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The article presents the judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights of 5 March 2020 in GROBELNY v. Poland, by which the Court found that Article 1 of the First Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights had been infringed following the rejection by national courts of the applicant's claim for compensation equal to the invalidity pension which he was unlawfully deprived of by applying the res judicata principle, despite the existence of relevant and sufficient grounds for departing from that principle, namely the fact that the applicant's deprivation of pension rights was the consequence of a manifest error attributable to the public authority, found as such by the court in the second dispute. The Court held that, in this way, the national authorities had failed to ensure compliance with the principles of social justice and fairness or good governance and that the burden to which the applicant was subject was disproportionate, since he was required to bear the consequences of the errors attributable to the public authorities on his own, even though he did not have any other legal means to compensate for the damage. The article also contains an analysis by the author of the ECtHR ruling.

Any reflection on the relationship between religion and politics in the Catholic thought cannot do without reminding the Augustinian distinction between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena. The goal and foundation of any just political community should be the orientation to wards the common good. In the contemporary catholic thought, Johann Baptist Metz proposes a political theology revolving around the concepts of the value of the human person, the necessary refusal, on the part of the Church, of any mundane ideology and the necessary use of the socially critical potential of theological thought. Hans Küng criticizes any politicization of theology. He insists on the development of an internal pluralism within the Church and advocates a self-limitation of the magisterial intervention in the world in the name of a necessary "eschato logical reserve". Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict the XVIth , invested with the magisterial authority, relies heavily on official documents of the Catholic social doctrine. He emphasizes the necessity of founding the state on the central value of justice and its acting according to the principle of subsidiarity. In this context, the Christian faith and the Church in particular may have a pedagogical role, as it may guide reason to follow the right priorities. All three thinkers agree on the public significance of the Christian vision of society and on the fact that it may help society both by its critical and by its constructive dimension.