Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
Author
John Paul II
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fides et Ratio is John Paul II's 1998 encyclical on the relation between faith and reason. Its governing image is that the human spirit rises toward contemplation of truth by two wings, and the whole argument defends the compatibility and mutual need of revelation and philosophical inquiry.