The recent decision by Pope Francis to add the feast of Our Lady of Loreto to the universal calendar made me think of Pope Leo XIII, the missionary prisoner. Permit me an explanation.
For the past 10 years I have spent a chunk of July in Kraków teaching in the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society, an exploration of Catholic social teaching in the early third millennium. Our central text – in the city of St John Paul II and the spiritual capital of the 20th century – is Centesimus Annus, the 1991 encyclical that presented John Paul’s most complete teaching on the right ordering of culture, politics and economics.
