Il significato internazionale del magistero sociale del Santo Giovanni Paolo II P.M
Authors: Negri Luigi 
Published: October 2014

The international significance of St. John Paul II’s social teaching

The teaching of John Paul II undoubtedly became a great provocation for the contemporary thinking of man due to its skillful and innovative treatment of a unique event which has been at the centre of the life of the Church for more than two thousand years and which presents a specific opportunity for any man who wants to cope with his own fate. The Pope offered as the essence of his evangelizational message Christianity presented in its completeness, as a phenomenon which cannot be reduced and compared to any form of ideology. Moreover, such Christianity is capable of exerting a creative influence upon man and providing him with a new form of culture. (We may venture an opinion that the entire magisterium of John Paul II is suffused with two kinds of wonder: the wonder of humanization and the results of humanization i.e. the transformation of man). The magisterium of John Paul II should be viewed as a pursuit to renovate the original identity of the Christian faith, a pursuit to promote the Church in it missionary function, a pursuit of a versatile development of the feeling of responsibility for the defense and promotion of human rights and collaboration to maintain peace. Not only did the Polish Pope supplement the output of the social teaching developed by his great predecessors, but he also enhanced it by the idea that the defense of the missionary freedom of the Church and of the Church itself was also associated with an unconditional defense of freedom and the rights of people and nations. This defense entailed the pursuit of such a social order on all levels, from the national level up to the global level, in which the human person would occupy the central position and would constitute a definitive value, irreplaceable by any other value. In one of his most famous social encyclicals entitled Centesimus annus, the Pope clearly emphasized the idea that by defending its own freedom, the Church defends man who should be more obedient to God than to other men, the family or various social and national organizations which enjoy their own sphere of autonomy and sovereignty. Today, more than anytime else, this line of thought finds justification not so much in the confrontation with overtly totalitarian ideologies, but in the struggle with ideologies which seem less bloody in comparison with past ideologies. However, according to such ideologies the human person and the rights of people and nations are systematically rejected in the name of the realization of a project of economic and scientific-technocratic globalization. By continuing the tradition of his predecessors on St. Peter’s throne in the sphere of social teaching, John Paul II introduced one fundamental innovation. When the great ideologies saw their end, he realized that the social teaching of the Church should above all increase its interest in man in his religious and secular therefore natural dimension. This increased interest should be associated with the care about his fundamental rights. The teaching and the activity of John Paul II made the social doctrine of the Church more authentic and even more engaged in the cause of evangelization today than ever before. The Church “practises” or suggests a social doctrine because it desires to fulfil its evangelizational mission completely. At the same time, it meets man in various historical contexts which are objectively difficult to cope with. The Church was engaged in the consideration of all political problems of the world with a freedom which no other institution enjoys. John Paul II spoke to individual people and to nations who lived in various conditions and various situations, to friends and enemies, without a preemptive estimation of possible reactions, including the reactions of the greatest powers on Earth. He did so for the good of mankind, to help mankind maintain its complete humanity. Man is the fundamental value which is subject to no negotiations. God is another value which is subject to no negotiatons because he reveals the true nature of man. We may surmise that with the long course of John Paul II’s pontificate we witnessed a new phase of the development of the social doctrine of the Church. Above all with the arrival of the third millennium the Church is more and more engaged in the problems of the modern word.