability to impact the world in the way few heads of state can imagine.

John Paul II was pope from 1978 to 2005, meaning the dominant global issue of the first half of his papacy was the Cold War and the battle between ideologies such as capitalism and communism. His native Poland fell under the rule of the Soviet Union and communism during World War Two. It remained a communist nation until 1989, when the last communist ruler resigned because of an obvious lack of support. Lech Wasela, who founded the Solidarity political movement that eventually toppled communism in the country, credited John Paul II for their liberation. “The pope started this chain of events that led to the end of communism. Before his pontificate, the world was divided into blocs. Nobody knew how to get rid of communism. He simply said, `Don’t be afraid; change the image of this land (Thomas).'”

After the fall of communism in his native land and during its collapse in most of the former Eastern Bloc, John Paul II and the Vatican published Centesimus Annus. This teaching was largely focused on the injustices of communism, socialism, and the governments that supported those ideologies. The title is Latin for hundredth year, referring the one hundred years that had passed since the Rerum Novarum was published in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Rerum novarum is Latin for “of new things”, referring to the new economic realities being created by the Industrial Revolution in the century it was published. It focused on the struggle between capital holders and laborers that would lead to communist parties and rule in the 20th century.

The subtitle for Rerum Novarum was “On the Condition of Labor,” a fitting description showing the book was going to address the main economic developments of the time. During the previous century many workers in Europe and North America had moved from independent tradesman, farmers, or merchants into workers in factories. While this line of industrialization was more efficient and led to tremendous economic growth, its displacement effect changed the relationships present in society forever. One class, the workers, was now dependent on another class, those who owned the capital necessary for mass production, for their economic future. Many saw this relationship as one where the capital owners could acquire more of the wealth produced, causing hardship for workers.

Karl Marx was the mostly widely renowned proponent for Communism during the nineteenth century. His main views of the economic realities of the time were published in works such as Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto. He saw the capital owners as simply leeching off of the workers, who provided the real value. The workers had to be paid under their true value for the capitalist to make money. This was easily accomplished by the capitalists, whose ownership of the means of production gave them the power to do so. For Marx, this situation was untenable as the number of workers swelled relative the number of owners. Eventually a revolution would occur and socialism would come into effect, where the means of production were commonly owned. This too was a temporary state on the way to communism, where private property and classes were completely abolished.

One area of Marx’s theories that was hostile to the Catholic Church was his view on religion itself. Marx saw religion as a tool used by a ruling class to oppress the workers by giving them hope for a better life after death. Along with this, it necessarily added classes to society, through the clergy and religious hierarchy along with Gods themselves, who were in a higher class than workers by definition.

While Thomas Aquinas and other catholic thinkers had talked about morality in economics, such as charging fair prices, Catholic teaching was lacking at the time, leading Leo XIII to commission the work on it. The book was ultimately understanding to the concerns of the worker espoused by socialist and communist thought, but rejected those theories still. One reason was that the theory was based on the idea that the dominant story of could be told through the lens of conflict. Yet, according to the Rerum Novarum society did and should function cooperatively. Another conflict between Catholicism and Marxism was the idea of the latter that justice could come to society only through the taking of property from one class to another. To the Catholic thinkers, this could not be seen as justice. According to this writing, by improving the resources of nature to produce a person could come to own those resources. He who made land more cultivable or made a machine capable of mass production had added to the world in a way he could be compensated for. Taking this property from him reversed justice as opposed to adding to it.

While rejecting too many tenets of collectivist theories to see them as viable solutions, the Catholic Church did agree with them on the problem. They saw the economic developments preceding Pope Leo’s papacy as damaging to the working classes. Power had been consolidated to few enough that they could work together to secure their own economic fortunes at the expense of others. “To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself (Rerum Novarum Section Three).” The solution to this was for workers to form collectives they could use to match the power capitalists had. Effectively, they were describing modern day labor unions.

It was with traditional teaching that John Paul II wrote the Centesimus Annus. However, his work was combined with a different background than that of the one Pope Leo XII wrote in. In the early twentieth century Russia had undergone a revolution that resembled the one Marx foretold. After World War Two Russia, now known as The Soviet Union, came to dominate Eastern Europe and Central Asia with spheres of influence throughout other areas of the world. In effect, after being a theoretical possibility for the future in the late nineteenth century, communism had become one of the dominant two ideologies driving the world at the end of the twentieth.

In this encyclical, John Paul II wrote in support of many things that were similarly supported in the Rerum Novarum, such as the right for labor to unionize and to earn a living wage for their work. The right to unionize is justified not as something to safeguard the economic livelihoods of one class, but just part of the natural right for people to associate with one another. He still affirmed the right to private property, expanding it from the land ownership of Pope Leo XIII to the full means of property socialism and communism were more concerned with.

While the first church work on communism and socialism was certainly not in favor of these two systems, Centesimus Annus is perhaps even more strongly against it having seen a century’s worth of results from collectivism. According to the writing, collectivism was more dehumanizing than other systems, as it saw the narrative of history as inevitable, minus any free will from the individuals within society. Those individuals were further dehumanized as there was no way for them to profit from their own labor. In the thirteenth section of the encyclical, John Paul II explains the damage this system can cause. “A person who is deprived of something he can call ‘his own’, and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it.” It is interesting that this uses a machine analogy, as Marx wrote of workers under capitalism as simply cogs in the machine.

Despite Marx’s assertion that communism would feature a classless society, nothing of this type developed in communist countries. The citizens of the county were subservient to the ruling class, who usually committed human rights violations in the aim of securing their own power. For one, despite having its roots as an ideology that would save workers from exploitation, John Paul II argued that the workers experienced the same types of hardships under communism. These very workers who supposedly should have seen the system as their saving grace were the ones who started the upheavals that lead to its demise.

Perhaps the most important issue to the church was the lack of religious freedom given to citizens of communist nations. The pope wrote that it was the “spiritual void” caused by this denial that ultimately lead to communism’s downfall. Without religion many felt alienated from society and turned back to religion even without approval from the state. This was the source of unrest that was the main catalyst for the revolutions that brought down the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

Written as collectivism was collapsing, Centesimus Annus was the first Catholic writing that could look at it retrospectively. While earlier works had argued that class struggle and abolition of property went against Catholic teachings, John Paul II had more issues with it than that. The denial of religious freedom continued to be an issue irresolvable with the church. Perhaps the bigger issue was the very ills of capitalism that Marx sought to cure, specifically dehumanization, subordination, and impoverishment of the working class all became worse under communist rule. The cure was worth than the disease, which is why Pope John Paul II spent his entire papacy and this specific work arguing against the implementation of communism.

Works Cited

Catholic Data, Catholic Statistics, Catholic Research. Georgetown University. Web. 31 Mar. 2012. <http://cara.georgetown.edu/CARAServices/requestedchurchstats.html>.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Print.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital. Print.

Pope John Paul II. On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus : Encyclical Letter, May 1, 1991. Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1991. Print.

Pope Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum, Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII on the Condition of Labor (with Discussion Club Outline). New York: Paulist, 1940. Print.

Thomas, Cal. “Pope Strengthened Church, Weakened Communism.” Baltimore Sun. 06 Apr. 2005. Web. 31 Mar. 2012. <http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2005-0406/news/0504060028_1_communism-pope-ronald-reagan>.