This short essay presents how complex and difficult it is today to study the ethnic, cultural, and civilisational transformations in the areas subjected to Rome. It seems it is no longer enough to use the term ‘Romanisation’ to describe all the complicated and diverse phenomena of adaptation, acculturation, or assimilation in the Roman world.

The article is devoted to the late Zygmunt Bauman (d. January 2017), a scholar who made an enormous impact on world humanities at the turn of the twentieth century. It briefly presents Bauman’s life and a number of the best known concepts from his works. The author first discusses Bauman’s attitude toward Marxist theory and explains his revision of it. He then introduces the main ideas of Bauman work Modernity and the Holocaust. The article ends with a review of Bauman’s reflections on globalisation and a discussion of his thesis concerning the crisis of the nation state.

Pope Francis often speaks about the new evangelization. He notices areas that need a special care of the Church. One of them is the problem of poverty. The Pope encou-rages all the faithful to engage in the transformation of this situation . It can be called a “throwaway culture” and a sign of real poverty of the whole society when people remain indifferent to the cause of the poor. It is one of the negative consequences of the culture of prosperity. The Pope also calls it a “globalisation of indifference” and calls on all people of the three states in the Church to care for those who are poor and abandoned and to act against poverty. In a particular way Francis addresses his appeal to the consecrated persons, encouraging them to contemplate the poor Jesus, to the consecration of their lives through a faithful fulfilment of their vow of poverty and to the apostolate among the poor and the marginalized . By means of such an attitude of men and women religious they would contribute to their own sanctification, to bearing witness to love to the poor before the world and at least partly they will help those in need among whom they live and serve.

The main task of the paper is to analyse pope Benedict XVI’s social teaching on poverty as introduced in the encyclical letter ‘Caritas in veritate’. While the methodo-logical language of the papal teaching is anthropological and theological in character, the document uses its own interdisciplinary approach that is characteristic of Catholic Social Teaching. Consequently such a Christian reflection on social issues like pover-ty, inequality, marginalisation and globalisation can be compared with other social fin-dings. In the global context the pope identifies growing economic inequalities but also the advantages of cooperation within the global economy. The analysis also discerns the theories of social development that are convergent with the papal social diagnosis. Finally, comparing the pope’s social teaching with some studies in economy, sociolo-gy and political sciences, the author of the paper examines the possibility to construct an interdisciplinary link between Catholic Social Teaching and other social sciences.