Of a New Pope and New Things

The new pope recently explained to his brother cardinals why he took the name Leo XIV:  

[It was] mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour. 

May 15 is the anniversary of the 1891 encyclical the new Holy Father referenced. Latin for “Of New Things,” Rerum Novarum is about the rights and conditions of workers that addressed the new social and economic challenges brought about by the Industrial Revolution. 

It is hard to overstate Rerum Novarum’s significance and impact. The 1891 encyclical consolidated the response of the Church to the modern world. From the time of the French Revolution, Catholicism was under attack and on the defensive. The motto of the revolutionaries was Diderot’s dictum: “Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” The spirit of revolutionary change swept through Europe in the nineteenth century. Waves of violent protest spread across the continent, for example, in 1789, 1815, 1830, 1848, and 1870. 

Pope Leo XIII’s pontificate was significant in that he developed a voice for a positive response to the modern revolutionary spirit. Retrieving the intellectual framework of Thomism, Pope Leo issued a series of encyclicals on political power, human liberty, and the power of the state. In Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo applied this Thomistic framework to the most pressing social question of the day: what can be done to help the working class? 

The modern world gave two answers to the social question. The individualists argued for replacing monarchies and the agrarian economy with modern democratic governments and a modern industrial economy that could produce massive new wealth, feed the hungry, and mass-produce clothing and modern urban dwellings. Drawing on the promise of the Enlightenment, this side proposed that the resources of modern science and technology could be applied to develop a new system of mass production guided by the modern principles of efficiency and effectiveness. But the application of this solution led to new social problems including new forms of urban poverty and a widening gap between the poor working class and those participating in the growing industrial economy. On the other hand, collectivists proposed that helping the working class entailed abolishing the system of property and putting in place state-controlled industrial production. 

Pope Leo did not take a side in the debate, but offered the Church a framework in which to view it. Rerum Novarum emerged as the centerpiece of this modern response. 

Rerum Novarum was referenced and celebrated by virtually every pope of the twentieth century. Encyclicals and statements revisited the 1891 encyclical, each applying it to their day, including important statements by popes from the 1930s to the 1990s. Its themes also deeply influenced the documents of the Second Vatican Council and spurred the arguments that brought down the Soviet Union and sought to curtail the excesses of consumer capitalism. 

When Pope Leo XIII was staring down the Industrial Revolution at the end of the nineteenth century, long-held patterns of work were changing. Amid new wealth, many industries treated workers as expendable commodities. Village life in the old economy was collapsing, and new forms of urban poverty were on the rise. Social life had become highly polarized. A new, materialist culture was emerging, and traditional virtues were increasingly regarded as obsolete. 

Since the mid-1990s, I have taught a philosophy seminar called Catholic Social Thought at Saint Louis University, for both undergraduates and graduates; Rerum Novarum is assigned. From my years of experience in returning again and again to this text with such a varied group of students, here are the ten most significant lessons I have learned about this enormously influential Church document.  

1. Pope Leo XIII warns the Church about the dangers of an unbridled industrial spirit. The title of the encyclical is subtle. Despite the phrase “Of New Things,” the subject of the first sentence is not new things. Instead, the subject is “the spirit of revolutionary change.” The encyclical begins with a statement about a widespread and familiar modern desire for innovation and novelty. The claim made in the first sentence is that this spirit of revolutionary change has taken hold and spread in the modern world, almost like a cancer. This modern spirit appears in politics as a demand for individual rights, and it becomes libertarian individualism in economics. This revolutionary spirit then shifts into a call for a collective politics and economics.

Pope Leo XIII warns us to be wary about this restless modern spirit. It’s alluring but deceptive, similar to yet perhaps different from the restlessness of heart expressed by Augustine at the beginning of the Confessions (our hearts are restless until they rest in God): this spirit turns its back on both the concrete lives of working people and hard-earned wisdom by flitting always to shiny new things.

2. Rerum Novarum treats the modern spirit as a two-headed monster. The modern spirit referenced in the title, “Of New Things,” is not a unified “new thing:” it is more like a two-headed monster. G. K. Chesterton called the two heads of such a monster “Hudge” and “Gudge.” Gudge is an industrial capitalist; Hudge is a romantic socialist idealist. To solve modern social problems, Gudge looks to big business while Hudge thinks social problems should be solved by big government. Pope Leo XIII did not take sides in this debate, as I explain below.

3. Pope Leo XIII was concerned about the conflict between business and government. Pope Leo, in the encyclical, observes that central to social questions in modern society is a conflict between the priorities of big business and those of big government. The former trusts that anarchic industrialism and unregulated markets make the world better by producing wealth; the other, noticing that many poor people are left out of the circle of exchange, trusts big government to create economic parity. The lover of big business supports a system of sweating and mindless long hours inconsistent with family life while the lover of big government is an idealist who loves humanity but doesn’t care much for particular humans or real-life families.

Leo XIII criticized the modern framework that turns social debates into a dispute between Right and Left. Both views share a modern anthropology, and both are fundamentally flawed in many ways. Leo’s alternative anthropology draws from a synthesis between Sacred Scripture and Greek philosophy. His view, like that of the popes who came after him (and, no doubt, our newest Holy Father), simply cannot be reduced to a dispute between left- and right-leaning ideologies.

4. The structure of the text of Rerum Novarum reveals the argument and the proposal. Many recent discussions ignore the encyclical’s structure, which is essential to understanding its central thesis. The order of presentation is straightforward, with five basic parts. (There is no scholarly critical edition of the text. A recent effort to develop a new English translation of the encyclical was jettisoned; perhaps it will be revived with the new pope taking the name Leo to honor Rerum Novarum.) The available translations differ in paragraph numbering, so references can be confusing. I reference here the online Vatican version. 

i) Introduction: The condition of the working class (1-3)

ii) Reasons against the socialist solution (4-15)

iii)  The role of the Church (16-31) 

iv) The role of the State (32-47)

v) The role of employers and workers (48-62)

Attending to the structure of the encyclical makes it easier to notice that Pope Leo is making an argument against socialism and that he is offering specific, practical advice regarding the distinct responsibilities of the Church, the state, employers, and workers in responding to the day’s pressing social issues.

5. Leo’s arguments against socialism rest on a distinctive understanding of the human person. Pope Leo explains that by exercising intelligence and freedom in work, humans are invited to act as stewards of creation. Some of the arguments rely on subtle, technical Thomistic understandings of justice. The larger point is a defense of private property (properly understood) as stewardship; this is a feature of our freedom and responsibility, with the corollary that ownership is not a claim that one may do whatever one wants with what is one’s own; rather, ownership is a responsibility to care for material goods that are the fruit of human labor. A central purpose of work is to support oneself and one’s family. Right possession is not the same as right use. In a more ultimate sense, the earth is the Lord’s. The human person is thus neither a mere rights-bearing individual nor a mere member of a collective. Any property system that denies this truth of the human person is unjust.

6. The Church has a specific role to play in contemporary society. In the final three sections, Pope Leo outlines his proposed solution to the social question. The role of the Church is distinctive: she should remind both employers and workers that “God has created every human as a person with dignity,” and yet it is foolish to think everyone is equal in every way: “People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community.” 

The Church “aims higher still” by reminding each person that everyone suffers and dies. It is foolish to think one can escape suffering and death, or to think that riches bring freedom from sorrow, or that money can buy eternal happiness. Accordingly, the Church has a distinctive task: “to influence the mind and the heart.” While the Church intervenes directly on behalf of the poor in her corporal works of mercy—feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and burying the dead—she does not have the task of secular political governance.

7. Political governance has a limited but distinctive role. The state’s task differs from that of the Church, though the two roles are complementary. Pope Leo outlines a principle of intervention that prefigures the principle of subsidiarity (as it would be articulated forty years later in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno). “The State must not absorb the individual or the family; both should be allowed free and untrammeled action so far as is consistent with the common good and the interest of others.” The state should allow employers and owners to come to agreements regarding pay, work hours, the conditions of the workplace, and other related matters. But Pope Leo reminds employers that when workers threaten to strike, it is typically because there is some injustice in the pay or the work conditions. Indeed, some situations may justify striking.

8. Pope Leo concludes Rerum Novarum with a detailed discussion of the role of employers and workers. The proposal is rather different from the revolutionary calls of the socialists. Pope Leo proposes not revolution, but a call to employers and workers to form associations “consisting either of workers alone, or of workers and employers together.” Some of these will have the aims of labor unions: to secure reasonable hours, rest periods, humane conditions, health and safety regulations, and a wage sufficient to support a worker and one’s family. Pope Leo also calls for other kinds of associations, including groups that promote interaction between employers and workers, mutual aid societies, organizations that support the young or the elderly, groups that promote intellectual and moral formation, and groups that promote shared participation in worship.

9. The text is concise yet rich. The text of Rerum Novarum is significantly shorter than most recent encyclicals. The argument, especially the complex line of reasoning against socialism, is highly compressed. Several factors account for the brevity of the text. Leo was writing to bishops, unlike the popes who wrote later social encyclicals, which are addressed to all people of goodwill indeed to everyone. Pope Leo presumes his readers are bishops with advanced training in Thomism and an awareness of the social questions dominating the late nineteenth century. Despite the comparative brevity of the text, the 1891 encyclical is rich and layered with insights that have been fruitful beyond the context in which it was written. The text assumes familiarity with many ancient and medieval sources and their nineteenth-century revival, especially in the journal Civiltà Cattolica. Some of the layers have come into better focus through subsequent engagement with Rerum Novarum. For more than a century, it has been discussed and analyzed, with later detailed analyses focusing on almost every section of the text.

10. Rerum Novarum has proven fruitful in practice. Rerum Novarum was far more influential than nearly every subsequent encyclical. At a granular level, it affected industrial policies, and on a broader scale, it changed the culture. Saint John Paul II observed in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) that during the Industrial Revolution, when consciences and cultures had become callous to the treatment of working people, Pope Leo’s call had an impact on both hearts and policies. By the end of the twentieth century, no one in polite society would say that it is just to treat workers merely as items of cost. 

In the domain of work post-Rerum Novarum, while there is widespread cultural acceptance that sweatshops and child labor are bad, the old worries about abuses of human dignity in the industrial economy are being replaced by concerns about the digital economy.  

One fruit of Rerum Novarum suitable to our time is the call to form associations. Almost every year, a few of my students respond to Rerum Novarum by taking seriously the challenge to form associations. The long-defunct sodality at our university has been revived. Our university’s Catholic Studies programs are buzzing with social activity. Yet inviting others to join in social associations strikes me as increasingly challenging. For some young people who came of age during the COVID pandemic in a digital world, the call to participate in face-to-face associations may seem threatening. Today, when a tremendous amount of our work and our economy is digitally mediated, we risk treating one another in depersonalized, inhumane ways. 

Rerum Novarum ends, appropriately, with a call to practice the virtues, a call that transcends a particular time in history and is always relevant. “The happy results we all long for must be chiefly brought about by the plenteous outpouring of charity.” Love is patient and kind. Love suffers all and endures all. This key Christian virtue will help us resist the alluring spirit of revolutionary, ravenous desire for new things in our AI age and retrieve the distinctions, habits, and practices Pope Leo XIII proposed more than a century ago. 

The new Pope Leo XIV faces many challenges, and so does the Church. But my experience teaching Rerum Novarum leaves me hopeful that, just as his namesake did, our new Pope Leo will shepherd the Church through this next great revolution with wisdom, humility, and divine guidance. 

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