KRAKOW, Poland, JULY 3, 2007 (Zenit.org).- North American and Eastern European students are doing what Pope John Paul II said he would never have done as a youth during his summer vacation -- study an encyclical.
The students are attending the "Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society," which is taking place in Krakow through July 19. The seminar, initiated in 1992, is built on the study of Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Centesimus Annus."
"The seminar has prepared almost 700 graduates of the 'John Paul II generation' to be leaders in public life, business, the professions, academic life, the family, politics and the Church," said George Weigel, author of "Witness to Hope," and the seminar's director since 2000. He is also a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Rocco Buttiglioni, a former advisor to John Paul II, and Michael Novak, theologian and author, organized the event shortly after the encyclical's release.
The idea behind the founding, Michael Novak said, was twofold. We wanted "to counter the growing drift between America and Europe. Secondly, we both judged that Catholic social policy paid too little attention to the ways in which the United States had broken the chains of poverty for scores of millions of Catholic immigrants since 1880."
"Students from Central Europe had had little exposure to the ideas moving the rest of the world, and the Americans had had little exposure to experiences 'behind the Iron Curtain,'" Novak explained.
First held in Liechtenstein, John Paul II asked that the seminar be moved to Krakow.
"John Paul II used to write to our Krakow seminar with words of greeting, good humor and encouragement," Novak recalled.
One year, said Novak, the Polish Pope wrote to commend the students, saying that when he was young, he wouldn't have spent three weeks of his summer vacation studying an encyclical.
"Each year," Weigel explained, "the seminar seems to be a moment of intense vocational discernment and clarification for our students; and each year, as our graduates move into their careers, we can see the effects of the time they spent wrestling with the social doctrine of the Church and the teaching of John Paul II."
Adapting to change
Despite the geo-political changes that have taken place since the seminar's inception, Weigel says the seminar has been able to adapt.
"For the European students we get today," Weigel explained, "the Communist period is just a memory, even a vague memory, so the heroic days of the '80s are about as 'real' to them as the Korean War was to me -- which is to say, not very!"
"We also have to contend with the new problems posed by a post-9/11 world in which the threat of jihadism looms large, as well as the problems of incorporating the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe into a European Union that can be very aggressively secular," added Weigel.
As a result, Weigel continued, "we've added lectures on Catholic international relations theory, the just war tradition and 'Europe's problem' to address all of this."
Offshoots
The seminar has also spawned several programs devoted to Catholic social teaching. Novak is in the middle of his seventh seminar in Slovakia on the same topic for American and Slovak students.
"Slovakia is a culturally strategic country at the heart of Central Europe," he said. "Seven years ago, it was still being relatively neglected by outside investors, educators and nongovernmental organizations."
Ever Johnson, a seminar participant in 1999, has also started "The John Paul II Fellowship," which brings together many of the alumni to teach Catholic social doctrine to professionals in Washington, D.C.
The Dominicans in Krakow, who host the participants and faculty each year, have also continued to work with their growing network of alumni, hosting annual reunions for all Poles involved in previous seminars.
ZE07070303 - 2007-07-03