A look at an early, unpublished work, in The Tablet:

The ability to dissect Marxism and reassemble it in a Christian form made Karol Wojtyla a potentially significant Catholic thinker. It would take him another two decades to perfect this approach in The Acting Person (1969) – a book that was studied, much to Wojtyla’s satisfaction, not only by Catholics but also by Communists, and is still widely seen as his most distinctive pre-papal philosophical work.

But Catholic Social Ethics served as a prototype for Wojtyla’s later efforts. When it was bound in Lublin in just a few copies, he had not yet found a coherent philosophy of his own. But he had thought out ways of reapplying Marxist concepts of alienation and parti-cipation in a Christian context.

Wojtyla had also set down the master concepts that would recur in his sermons in the Eighties. One was the need for “solidarity”, which became the name of the Polish movement that helped to bring Communism to a peaceful end in the 1980s.

Catholic Social Ethics confirms that the Church’s latter-day struggle with Communism was largely the Pope’s personal achievement, since it drew on insights and intuitions born in his own head. Previous popes had feared the potential of spontaneous social movements. By contrast, Wojtyla saw them as important forces whose creative energy could be directed for godly purposes. He saw Communism less as an enemy than as a misunderstanding – a misdirected turn towards a false conception of the world and humanity. To correct any mistake, one had first to understand it, to turn its illusory values into real ones. Despite his Christian interpretation, though, Wojtyla clearly empathised with Marxism’s analysis of capitalism, as can also be seen from the margin notes of his personal books in the Krakow curia.