Centesimus Annus and the Renewal of Culture (Critical Essay‪)‬

"The individual today is often suffocated between the two poles represented by the state and the marketplace. At times it seems that he exists only as a producer and consumer of goods or as an object of state administration." (1) In these words from Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II presents the fundamental problem of which I propose to speak in this brief essay. Western society in the present century has been fluctuating between the two extremes mentioned by the Holy Father. In the United States we seem to be caught between the seductions of the welfare state and libertarian capitalism. The one, consistently pursued, leads to the "animal farm" of state socialism; the other, to the anarchic jungle of social Darwinism.