Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §27

²⁷ The examination which the Encyclical invites us to make of the contemporary world leads us to note in the first place that development is not a straightforward process, as it were automatic and in itself limitless, as though, given certain conditions, the human race were able to progress rapidly towards an undefined perfection of some kind. Such an idea - linked to a notion of "progress" with philosophical connotations deriving from the Enlightenment, rather than to the notion of "development" which is used in a specifically economic and social sense - now seems to be seriously called into doubt, particularly since the tragic experience of the two world wars, the planned and partly achieved destruction of whole peoples, and the looming atomic peril. A naive mechanistic optimism has been replaced by a well founded anxiety for the fate of humanity.