CSDC 521

Aware of the power of Christianity to renew even cultural and social realities¹¹⁰⁵ Cf. Congregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis, 18, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City 1997, pp. 21-22., the Church offers the contribution of her teaching to the building up of the human community by bringing out the social significance of the Gospel¹¹⁰⁶ Cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio, 11: AAS 83AAS — Acta Apostolicae Sedis (official gazette of the Holy See)Volume 83 (1991) at vatican.va — scanned PDF (1991), 259-260.. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Church's Magisterium systematically addressed the pressing social questions of the time, creating “a lasting paradigm for the Church. The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, individual, and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved”¹¹⁰⁷ John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 5: AAS 83AAS — Acta Apostolicae Sedis (official gazette of the Holy See)Volume 83 (1991) at vatican.va — scanned PDF (1991), 799.. The intervention of Pope Leo XIII in the social and political reality of his time with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum “gave the Church ‘citizenship status' as it were, amid the changing realities of public life, and this standing would be more fully confirmed later on”¹¹⁰⁸ John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 5: AAS 83AAS — Acta Apostolicae Sedis (official gazette of the Holy See)Volume 83 (1991) at vatican.va — scanned PDF (1991), 799..