Shedding light on ‘Centesimus Annus’
(Vatican Radio) The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a symposium this week to mark twenty five years since the publication of Saint John Paul II’s social encyclical “ Centesimus Annus”.
In an effort to find out more about this social encyclical Veronica Scarisbrick speaks to a Professor of Social Teaching at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas here in Rome. He’s Dominican Alejandro Crosthwaite:
It was 1987 when Pope John Paul II promulgated his social encyclical “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis”. In this document he highlighted changing circumstances, both within the debtor nations and in the international financial market:”…At a time when the instrument chosen to make a contribution to development had turned into a counterproductive mechanism. This because debtor nations, in order to service their debt, found themselves obliged to export the capital needed for improving or at least maintaining their standard of living. And also because, for the same reason, they were unable to obtain new and equally essential financing.
Through this mechanism, the means intended for the development of peoples had turned into a brake upon development instead, and indeed in some cases even aggravated underdevelopment…”
So when John Paul II published his second social encyclical “Centesimus Annus “in 1991, as the title indicates a century after Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum”, he picked up on this same theme. Highlighting once again how the positive efforts which have been made along those lines are being affected by the still largely unsolved problem of the foreign debt of the poorer countries:”.. The principle that debts must be paid is certainly just. However, it is not right to demand or expect payment when the effect would be the imposition of political choices leading to hunger and despair for entire peoples. It cannot be expected that the debts which have been contracted should be paid at the price of unbearable sacrifices. In such cases it is necessary to find — as in fact is partly happening — ways to lighten, defer or even cancel the debt, compatible with the fundamental right of peoples to subsistence and progress…”