Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka Etyka Społeczna as Precursor and Hermeneutic Key to Pope John Paul II’s Economic Teaching

• Date: 01 September 2020
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12358
• Author: Gerald J. Beyer

Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka Etyka Społeczna

as Precursor and Hermeneutic Key to Pope

John Paul II’s Economic Teaching

By Gerald J. Beyer*

aBstract. The highly anticipated publication of Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka

etyka społeczna (KES) in 2018 provides a novel and important basis

for understanding the economic thinking of Pope John Paul II. The

text is comprised of Wojtyła’s extensive lecture notes from the 1950s

on the topic of Catholic social teaching and spans almost 500 pages.

KES illustrates the future pope’s deep concern for economic justice as a

young priest and his ambivalence towards capitalism, which persisted

throughout his papacy. Given the size of KES, this article selectively

focuses on Wojtyła’s treatment of topics of continuing relevance:

the right of the Church to pronounce on economic matters; private

property and the “social mortgage” on it; inequality, the just distribution

of resources, and the “option for the poor”; the moral assessment of

capitalism and Marxism; the dignity of labor and workers’ rights; and

the role of conflict in promoting the common good. I contend that KES

is consonant with the later papal teaching of John Paul II on economic

justice and that it provides a hermeneutic key to understanding it.

Furthermore, I argue that the “radicalism” of Karol Wojtyła on matters

of economic justice in KES coheres with papal social teaching from

Pope Paul VI through that of Pope Francis.

Introduction

Pope Saint John Paul II’s teaching on economic issues has long been

the subject of debate and wildly divergent interpretations. For decades,

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 4 (September, 2020).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12358

© 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

*Associate professor of Christian Ethics at Villanova University. Author, Recovering

Solidarity: Lessons from Poland’s Unfinished Revolution (University of Notre Dame Press

2010) and Just Universities: Catholic Social Teaching Confronts Corporatized Higher

Education (Fordham University Press, in production). Studied at Jagiellonian University,

the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków and was a Fulbright fellow at the

Kraków University of Economics in 1999–2000. Email: gerald.beyer@villanova.edu

1112 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

some observers have argued that Pope John Paul II was the first pope

to unequivocally embrace capitalism and reject socialism, while oth-

ers have disputed these claims.1 For example, Lamoureux (2005: 410)

pointed out that Marxists heralded the encyclical Laborem Exercens

(1981) as an “indictment of capitalism,” while Novak lauded it as a

“defense of private property.” Lamoreux added that supporters of both

capitalism and socialism underscore aspects of Laborem Exercens to

bolster their side in the debate about which economy better pro-

motes the welfare of workers. Catholic scholars Budde and Brimlow

(2002: 128) lamented that John Paul’s thinking in Centesimus Annus

(1991) holds “market capitalism is sanctified as natural and, in fact,

God-given,” thereby destroying the “Gospel demands to poverty, self-

lessness, community, communal ownership, sacrifice, denial, neigh-

borliness, charity.” Novak (1992: 142) agreed that the pontiff embraced

capitalism in the encyclical, but approvingly states: “In Centesimus

Annus, Rome has assimilated American ideas of economic liberty.”

Commentators such as George Weigel and John Richard Neuhaus

likewise lauded John Paul’s appreciation of capitalism, particularly its

American incarnation (Shadle 2012: 172–173). Hollenbach (1991: 591)

disagreed:

It would be a serious mistake to think that the Pope has blessed the form

of capitalism existing in the United States today. In fact the encyclical is a

major challenge to much recent U.S. economic and social policy.

Pawlikowski (2000) and Finn (2011) hold similar views. Andrzej

Szostek (1998), a Polish theologian and former rector of the Catholic

University of Lublin and student of Wojtyła, maintained that John Paul

critiqued the “individualism at the foundation of capitalism.” Szostek

(1998: 295) contended:

Even if the “cure proposed by Marx was worse than the disease” the sick-

ness was real during Marx and Leo XIII’s days and in John Paul II’s view it

is real today, even though capitalism has undergone improvements.2

According to Clark’s (2014a: 34) exegesis of John Paul II’s concept of

alienation, the pope believes collectivism and the “capitalist mecha-

nism fail to respect the dignity of the person and other communities

1113Karol Wojtyła’s Katolicka Etyka Spoleczna

within the culture and structures of institutional practices.” Hinze

(2015: 95) notes that eight years after Centesimus Annus, John Paul II

critiqued the encroachment of neoliberalism on the global economy.

I do not intend to intervene directly in this thorny debate in this

article.3 Rather, I will offer an analysis of Wojtyła’s (2018) most sus-

tained treatment of economic matters from his corpus prior to be-

coming John Paul II, namely, his work Katolicka etyka społeczna

(henceforth KES). The publication of KES has been lauded as a major

achievement in Poland. In fact, the Catholic Publishers Association of

Poland (Stowarzyszenie Wydawców Katolickich) recognized it as the

best edited volume of 2018 and the Catholic Conference of Bishops

in Poland held a special symposium to discuss it (eKAI 2019). As a

priest, bishop, and philosophy professor, prior to becoming pope,

Wojtyła published numerous scholarly works, some of which can aid

in understanding his moral evaluation of the economy and its effects

on human well-being and all of God’s creation. Scholars have already

analyzed some of these works, a few of which were translated into

English many years ago.4 Most notable for social ethics is Wojtyła’s

(1979) masterful treatise, originally published in 1969 as Osoba i czyn

in Polish.5 However, the long-awaited publication of KES adds almost

500 pages of material that sheds new light on the topic. Moreover,

unlike Wojtyła’s other (pre-papal) works, KES devotes lengthy and

detailed analysis to matters of ethics and economics. However, no one

has yet written a scholarly article in English that systematically ana-

lyzes the treatment of economic issues in the text, and KES remains

available only in Polish.6

The present article undertakes this task and, in doing so, adds

a valuable contribution to understanding Pope John Paul II’s views

concerning morality and economics.7 As one of the editors of the crit-

ical edition of KES, I have studied the manuscript closely.8 I contend

herein that KES is both consonant with the later papal teaching of

John Paul II on economic justice and that it provides a hermeneutic

key to understanding it. KES discusses key economic justice issues

such as the relationship between the right to private property and the

common good, the moral status of profit, and workers’ rights in ways

that both adumbrate and clarify the more necessarily concise papal