Published by Pope John Paul II in 1991, a hundred years after Rerum Novarum and just after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Centesimus Annus (“The Hundredth Year”) weighs the social order at the close of the twentieth century.

John Paul offers a careful judgment on the market economy: he affirms the value of free economic activity, enterprise, and profit rightly understood, while warning that the market must be circumscribed by a strong juridical framework and ordered to human freedom in its totality, which has its center in ethics and religion. He rejects both collectivism and a capitalism unmoored from moral and legal limits.

The encyclical develops the dignity of work, the “subjectivity” of society through its intermediate communities, the preferential option for the poor, and the proper but limited role of the state. It stands as a mature synthesis of a century of social teaching.

Read the full text at Vatican.va.