When St John Paul was shot in St Peter’s Square before the general audience on May 13 1981, his text for the day was consequently left undelivered. It has been on the Vatican website in Italian for some time, but the good folks at Aleteia have put an English translation online for the 35th anniversary of that historic day.
It is striking to read that text now, heightened by the extraordinary significance May 13 would assume in the life of the saint, as Our Lady of Fatima became a leitmotif of his pontificate, especially regarding the defeat of communism.
The text is best remembered for two initiatives that John Paul launched as a follow-up to the 1980 synod of bishops on the family the previous autumn. In that audience, the pope was to announce the creation of the Pontifical Council for the Family, as well as a new International Institute of Studies on Marriage and the Family. The institute would be housed at the Pontifical Lateran University – the Pope’s university in Rome.
Before long, the marriage and family institute would be multiplied all over the world, and would eventually take John Paul’s name. The theological work it has produced on marriage, family and the theology of the body over three decades is one of the major legacies of John Paul’s pontificate.
Those were the fruits of the 1980 family synod, which have recently been allowed to wither. Undoing the 1981 post-synodal exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, was the main thrust of the Kasper party during the two-year synod process, an effort which ultimately failed, but only just. The Pontifical Council for the Family is soon to be abolished as a separate Vatican department, to go back to what it was before John Paul, part of a larger department of the laity. Despite the intense focus on questions of the family in Rome, the work of the John Paul II institutes was sidelined in recent years.
Yet that May 13, 1981 address was not principally about the family. It was dedicated to social doctrine, as May 15, 1891 was the publication date of Rerum Novarum, the landmark encyclical which Pius XII would call the “magna carta” of the Church’s social doctrine, her teaching about culture, politics and economics.
“I emphasise a date which deserves to be written in golden letters in the history of the modern Church: May 15, 1891,” John Paul intended to say. “It has in fact been 90 years since my predecessor, Leo XIII, published the foundational social encyclical Rerum Novarum, which was not only a vigorous and heartfelt condemnation of the ‘unmerited misery’ in which workers then lived, after the first period of implementation of the industrial machine in the field of enterprise, but especially laid the foundations for a just solution to the serious problems of human coexistence which fall under the name of ‘social issues’.”
The Church had addressed social issues since the Acts of the Apostles, but “Pope Leo XIII is credited with having first sought to give them an organic and synthetic character”.
John Paul added: “The Church is called by her vocation to be everywhere the faithful guardian of human dignity, the mother of the oppressed and marginalised, the Church of the weak and the poor.” Having lived his adult life under totalit-arian atheism, Karol Wojtyła intended for his papacy to be a guardian of human dignity, especially in the field that touches nearly every aspect of life – work and economics.
In 1981 – delayed for a few months by the assassination attempt – John Paul would publish the first of three social encyclicals, Laborem Exercens, on the dignity of work. He would thus give the Church’s social doctrine a distinctive anthropological flavour. He meditated deeply upon Genesis, and the vocation to work, in a complement to his teaching in the theology of the body on what Genesis taught about sex and love.
Laborem Exercens treated work not as something extrinsic to man, which he simply did, but as something by which he both expressed and shaped his personality. It was a lofty vision of human work, contrasted with the rather depersonalised vision of workers offered by communism.
Ten years later, for the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, John Paul would issue Centesimus Annus, the great masterpiece of magisterial reflection on the free society. The anthropological reflections on work are extended to the entire economic sphere, in which man is called to exercise his freedom and creativity in cooperation and solidarity with others. It remains the richest treatment of the subject in the papal magisterium to date and on its 25th anniversary it deserves to be re-read.
May 13, 1981. The assassination attempt, the care for the family, the defence of the dignity of workers, the promotion of the free society of virtue – it was the whole pontificate in one afternoon.
Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of Convivium magazine
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