ABSTRACT
The Catholic Church, led by Pope John Paul II, had contributed significantly to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. For Pope John Paul, the totalitarian ideologies, National Socialism and Marxist-Leninism, had an important commonality: They have as their premise the denial of truth, which naturally entails the denial also of the metaphysical, transcendent truth. In 1991 pope John Paul published his most important social encyclical: Centesimus Annus. Pope John Paul gives a rationale here for what he had already practiced. For he had not limited himself to the theological-philosophical presentation of Magisterium's principles for the Church's appraisal of modern culture. But he had entered into confrontation with this culture in the form it had taken, undergirded and shaped by the democratic state. Democracy's embrace of theism and personalism is the basis on which the pope can give his approval to liberal democracy.
