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In the chapel of the Palafox Seminary, before an audience of bishops, 6,500 miles from St. Peter's, John Paul delivered a 5,000-word speech that may mark the entire course of his papacy. The text was designed to strip away any ambiguity over future papal social policy. From Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) to John XXIII's Mater et Magistra (1961), papal encyclicals have rejected both the "unregulated competition" of laissez-faire capitalism and Marxism's class struggle with its elimination of private property. However, in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, Paul VI allowed for revolutions in extreme cases and thus left the door open to liberation theology.
John Paul, who rose to eminence in Communist Poland, made clear his urgent desire to eliminate priestly activism based upon Marxist dogma. The Pope emphatically rejected liberation theology, without ever using that phrase. Repeatedly emphasizing the value of each person before God, and the need for spiritual freedom, he used the term liberation in a Christianized context. To the Pope, "atheistic humanism" holds out to mankind only a half liberation, because it bases everything on economic determinism ignores spiritual dynamics. The result, he said, is that man's very being is "reduced in the worst way." Today, he said, "human val ues are trampled on as never before." Implicit in his statements was a basic judgment: the tactics of Marxist revolution, based as they are on class conflict, violate the most profound Christian teaching.
In one passage heavy with theological significance, he rejected efforts by modern radicals to view Jesus Christ as a political Messiah. "People claim to show Jesus as politically committed, as one who fought against Roman oppression and the authorities and also as one involved in the class struggle," said the Pope. "This idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth, does not tally with the church's catechesis." The Gospel and the church, he preached, must transcend all political ideologies. But while the church's mission is "not social or political," the church "cannot fail to consider man in the entirety of his being." In particular, Christians must seek a "more just and equitable distribution of goods, not only within each nation but also in the world in general."
He made a detailed statement against viola tions of human rights, as he has done previously. Before the Indian audience in Oaxaca, he uttered a fervent plea for economic justice and redistribution of land. Attacking "the powerful— rich classes who often leave untilled the lands in which lay hidden the bread that many families need,"John Paul cried: "It is not just, it is not human, it is not Chris tian." At Monterrey, he defended laborers' right to organize and protect their economic interests. In an obvious wetbacks who head for the U.S., he stated, "We cannot close our eyes to the plight of millions of men who abandon their homelands, and often their families, in search of work with no social security and miserable wages."