NEW SOCIAL POLICY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. RERUM NAVARUM – ON THE CENTURY

Abstract

The term social service is one of the most frequently used concepts in the Ukrainian media field. The term is universal and is used in the compositional sense of both state-political institutions and church organizations. However, given the same addressee, the same and the ultimate goal of such action, the approaches in the implementation of the "social programs" of the Church and the state are completely different. The Catholic Church's social ministry’s (deaconium) programs are based on a comprehensive doctrine, the Social Doctrine, which is the most effective tool in the formation of valuable anthropological ideas, worldviews, and denominational beliefs about the place and role of the Christian in the world. It is this that necessitates the study of the principles of the development of the social doctrines of the Christian churches, the analysis of their influence on the social phenomena and the processes of formation of the Christian worldview. Social concepts in modern Christianity are the main means of reforming the Christian notion of man. Therefore, this article is devoted to the analytical retrospective of the social policy issues of the Catholic Church against the background of the permanently glowing ideologies of Europe. The processes of social triumph, decadence, and fin de siècle (end of the world) are analyzed. Against this background, we characterize the reaction of the Catholic First Hierarch Leo XIII and his successors to the question of the status of workers and society as a whole. Encyclical Pope Leo XIII's “Rerum Novarum” took into account the so-called “labor issue” around which political struggles were unfolding in the most economically developed regions of Europe, and which resulted from the rapid industrialization of the economy and the involvement of the masses of the population in hired labor, mainly through industry of labor market. Controversial with the political doctrines that developed the ideology of class confrontation, Pope Leo XIII offers, as an alternative, a social Catholic doctrine of the fundamental ideas of solidarity and subsidiarity, the public good and private property. It is these principles underpin the Christian social paradigm and democracy. Keywords.