Centesimus Annus

– the hundrieth year of rerum novarum

– Last days of the cold war
– fall of the communist regimes
– written by Pope John Paul II
– 1991

three factors in the fall of communism

1. violation of rights of workers

Principles
● The dignity and rights of the worker
● The right to establish professional associations of employers and workers
● The right to private property
● The right to a just wage
● The right to discharge freely one's religious duties/freedom of religion
● The kingdom of God cannot be confused with any temporal kingdom
● To defend and promote the dignity and rights of human persons regardless of
personal convictions
● Subsidiarity
● solidarity

Characteristics of Rerum Novarum

● attempts to respond to the conflict between capital and labor
● affirms the dignity of work and the rights to private property, private
associations, a just wage, and to discharge freely religious duties
● criticism of socialism and liberalism
● emphasis on the rights of the poor and the defenseless gives testimony to the
continuity of the option for the poor
● The guiding light of Rerum novarum is its view of human dignity

A. Formal and Material Causes

– Science
– Technology
– Capital
– Wage
B.
C. Situation of work
– Revolutionary spirit
– increasing povertu
– inhuman developments
D. Goals for work

Towards the new things of today

● Rejecting socialism

State and Culture

 – the root of totalitarianism is found in its denial of the transcendental dignity of the
human person

Man is the way of the church