The 20th century brought a range of political projects charting a “third way” between liberalism and communism. Largely unexamined, however, were various European Catholics’ attempts to make Catholic social teaching the basis for social and political activism. The recent death of former Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who shepherded Poland’s transition from communism to democracy in 1989, offers an extraordinarily illuminating lens on Catholic “third way” projects: a devout Catholic intellectual who spent four decades attempting to harmonize Catholic social teaching with state socialism, Mazowiecki ultimately, as prime minister, broke with both to pursue free markets aggressively. His case begs the question that, if a Catholic third-way prime minister of one of the world’s most Catholic countries could not build a political program around Catholic social teaching, who could?