Pojęcie rozwoju w społecznym nauczaniu Kościoła

Abstrakt

The documents of the social doctrine of the Church inspire us to present in detail what we understand by "development". The present study seeks to answer the question how the social teaching of the Church understands "development" with a view to absorb the address of the Catholic social doctrine in more efficient and fruitful manner.

The study has been divided into three parts. The first part deals with the biblical foundations of development, the second part with the anthropological foundations, and in the third we have the Church's social teaching on development, and it follows from the biblical and anthropological premisses. The third part embraces the period from the Rerum Novarum to the Vatican Council inclusively. It was just in that period that the principal assumptions of Church's doctrine on development had been established. Those assumptions soon afterwards bore fruit in the encyclical Populorum Progression.

Relying on the biblical texts we may reflect on development, and such reflection allows us to speak in terms of vocation and cooperation with God. The ultimate goal of development is to achieve unity with God, and a creative transformation of the world is supposed to serve to this end too. Making the created things perfect is a continuation of the work of the Creator and is a form of development. Man, who is the object of development, is himself developing. The process of development pertains to the whole man, that is his bodily and spiritual nature.

Christian anthropology then stresses the entire development, and does not exclude the material and earthly bases: technical, economic and cultural. Due to the fact that human nature has a social character the human person attains his or her complete development through an interpersonal community with other people. Since development has been rendered so broadly in the social teaching of the Church, one may speak about an integral development. It embraces a wide range of socio-economic phenomena which are interrelated and constitute a harmonious whole, which is interiorly bound and complex. The integral development, as it pertains to every man, is based on the socio-ethical principles, and it takes into account the hierarchy of material, cultural, spiritual and religious human needs.

The understanding of "development" grounded on the biblical and anthropological premisses fully renders the dynamics of the reality of human life. The latter cannot be encapsulated within the static processes constraining man.