How to read the encyclical after 128 years

“Advise your priests to give up cloistering themselves within the walls of their churches and presbyteries and to go out to the people, doing all they possibly can for the workers, the poor, and members of the lower classes.” – Letter of Leo XIII to the Bishop of Coutances, 1893

 “It was a simple enough idea that a man’s labour is not a commodity, governed by the law of supply and demand, and that you could not just speculate on wages and the lives of men as you would on the price of wheat, sugar, or coffee. But simple though it was, it was enough to shake men’s consciences.” – Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest [1]

 Rerum novarum is often cited as the beginning of what eventually came to be known as Catholic Social Teaching. Like most such attributions, this one is only approximately true. Depending on what is meant by the social teaching, the beginning can be stretched back to the community of property described in the Acts of the Apostles, or forward to the Second Vatican Council. The latter’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes was the first official document to deal with as many aspects of modern society as possible, to treat the whole world as its audience, to avoid any demands for blind loyalty to the pope and bishops, and to be free of even a hint of yearning for a return to the lost era of Christendom. Contemporary readers of Gaudium et spes and of all subsequent documents need to make few if any allowances for the thinking of an earlier era. This is not the case for all earlier documents, including Rerum novarum. 

Still, Rerum novarum deserves its prime location in the quasi-canon of the social teaching. As the quote from the Bernanos novel implies, in this encyclical Leo XIII did something which was widely perceived as new. He set the Church firmly on the side of poor. That redirection was not a fluke. Hints of the new social understanding can be seen in earlier papal writings, and the vision was developed further by Leo, including the letter quoted above, and then expanded and deepened by all his successors. 

The novelty was genuine, but should not be exaggerated. In an age of great political ferment, Leo was not a revolutionary – far from it. He had no dogmatic or constitutional animus against the rich or to the old aristocracy. If anything, he was instinctively opposed to the dismantling of Europe’s various anciens regimes and the slow construction of more democratic governments. However, the pope was in favour of helping the poor, materially and socially as well as spiritually. And he was opposed, both instinctively and analytically, to all economic theories, social schemes and selfish governments which would, whether sooner or later, bring additional suffering  to the least of Christ’s brothers. 

It is not quite fair to say the Leo’s two most immediate predecessors, Gregory XVI and Pius IX, had not been in favour of the poor. Nor is it quite fair to describe their response to the dramatic changes in the European social and political order as entirely negative. They did not reject absolutely every intellectual, cultural and economic development of the 19th century. However, while none of those generalisations are entirely valid, they all have a good deal of truth to them. 

Consider the tone of Gregory, writing in 1832. “Therefore, both divine and human laws cry out against those who strive by treason and sedition to drive the people from confidence in their princes and force them from their government….”  “[Campaigners for] political liberties [are] sons of Belial …the sores and disgrace of the human race.”  “[In their] detestable insolence and improbity… consumed with the unbridled lust for freedom, [they] are entirely devoted to impairing and destroying all rights of dominion while bringing servitude to the people under the slogan of liberty.” (Mirari vos). 

Leo was like Gregory and Pius in being both haughtily self-confident and unreservedly hostile to the motivations of anyone he considered opposed to the truth or to the Catholic Church, two things which were basically identical in his mind. Still, the Spirit definitely started to blow in new directions in the Vatican after Leo became Pope in 1878. Memories of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had faded, the Napoleonic non-Christian reordering of Europe had become a tradition rather than an innovation, the expansion of Catholicism outside of Europe had created a new world with new challenges for the Faith, and industrialisation and urbanisation had brought clearly irreversible changes to the social and economic orders. 

Leo responded in many ways, including a direct and, to modern eyes, sympathetic concern for the people taken in by bad modern ideas. He wanted to lure, rather than merely to condemn, the lost souls of the 19th century. For Catholics, that salutary shift remains quite relevant to the far greater number of lost souls in the 21st century.

Compared to Gregory and Pius, Leo’s approach was far more pragmatic. Pius has declared himself a “prisoner of the Vatican” in 1870, when the new Italian government seized the Papal States. In 1892, nine months after Rerum novarum was published, Leo ordered French Catholics to cooperate with their Republican and quite anti-clerical government. The relevant encyclical, Aux milieu des solicitudes, was a remarkable piece of political realism, although it took almost another half-century before the Vatican finally admitted that the Papal States were lost forever.  

Despite the French realism and the sympathy with the poor. Leo did not abandon fully the old Papal thinking and the style of writing which accompanied it. Realistic expressions of pessimism about the Church’s political and social role in the modern world sit uncomfortably with his repetition of the previous papal demands for the renewal of a Christian culture: “And if human society is to be healed now, in no other way can it be healed save by a return to Christian life and Christian institutions.” (RN 27). The association of Christianity with all good things in society and with all recoveries from the stains of sin is undoubtedly good Catholic theology, but politically, at least in retrospect, pleas for the restoration of anything like the old Christianity-imbued social order were mere wishful thinking. 

These brief comments suggest that some elements of Rerum Novarum were very much of its time. That is to be expected – its goal was to bring the timeless truths of Christianity to a situation at a particular time and place. Readers in 2020 may be curious about that historical background, but they are likely to be more interested in aspects of the document which are less constrained by then contemporary concerns and patterns of thought. Such readers may sometimes feel frustrated, but the encyclical is well worth parsing. It contains some timeless truths and some truths which, while perhaps not timeless, are still relevant. I will discuss six issues worthy of contemporary attention and then mention a few other areas where Leo’s thinking seems time-bound or quite incomplete.

1. Putting the economy in its place 

 “[I]t is the opinion of some…that the social question is merely an economic one, whereas in point of fact it is, above all, a moral and religious matter, and for that reason must be settled by the principles of morality and according to the dictates of religion.” (From Leo’s Graves de communi re (1901) 11, my emphasis; see sections 28, 29 and 32 of RN for the same idea, expressed less succinctly). 

The “some” people whom Leo had in mind were the Socialists. Following Marx’s materialist reading of human nature and history, they claimed that all social matters are indeed essentially economic. In their analytic framework, morality and religion were what Marx called “superstructures”, ideologies created to justify and hide the actual structures of power. 

The Catholic position is quite different. The provision of material, economic help for the poor is only one part of Church’s sole ultimate responsibility, to expound and promote moral and religious truth. Even when Leo economic concern, it is described as secondary to the higher Christian mission. “Neither must it be supposed that the solicitude of the Church is so preoccupied with the spiritual concerns of her children as to neglect their temporal and earthly interests. Her desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and better their condition in life; and for this she makes a strong endeavour” (RN 28). In the background of Leo’s argument is a judgement of the modern world. The “prevailing moral degeneracy” (RN 1) has corrupted many aspects of life: material, spiritual, and social. The enemies, the various promoters of this degeneracy, must be countered in all of these aspects, including the economic. 

As Bernanos explained, Leo was the first pope to understand the importance of economic issues in modern societies. However, he never lost his Catholic understanding of the human condition. Questions of labour, production consumption and distribution are not only subsidiary to the great questions of humanity’s sin, redemption and divine vocation, but economic issues cannot be resolved in a fully satisfactory way except as part of the answer to these great questions. Leo’s analytic framework – economic issues are truly important and inescapably secondary – remains central to today’s social teaching. In many Western countries, political analysis often starts with the assumption that, “It’s the economy, stupid”. Catholics start with, “It’s everything – and everything is religious, everything is moral”. 

2. The preferential option for the poor (in embryo)

 “[T]he labouring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and …his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred.… 

“[W]hen there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon…And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government” (RN 20, 37).

 The “preferential option” was doctrinally named by John Paul II, but Leo already expressed the basic idea: those most in need deserve special attention from those who can offer the most help, the people and institutions which control wealth and exercise political and social power. However, Leo’s vision is far less politically charged that that of the Polish pope, who borrowed his phrase from the highly political theology of liberation. By the end of the 20th century, the plight of the poor had become a social scandal and a global political issue. Leo’s socialist opponents already understood that poverty was not only caused by a lack of human energy, the insufficiency of the natural world or an easily correctible lack of charity. They saw, as John Paul II would see, that one reason that the poor were poor was that the rich and powerful treated them unjustly. 

In contrast, Leo was firmly persuaded that fairly steep social hierarchies were part of natural order. His vision of helping the poor was innovative by Catholic standards, but sounds socially complacent by the socialist standards of his time and by the conventional, and Catholic, standards of today.  

“That kind of help is especially worthy of recognition which forms the minds of mechanics and laborers to thrift and foresight, so that in course of time they may be able, in part at least, to look out for themselves. To aim at that …refrains immoderation in their desires, and acts as a spur in the practice of virtue” (Graves. 17). 

In other words, he believed that the charity which fosters the self-help of the poor such munificence was all that was needed to restore social harmony, because he was confident that any thrifty poor man could gradually bring his family into a respectable way of life. All that was required was a combination of sobriety, hard work, and a bit of help from the privileged. In effect, Leo was largely repeating the traditional Christian call for personal charity, presented as early as the Acts of the Apostles. He only grudgingly accepted the need for state relief programmes, and he was either opposed to or not interested in big structural changes. Rerum novarum does not propose massive public investments in housing, education or infrastructure, recalibration of relative wages or expropriation of aristocrats’ surplus land – the changes which eventually all but eliminated desperate poverty in so-called “developed” economies. 

It is a bit unfair, however, to criticise Leo for not thinking too narrowly. In the 1880s, only Socialists, and really only the most advanced thinkers among them, had grandiose visions of central planning. Subsequent popes have caught up with this big-thinking, so much so that they may sometimes have lost track of the human scale inherent in the relations of charity, and the social unity which only direct and almost direct personal encounters can promote. While Leo perhaps did not understand fully the need to include the social in the personal, he certainly understood the need to include the personal in the social.

“No one is so rich that he does not need another's help; no one so poor as not to be useful in some way to his fellow man; and the disposition to ask assistance from others with confidence and to grant it with kindness is part of our very nature.” (Graves 16) 

Leo does not say in that encyclical just what use the poor man can be, but he tries hard to balance the Christian duty to help the poor become less poor with the Christian respect for the equal dignity in the God’s eyes of all people, poor and rich alike. Indeed, Leo points out that the rich are at a disadvantage when it comes to divine judgement. This tension between helping the poor and respecting the spiritual gifts of poverty is always latent is Catholic social teaching. Leo manages to make the tension creative.

3. Solidarity and subsidiarity (in embryo)

 The socialists whom Leo was attacking were mostly uncritical followers of Marx, who was a critical follower of Hegel, who thought that conflict was the wellspring of historical development. In this way of thinking, the power of strife is always greater than the power of love, compromise and concord. Catholics firmly disagree with this judgement. From at least Augustine onward, Catholic thinkers have argued that all conflicts – within families, between groups in a society, and between nations – are signs of the Fall. 

In Rerum novarum, the relevant conflicts are between economic classes. In Leo’s understanding, socialist doctrine held that this fight is inevitable, at least until a single socialist government abolished the class system. Whether or not Leo was right about socialism, his opposition to their supposed teaching gave him an opportunity to place a basic claim about society firmly into the nascent social teaching:  

“The great mistake …is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labour, nor labour without capital” (RN 19).

Leo’s positive portrayal of social relations between rich and poor may sound somewhat complacent now – it certainly did to socialists then. However, the idea of human bonds which transcend social and economic positions is so central to Catholic Social Teaching that, long after Leo’s day, it was given a name: solidarity. 

Unlike the limited and ultimately conflictual Socialist solidarity of workers, whether of one the nation or of the entire world, Catholic solidarity is built on the mutual sympathy and mutual needs which people have simply because they are human, created in the likeness of the Trinitarian God who is love. Leo’s organic image was developed in various ways by later popes, but his foundational confidence in the Catholic principle of harmony has remained unquestioned.

In discussing the social teaching, solidarity is often paired with subsidiarity, the idea that as much as possible big organisations should support rather than supplant little ones in every social domain. Subsidiarity calls for national governments to yield to local governments, for all governments to yield to civil and religious organisations, and for all organisations to yield to families. The full doctrine was developed in response to the 20th century trend towards ever more centralised and intrusive governments. However, Leo already portrayed a clear social and political order, where each group has its appropriate place, powers and responsibilities: 

“The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, shall …realize public well-being and private prosperity.…Now a State chiefly prospers and thrives through moral rule, well-regulated family life, respect for religion and justice… everything, in fact, which makes the citizens better and happier. …[I]t lies in the power of a ruler to benefit every class in the State, …to promote to the utmost the interests of the poor…” (RN 32).

The apparent enthusiasm for State action in that quote is misleading. In Rerum novarum, Leo is strongly opposed to the Socialist plan for the government to control all property. He wants the Church, not the government, to play the leading role in both education and the charitable activities which are now identified with the governmental Welfare State. What is not misleading is the image of a well-ordered polity, with each group doing what it is supposed to do by its nature, and the government both presiding over the civic whole and supporting each of the other groups with beneficence and respect. 

Leo worried that a too powerful state would disrupt this harmony and “absorb” the authority which rightly belonged to other groups. “We have said that the State must not absorb the individual or the family; both should be allowed free and untrammelled action so far as is consistent with the common good and the interest of others” (RN 35). Subsidiarity can be considered a refinement of this basic vision.

The papal praise of subsidiarity is sincere and inspiring, but the correct way to practice it in modern societies is far from clear. The Catholic debates about particular issues are often depressingly inconclusive. Rerum novarum shows the basic problem. Immediately after the warning quoted in the previous paragraph, Leo calls upon rulers to “nevertheless, anxiously safeguard the community and all its members…”(RN 32, emphasis added). It is not easy to find the right border between virtuous government safeguarding and the inappropriate absorbing of individual, familiar and communal responsibilities and freedoms.

4. Rejection of socialism and contractual liberalism

 Much of Rerum novarum is dedicated to an attack on socialism. Leo’s prime concerns are the socialist desires to abolish private property, to overthrow the established social order and intrude in family life. The pope is well aware of the social situation which allows such wicked desires to flourish:

“[W]working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, …still practiced by covetous and grasping men. …[A] small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself” (RN 3).

The Socialists have a seemingly compelling solution to the problem, but Leo states without hesitation that it is totally the wrong one.

“They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community” (RN 4).

Rerum novarum includes extensive arguments in favour of the justice and practical use of private property. These are much loved by those more recent Catholic commentators who believe that the Church’s social teaching endorses economies based on “free markets”. That reading is at best problematic, not least because it gives precedence to a simplified version of Leo’s concerns, while almost ignoring the developments in papal thinking over subsequent decades. 

Indeed, by the time of John Paul II, the importance of individual and family ownership had become much less central to the social teaching than what might reasonably be considered its opposite, the “universal destination of goods”. In that perspective, which can easily be traced back to the Fathers, the goods of creation are gifts from God to all humanity, so the division of land and other economically valuable things is basically a concession to fallen human nature. Private property can be good for its owners and for society, but all property always comes with a “social mortgage” (John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) 28), an obligation to support the common good. In effect, John Paul replaced Leo’s priority of property with the priority of social solidarity.

Despite his firm condemnation of current injustices, Leo was totally opposed to righting them through political-economic revolution. On the contrary, the State must counter people who want to 

…seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people's possessions.…The authority of the law should intervene to put restraint upon such firebrands, to save the working classes from being led astray by their manoeuvres, and to protect lawful owners from spoliation”. (RN 38) 

Leo’s cautious 19th century political conservatism (in the literal sense of conserving the existing social order) has not disappeared from the Catholic teaching, but more recent popes have been more open to some sorts of radical social and political change. The evolution is sensible. It is hard to know what there is to conserve after a century of massive upheavals in the Catholic homelands of Europe and of perhaps even more fundamental convulsions in other countries. 

Leo worried almost exclusively about individual property, in particular land and to a lesser extent the tools of craftsmen. He hardly mentioned the crucial socialist goal of State control of the means of industrial production and of the physical infrastructure of roads, sewage and so forth. It is at least possible that the relatively slow development of the Italian economy left him unaware of the importance of this policy. In any case, later popes, especially John Paul II, have approached this part of the capitalism-socialism debate with more sophistication.

Rerum novarum, however, does deal with one central Catholic objection to the classical liberal understanding of the capitalist economy. Leo rejects entirely the idea that the sanctity of contracts has a higher standing than “distributive” (RN 33) justice: 

“[T]here underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice” (RN 45). 

There is a symmetry of disapproval. For Leo and the entire subsequent tradition of the social teaching, a purely contractual understanding of economic relations is just as much against the ordered and mutually supportive nature of a good society as the conflictual understanding of socialists. Both offer only a false “equity” and both reject the guiding moral authority of the Church. 

Later popes have been more welcoming of both some elements to the socialism found in social democracies and some of the contractual relations of markets. Such discernment is appropriate, since the modern economies which have created many good things are all mixes of socialist and market arrangements. However, each of the popes of the 20th and 21st centuries has only reinforced Leo’s fundamental understanding that the two models share a secular logic which easily turns against the common good. 

5. The authority of the Church

 Rerum novarum is unwavering in its assertion, or really its assumption, that no modern problems, or really no problems of any sort, can be addressed successfully without the aid and guidance – sacramental, dogmatic and interpretative – of the Catholic Church. “But We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave out the Church” (RN 16). From this church-centric perspective, Catholics should stay close to their Church and too each other. The workers’ organisations with Leo proposes are for “Catholics only”. This exclusiveness is not motivated by ill will toward non-Catholics (who are welcome to convert, after all). It springs from the labour unions’ higher mission. 

“Let our [Catholic workers’] associations, then, look first and before all things to God; let religious instruction have therein the foremost place…Let the working man be urged and led to the worship of God, to the earnest practice of religion, and, among other things, to the keeping holy of Sundays and holy days. Let him learn to reverence and love holy Church, the common Mother of us all; and hence to obey the precepts of the Church, and to frequent the sacraments…” (RN 57). 

The assured tone might be a little deceptive. Leo was countermanding a tendency among Catholic labour organisers to prefer working with other unions, because there is strength in numbers, over keeping Catholic purity. In practice, Leo was pragmatic enough to tolerate religiously mixed organisation in Germany, but he was strongly opposed to the principle. 

Why did he feel so strongly? He may have lacked confidence in the ability of Catholic workers to resist socialist blandishments. That would be reasonable, since most lay Catholics had little knowledge of the faith. However, in Leo’s way of thinking, “unless forced by necessity to do otherwise, Catholics ought to prefer to associate with Catholics, a course which will be very conducive to the safeguarding of their faith” (Longinqua 6, an 1895 encyclical letter to the bishops of the United States). In other words, the Body of Christ is healthiest when it extends through the familial, professional, intellectual and social aspects of life. Labour unions will not be successful if they do no more than secure higher wages or better working conditions. They must also make their members better people, an improvement which, in the Papal imagination, clearly requires them to be confraternities built around the practice of the faith.

This assumption makes Leo’s Catholic social teaching doubly Catholic: it is the teaching of Catholics for Catholics. There will a long journey from this worldview to that of John XXII, who addressed his social encyclicals to “people of goodwill”, let alone to the approach of Francis, who goes out of his way to include Moslems in his symbolic gestures of the Church’s teaching.

There is also a long way to go from Leo’s understanding of the role of lay people in social action to that of the Second Vatican Council. The 19th century Vatican accepted that lay people could administer Catholic organisations, but only under firm priestly control. In turn, priests were expected to obey their bishops, and bishops could not disobey the pope. People being what they are, and the modern enthusiasm for free thinking perhaps emboldening some Catholics, Leo felt the need to repeat this message: 

“We recur again to what We have already declared and We insist upon it most solemnly; viz., that whatever projects individuals or associations form in this matter should be formed under episcopal authority. If [an excessive zeal in the cause of charity] leads them to be wanting in proper submission…it will not have any useful result and cannot be acceptable to God. God delights in the souls of those who put aside their own designs and obey the rulers of His Church as if they were obeying Him” (Graves 26).

The authority of the Church over the lives of believers has waned greatly since Leo’s time, as has the ability of the Pope to speak for and to Catholics, even the most devout. Submission cannot be taken for granted, and Paul VI was the last pope to demand it, rather than to plead for conscientious respect of the teachings. Some contemporary Catholics may choose to live in mostly all-Catholic environments, but it is almost impossible to imagine a 21st century pope even suggesting that lifestyle choice to the masses. 

6. Praise of social hierarchy

 Inequality has recently become a political issue in several countries. Economists often argue about whether inequality has increased or by how much, but they rarely feel the need to explain why inequality is undesirable. Philosophers add some wrinkles to the equality debate, most commonly by comparing equality of outcome to equality of opportunity, but they are hardly more likely than economists to question the assumption that inequality of some sort is undesirable. 

Leo thought very differently: 

“It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. …There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community” (RN, 17).

This social teaching was deeply embedded in the Christian tradition. Until well after Leo’s time, few Catholics and no popes thought that a social order was necessarily unfair to those at the bottom, even though they lived in miserable poverty and were excluded from many of the good things of life in the world. For Christians, the spiritual life is far more important than riches, fame, pleasure, or power, or than material misery, ignominy, suffering, or oppression. 

“God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of earth, but for things heavenly and everlasting; He has given us this world as a place of exile, and not as our abiding place. As for riches and the other things which men call good and desirable, whether we have them in abundance, or are lacking in them - so far as eternal happiness is concerned - it makes no difference; the only important thing is to use them aright. Jesus Christ, when He redeemed us with plentiful redemption, took not away the pains and sorrows which in such large proportion are woven together in the web of our mortal life” (RN 21).

In that respect, the rich are starting at a disadvantage. “[T]hose whom fortune favours are warned that riches do not bring freedom from sorrow and are of no avail for eternal happiness, but rather severe obstacles…a most strict account must be given to the Supreme Judge for all we possess” (RN 22). 

Leo could have asked more penetrating questions about what sort of social and material order best cultivated spiritual lives, but such enquiries were deflected by his unreflecting confidence, a confidence that was deeply set in the Catholic tradition, that the current social orders and the governing authority which supported them were both God-given. From that starting point, it was inevitable that Leo’s vision of social reform would not be ant-rich. Rather, he expected the rich to make better use of their fortunes, of their good fortune. He praised the “men of eminence” who help “to better the condition of the working class by rightful means” (RN 55). The desired results of this betterment are “sufficient wages”, workers who “practice thrift”, and “private ownership [which is] held sacred and inviolable” (46). This combination will promote social peace, because “property will certainly become more equitably divided” (47). 

This extravagant praise of noblesse oblige was already backwards-looking in Leo’s day. The rise of the massive and relatively equal middle class had begun. Education, clean water and basic medical care were increasingly treated as goods which should be provided equally for everyone, rich and poor alike. The bureaucracies of public services were already supplanting the scattered efforts of generous industrialists, concerned aristocrats and religious congregations. Those trends have continued without interruption, so that the current talk of inequality can be deeply misleading. So many basic goods of life are universally available, including several that did not yet exist in Leo’s day, that the scale of inequality in lifestyles is minimal by late 19th century standards. 

Whether Leo’s hierarchical social model is equally out of date is a more open question. In practice, social elites remain very powerful and clear class structures are still observable in all developed countries. More philosophically, it is hard to imagine a 21st century pope citing or rephrasing Leo’s criticism of a “level” society. However, the Catholic Magisterium has not repudiated the spiritual and social perspective which finds some sorts of social inequality acceptable or even desirable. Whether it should endorse a more materialistically egalitarian perspective remains a question for debate.

Weaknesses of Rerum novarum

 Catholics who care about the social teaching often treat all the encyclicals as if there were infallible or close to it. This approach is theologically wrong, since the texts inevitably mix binding teachings on faith and morals with necessarily time-bound and imperfect observations and exhortations on complex issues. The expectation of perfection is also practically frustrating, since the documents are manifestly imperfect. The more time passes, the more visible are the failings. Unsurprisingly, the gaps are particularly large in Rerum novarum, which was the first dedicated papal treatment of the relatively new challenges of socialism and the rise of the working class. 

Some of the questions the encyclical deals with are not as relevant as they were in 1891. Socialism in its pre-Soviet fervour is no longer a threat. Leo’s fierce strictures will not give any insight into the so-called socialists of Venezuela, North Korea or China. Also, labour unions have risen and declined since Leo’s time, so his comments on the topic can only be helpful after significant revisions. Similarly, after more than a century of fairly steady secularisation, only with an imaginative reinterpretation can Leo’s memory of Christendom and his hope for a return to it remain relevant. Other changes since he wrote – the rise of ecumenism, atheism and secularism and the declining faith and obedience of Catholics – limit the applicability of his advice on Catholic social organisations. 

There are four other, more technical problems worth mentioning. 

First, Leo’s defence of “private property” is marred by a narrow view of what property actually is. Curiously, his approach is closer to John Locke’s than to that of his own intellectual mentor, Thomas Aquinas. In the Thomistic perspective, which is largely shared by contemporary legal philosophers, economic property is better understood as a social relationship, something the comes with limited rights and definite responsibilities, than as Locke saw it, an absolute possession which separates the owner from the world. 

Second, Leo basically treats land as the only kind of property which matters, and his socially peaceful society seems involve many workers saving up enough money to buy a plot of land and do some farming. This perspective unhelpfully ignores other economically important types of property (especially the means of production), other desired lifestyles and the distinctively modern and economically crucial entity, the large property-owning corporation. 

Third, Leo’s use of “capital and labour” in the subtitle of the encyclical betrays a surprising acceptance of the standard Marxist model of the class system. Although he rejects the claim that the classes are inherently in conflict, he does not think very clearly about whether the categories are themselves are very insightful. John Paul II filled in this gap in Laborem exercens. 

Finally, Leo seems curiously oblivious to much that was happening in the economic word. He wrote in the midst of a monumental change in technologies and prosperity. In the 1880s and 1890s, Such developments as chemical fertilisers, steel from blast furnaces, electricity and railroads were changing society, shifting political balances and increasing prosperity. The misery of the proletariat was lessening fairly quickly, the bourgeoisie was expanding and competent administrative governments were starting to control more of the society and the economy. Unfortunately, Rerum novarum takes note of almost none of those changes. 

Worth it, after all

Rerum novarum is far from perfect, but even beyond the specific points already mentioned, the method it adopts had three enduringly valuable features. 

First, Leo teaches the right way to look at social issues. The most important questions are always human and moral. Is the dignity of human beings being respected? Are the current arrangement just? Is virtue being promoted? Is sin being tolerated? It turns out that all issues, even the most secular, can be seen more clearly when they are framed in these essentially Christian terms. 

Second, Leo’s hostility to secular ideologies may sometimes sound shrill and anachronistic, but it is also, and more importantly, prescient. The understanding of human nature and society which lies behind socialism, and the in many ways similar understanding which lies behind liberalism, remain prevalent today. The popes since Leo have never ceased trying to explain why those understandings are deeply flawed. 

Finally, Leo puts the Church at the service of humanity, especially those who are suffering the most. The message has been refined and broadened by subsequent popes, but Leo’s ideal of a Church mobilised to help the world through concrete actions as well in prayer and liturgy remains the only persuasive Christian response to the modern challenges which Rerum novarum took on. 

[1] Both quotations are taken from Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France (Freiburg, West Germany: Herder 1961 (tr. John Dingle from Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1948)),  Vol. II 126, 127. All papal documents are quoted from the Vatican website.