RERUM NOVARUM: A Sign of the Church’s Enduring Youth
By Fr. Michael Ryan
February 1991
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He was a thin, frail-looking man, 68 years of age. When the cardinals elected him pope in 1878, Joachim Pecci looked like someone who might perhaps live another two or three years, just long enough for them to groom a stronger candidate for the position. But this man, who took the name of Leo XIII, had other ideas. He had undergone a personal conversion many years before and was filled with life. He possessed a thorough knowledge of the great documents of the Catholic tradition and was also well-acquainted with the realities of the modern world in which he lived. Early on in his pontificate he declared his intention to move the Church so far forward that none of his successors would ever be able to move it back again. To everyone's amazement he was to be pope for another 25 years, dying finally at the age of 93. He was to work an astonishing 12 to 14 hours a day at his desk and to dismiss some of his younger advisors as "too old for me." He turned out to be, in the words of the Church historian, Philip Hughes, the creator of the modern Church.
This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of one of Pope Leo's greatest accomplishments: the publication of the encyclical letter Rerum Novarum on May 15, 1891. It was the first in a long line of social encyclicals that have come to us in the years since then from succeeding popes, and marks the beginning of what is today called the "Social Teaching of the Catholic Church."
Most people today would probably regard the Second Vatican Council, which took place in the years 1962-65, as the great turning point in the life of the modern Church. Yet a strong case can be made (and has been made by the late Laval University scholar, Fr. Gerard Dion) that this Council only completed a process that Pope Leo began. For it was Pope Leo XIII who turned the Church decisively toward the modern world. Prior to his pontificate, there had been a strong tendency for Church leaders to distrust the modern movements, those toward democracy, toward nation- states, toward a market economy, for example, and to support efforts for a return to earlier social forms. Pope Leo reversed all this. Though he was well aware of the errors and dangers of his age and though he was himself a 19th century man in many of his attitudes, he was determined to accept the modern world, to look for the good in it and to work along with it.
One incident may illustrate Pope Leo's attitude. In 1885 Leon Harmel, a progressive Catholic industrialist from France, led a pilgrimage of'100 fellow industrialists to Rome to meet with the pope and ask him for guidance in social matters. Pope Leo was glad to see them, but surprised them by saying that what he really wanted was to meet their workers. Harmel obliged and later led a pilgrimage of 10,000 workers to Rome.
One World, One Village
If our world were a village of 1,000 people, of these people:
60 persons would have half the income
500 would be hungry
600 would live in shanty towns
700 would be illiterate
(New Internationalist, August. 1990.)
The pope's request to meet with the workers themselves - and not just with their employers - made clear his firm rejection of the paternalistic attitude that had for so long dominated the thinking of many Catholics. It also exemplified an attitude that stood in sharp contrast to that of those clerics who dismissed worker movements as signs of "Marxist agitation," and who collaborated with reactionary political regimes, thinking that such regimes would provide a better climate for the Church to function. Finally it demonstrated this pope's commitment to the young Catholic Social Movement.
That Catholic Social Movement, which began about 1820 in France and spread to most industrialized countries in the next 60 years, grew initially out of a concern for the victims of the industrial revolution. However it soon came to embody as well a realization- sometimes referred to as "Christian sociology"-that people are profoundly affected by their social environment and economic conditions, and that this environment and those conditions can be changed to bring about more human conditions. Hence the economy and society in general, fall under the Gospel judgement. By the late 1880s this movement had agreed upon a body of "Christian social principles’. and had sent these to Pope Leo for his approval. Those principles were to be given official status in his great encyclical letter, Rerurm Novarum.
"RERUM NOUARUM FIRMLY OPPOSED THE "ECONOMIC REALISM' OF THE DAY. THIS 'REALISM' RESTED ON THE CONTENTION THAT ECONOMICS WAS A STRICT SCIENCE, DESCRIBING 'NATURAL' LAWS; HENCE, IT WAS CLAIMED, ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS HAD NO MORE PLACE IN IT THAN THEY DID, LET US SAY, IN PHYSICS."
Rerurm Novarum was a carefully crafted document. We know a lot about its genesis because the handwritten notes of Pope Leo's secretary, Monsignor Volpini, have survived intact. The encyclical was three years in preparation, going through several revisions. It made use of the statement of social principles agreed upon by the representatives of the various branches of the Catholic Social Movement when they met in Fribourg in 1886 and 1888. The social vision of Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler, the leader of the German Social Catholic movement, shaped many of its ideas. It was worked on by two of the best scholars of the day - the Jesuit, Lehmkuhl, and the Dominican, Weiss. Two of the drafts were written by two of the giants of the 19th century Thomist revival, Liberatore and Zigliara. And the entire process took place under the watchful eye of Pope Leo himself.
When Rerurm Novarum appeared in 1891 it marked the start of something utterly new in the history of the Church. It was the first official articulation of what Pope John XXIII would later say in his 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra: "We firmly assert that the social doctrine professed by the Catholic Church is a necessary part of its teaching on how people should live." (No. 222). That message would be put even more strongly by the Bishops gathered for the 1971 Synod, who would declare in their document, Justice in the World: "Action for the sake of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us to be a constitutive element of the preaching of the Gospel, that is, of the mission of the Church for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every state of oppression." In his 1975 encyclical, Evangelization in the Modern World, Pope Paul VI would strongly reaffirm this stand.
Rerurm Novarum firmly opposed the "economic realism" of the day. This "realism" rested on the contention that economics was a strict science, describing "natural" laws; hence, it was claimed, ethical considerations had no more place in it than they did, let us say, in physics. The pope rejected this faulty analogy. Human beings are not just economic actors, "determined" by laws over which they have no control, he said. In fact human motives and decisions are not only inherently unpredictable (and so not capable of being explained by strictly scientific laws), but they remain subject at all times to moral law. In particular the pope rejected with indignation the picture of human labour as a mere "commodity" to be bought and sold at market prices.
"RERUM NOVARLIM REJECTS THE 'HANDS OFF' VIEW OF THE STATE, THE VIEW STILL TO BE HEARD AT TIMES EVEN TODAY, THAT WE MUST 'KEEP GOVERNMENT OFF OUR BACKS'... THE POPE INSISTS NONETHELESS ON THE DUTY OF THE STATE TO PRODUCE SOLID LEGISLATION AFFECTING THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE ECONOMY AND ITS IMPACT UPON PEOPLE."