Mater et Magistra

1. Mother and Teacher of all nations—such is the Catholic Church in the mind of her Founder, Jesus Christ; to hold the world in an embrace of love, that men, in every age, should find in her their own completeness in a higher order of living, and their ultimate salvation. She is "the pillar and ground of the truth." To her was entrusted by her holy Founder the twofold task of giving life to her children and of teaching them and guiding them—both as individuals and as nations—with maternal care. Great is their dignity, a dignity which she has always guarded most zealously and held in the highest esteem.

2. Christianity is the meeting-point of earth and heaven. It lays claim to the whole man, body and soul, intellect and will, inducing him to raise his mind above the changing conditions of this earthly existence and reach upwards for the eternal life of heaven, where one day he will find his unfailing happiness and peace.

- Bl. Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra

Lovely!

Time had two interesting articles on the encyclical which is probably the longest encyclical ever.

"Mater et Magister" (Jul 21, 1961) - a very good overview of the encyclical

"Teacher Yes, Mother No" (Sep 29, 1961) - the Church's social teaching from the perspective of Protestants:

Protestants may be galled by the pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church, but they can ill afford to sneer at Catholic social doctrine, because it is vastly superior to Protestant vacillation between pragmatism and perfectionism. So holds Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose perennial willingness to stick out his political and theological neck is one of Protestantism's glories. To make his point, he analyzes Pope John's recent encyclical, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher), which broadened Catholicism's alignment on the side of the welfare state and endorsed a measure of "socialization" (TIME, July 21).

"...Some of the soberness of Catholic social theory certainly derives from its exclusion from the political realm of the yearning for the absolute." (quoting Reinhold Niebuhr)