Latest read – this past weekend in Sloan Kettering

I put aside Barbara Tuchman’s “The First Salute” which I have been enjoying, since I didn’t feel like schlepping in a heavy hard cover book for the weekend. Instead I did another re-read. This time, John Paul II’s great encyclical “On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum”.

Rerum Novarum was the encyclical letter written in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII on labor and the rights of workers. A very important document in the development of Catholic thinking on these issues.

So JP II took the opportunity of the 100^th anniversary to write this fantastic encyclical (92 pages long, in the small pamphlet sized style these are printed in – it takes about two hours to read carefully), reviewing Church teaching on social justice, private property, the state, and culture. One of the chapters is entitled “the Year 1989” reviewing the fall of communism and what he thinks it means.  And – he is very critical of secular trends and consumerism in the West. 

It was probably the third or fourth time I read this encyclical letter, and it is really one of the great works of John Paul’s pontificate.

Here is a much-quoted section from the letter (the start of section 43, on page 62 of the Daughter’s of St. Paul edition):

The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another. For such a task the Church offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation, a teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these must be oriented to the common good. This teaching also recognizes the legitimacy of workers’ efforts to obtain full respect for their dignity and to gain broader areas of participation in the life of industrial enterprises so that, while cooperating with others, and under the direction of others, they can in a certain sense “work for themselves” through the exercise of their intelligence and freedom.