Challenges Ahead

Abstract

There are three types of challenges corresponding to the three components of social economics as articulated by William Waters in his 1987 Presidential Address to the Association for Social Economics and as mentioned previously in Chapter One. The three components are: (1) philosophical foundations or premises, (2) a careful description of the economy as it truly is, and (3), economic policy. Waters views the third component as deriving from the first two in a way that bears a personal imprint [Waters, p. 130].

I now wish to propose a “rereading” of Pope Leo’s encyclical by issuing an invitation to “look back” at the text itself in order to discover anew the richness of the fundamental principles which it formulated for dealing with the question of the condition of workers. But this is also an invitation to “look around” at the “new things” which surround us and in which we find ourselves caught up, very different from the “new things” which characterized the final decade of the last century. Finally, it is an invitation to “look to the future” at a time when we can already glimpse the third millennium of the Christian era, so filled with uncertainties and promises which appeal to our imagination and creativity and which reawaken our responsibility as disciples of the “one teacher” (cf. Mt. 23:8) to show the way, to proclaim the truth and to communicate the life which is Christ (cf. Jn. 14:6).

Centesimus Annus, introduction.