Twenty Years of Interpreting Centesimus Annus On The Economy

Abstract

Pope John Paul II’s social encyclical Centesimus Annus (CA )w as published in 1991, and one of its key tasks was to propose a Christian vision of the economy in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of Cold War conflicts in the Third World. In the intervening twenty years, much has changed in the global economy. The process of globalization, already well underway in 1991, has accelerated. Financial crises erupted in Mexico, East Asia, and Russia, hampering efforts at economic development and threatening to spread throughout the global economy. China and India have brought the largest number of people out of poverty in human history through marketfriendly reforms. Beginning in 2007, a global financial crisis began that shook the world economy to its core. Just as countries began to recover in 2010, crisis arose again over the ability of European nations such as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal to repay their debts, and in 2011 the ability of the United States itself to repay its debts came into question; this ongoing crisis has threatened the monetary union of Europe and the continued viability of government entitlements in many countries. Despite these significant changes in the global economy, CA continues to be a relevant guide for Christian discipleship in economic life through its distinctive insights on the role of the state in the economy, the relevance of ethics for economic life, and the necessity of theology for a complete understanding of economic life. This article presents the main insights of CA by discussing the ways in which the encyclical has been interpreted over the past twenty years. 1 Broadly speaking, there have been three interpretations of the encyclical. Perhaps the most eager interpreters of the encyclical have been the neoconservatives, who see the encyclical as a qualified endorsement of the free market economy. The second interpretation of the encyclical is that of the progressives, which claims that the encyclical