Question

benefits and shortcomings of a market economy? according to John Paul II, Centesimus Annus

Answer 1

Human dignity is the source of rights in Catholic social teaching inasmuch as rights are the means for ensuring the dignity of the person.
Rights protect the dignity of the person in turn by insuring the conditions for the fulfillment and development of the entire person.

Much of Catholic social teaching is focused on the rights and duties of all persons, particularly of workers and employers, of the proper role of society and the state and of the conditions under which economic and social justice is to be obtained, especially for the poor.

"When man does not recognize in himself and in others the value and grandeur of the human person, he effectively deprives himself of the possibility of benefitting from his humanity and of entering into that relationship of solidarity and communion with others for which God created him. Indeed, it is through the free gift of self that man truly finds himself. This gift is made possible by the human person's essential"capacity for transcendence".

As a person, he can give himself to another person or to other persons, and ultimately to God, who is the author of his being and who alone can fully accept his gift"(41.

An important role of authentic human communities, those which foster that capacity for transcendence and full development of the person, is to destroy structures of sin, those forms of organization as well as habits in our behavior which stand in the way of the integral development of the person and full communion with others(38.

In speaking of the individual person, John Paul insists that in order to maintain human dignity, the person must always remain the subject of economic activity.
Human dignity for the full person, just wages, respect for private property, protection of the poor by the State, the existence of natural rights and their protection by the State; these are all true needs of persons.
John Paul is particularly interested in the way in which new needs arise in today's world, for they arise in a context that presume a particular concept of the person and the good of the person.

We have already learned that the state has a duty to protect the natural rights of the person as the way of protecting the dignity of the person.

In the midst of a discussion of a need to provide for defense and preservation of common goods, goods which by their nature cannot be bought and sold, he praises the market in terms that any economist can appreciate, but ends with a stern warning: "Certainly the mechanisms of the market offer secure advantages: they help to utilize resources better; they promote the exchange of products; above all they give central place to the person's desires and preferences, which, in a contract, meet the desires and preferences of another person.

John Paul is likely more interested in creating more of a role in social life, not for further development of the market, but for the fulfillment and integral development of the complete person, especially in the role of forming, joining, developing and infusing intermediary groups with the principle of solidarity, the positive principle of unity in John Paul's social thinking.