Home > Church Documents > Documents from the Pope and the Vatican

Online Shop

Documents from the Pope and the Vatican

Centesimus Annus

Encyclical Letter on the 100th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum

John Paul II, Pope

Observations on Catholic social teaching a century after Rerum Novarum

This benchmark encyclical by John Paul II was written to mark the hundredth anniversary of Pope Leo XIlI's seminal work Rerum Novarum (1891) which is universally regarded as the magna carta of Catholic social teaching. Centesimus Annus was published in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin wall and during the wider collapse of Communism. These major events at the close of the second millennium provided a unique backdrop against which to restate Catholic social doctrine and propose a re-reading of the great social encyclicals.
John Paul II 'looks back' at Leo XIlI's text, 'looks around' at the present times, and 'looks to the future'. He grasps a unique- opportunity to state that the socio-economic and political problems facing humanity can only be resolved with a correct view of the human person and of his unique value.