(Państwowa Szkoła Wyższa im. Papieża Jana Pawła II w Białej Podlaskiej, 2019-07-18)
Wódka, Marek
Freedom is one of the core values explored in Catholic social teaching. It is part of human nature
and is essential for human existence. It is realised in all subsystems of our social life, i.e., social,
economic, political, and cultural. By using their freedom, people can develop integrally. The
subject of the following paper is the operationalisation of the concept of freedom in Catholic
social teaching. The paper presents, in a historically systematised fashion, the ideological dispute
between the Catholic Church and liberalism, and describes a positive approach to freedom as an
essential category in Catholic social teaching. The method used in this paper corresponds to the
way the position of the Catholic Church crystallised in relation to freedom as a value. The article
narrows its analysis down to socio-economic aspects. This has been dictated by the nature of the
scientific discipline in the paradigm of which the problem was explored.