The conditions of personal freedom in Karol Wojtyla’s treatise “Person and Act” and their transformation in the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church

Abstract

The article analyzes the changes in the understanding of the conditions of personal freedom that occurred in the second half of the 20th century in Catholic social anthropology. Researchers of the social teaching of the Catholic Church presented in the Compendium, 2004, note the strong influence of the personalistic ideas of Pope John Paul II on its’ main anthropological positions. The author of the article shows that this thesis cannot be fully attributed to the understanding of personal freedom in the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, where freedom is considered beyond the ontological connection with the self-determination of the personality. The author’s argumenttion is based on a comparison of K. Wojtyla’s teaching about the self-establishment of a free person in society with the conditions for the exercise of personal freedom set out in the Compendium, where freedom, placed on a par with human rights, is determined by external causality. According to a number of signs given in the article, such changes in Catholic anthropology may be associated with the social relativism of the Western Church. The relevance of the topic of the article is due to the direct connection between the freedom of the person and her salvation.