(FORTUNE Magazine) – Westerners eyeing business opportunities in Eastern Europe will find encouragement in Pope John Paul II's new 114-page encyclical. The Pope, once thought to have a slightly leftish political tilt, makes clear that the Roman Catholic Church will not play an obstructionist role in the economic -- read capitalist -- development of these predominantly Catholic countries. To help prepare his message, the Polish-born pontiff sought the views of a dozen respected economists, including Stanford University professor Kenneth Arrow, winner of a 1972 Nobel Prize, and Harvard professors Hendrik Houthakker and Jeffrey D. Sachs. Their free-market opinions are reflected in the papal letter to the faithful. John Paul's concern for the poor in the former Eastern bloc, along with those in the Third World, is tempered by a recognition of the hard economic realities. He acknowledges wealth creation as a precursor to wealth distribution. Says Father Francis McHugh, director of the Von Hugel Institute, an ethics research center at Cambridge University: ''You can safely say the Pope will welcome investment in Eastern Europe, as long as we don't invest our whole system of Western values along with it.''