Liberalizm ekonomiczno-gospodarczy a nauczanie Kościoła ostatnich wieków

Abstract

The key issue for the possibility of surveying the relations between the Church and liberalism, their mutual references, areas of agreement and argument is the position of the Church in relation to society and state in general. The arrangement of relations between these realities in such a way that each would be able to realise as fully as possible their aims is an important, yet an extremely difficult, problem. If, on the part of the state the directions of searching and solutions were established on the European ground by the French Revolution and the documents connected with it, then on the part of the Church special attention to the so called “social issue” was drawn by pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 published an encyclical Rerum Novarum. Since that time his every successor introduced new issues into the regulation of mutual relations between a modem state and the Church. Another dimension opens with the Second Vatican Council, which considerably modified the views of the Church on an issue of opening to the reality of the world. Nearly two centuries after the French Revolution aggiornamento was to summarise what began to happen. A direct continuator of the Council, and one who continues to live in its spirit, is the present pope John Paul II, the author of three (since 1991) social encyclicals: Laborem exercens, Sollicitudo rei socialis and the last, whose publication coincided with a hundredth anniversary of Leo's Rerum novarum – Centesimus annus. The silver jubilee of his pontificate is a good occasion to undertake the subject matter formulated in the title of this paper.