The Catholic Church has a new Pope. A new papacy is often surrounded by speculation regarding the chosen papal name and what it may mean with regards to the bearer’s intentions, policies, and visions for the future of the church.
Pope Leo XIV’s chosen name has been seen as a direct nod to Leo XIII – and more closely, a reference to his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“of revolutionary change”, or ‘Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour’) – often seen as the first great social encyclical, focusing so much on the great injustices faced by the poor and the working class of the late 1800s.
In this article from 1931 – the early years of the Great Depression – author Henry Somerville provides a retrospective on the forty years since the encyclical’s publication, and discusses its impact alongside the broader – and longer – history of Catholic social justice works.
Henry Somerville, ‘The “Rerum Novarum” After Forty Years’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 20, No. 77 (March, 1931), 1-12. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30094716
The Rerum Novarum enjoys a unique reputation among Encyclicals; it is probably the most often quoted of papal documents, and it is certainly the bestseller. The Catholic Social Guild in England disposes of thousands of copies every year and thus obtains a welcome contribution to its revenues. Pilgrims will go to Rome from all parts of the world in May for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the issue of the Encyclical by Pope Leo XIII. Doubtless the number of new readers will be increased this year by all that will be written and said in the way of commemoration and commentary. It would be interesting if we could have candid confessions of the reactions of new readers of different types and experiences.
I can speak for a Catholic factory worker in his teens more than twenty years ago, mildly smitten with Socialism. This youth, with all the assurance of his years, satisfied himself that the Encyclical was not an ex cathedra pronouncement and therefore felt free to criticize it severely! The argument against Socialism was dismissed as irrelevant, because it appeared to the young critic that the Pope did not distinguish between the socialisation of all property and of the means of production only. The enunciation of the doctrine of the Living Wage was discounted, because it did not show how the Living Wage was to be obtained. Other advantages to the worker, advocated by the Pope, were unimpressive because in the first decade of the twentieth century they had already been secured by English legislation and trade unions. The Encyclical as a whole seemed to be nothing more than platitudes.
The years and wider experience and opportunities for study have changed the views of that reader, and he now realises that the Rerum Novarum is a masterpiece of social science, as well as a worthy pronouncement of the Supreme Teacher of the Church of God. Yet he still feels that many first readers will share his original disappointment, for the Encyclical does not prescribe any specific for our pressing social troubles: it gives rather the principles of healthy social living, which we can apply to our case only gradually and after many practical problems have been solved.
The very success of the Rerum Novarum is responsible for some appearance of platitudinousness at the present day. A great part of the teaching of the Encyclical is now generally accepted, theoretically if not practically, by the majority of schools and parties, Catholic and non-Catholic. This was not the situation in 1891. At that time the social teaching of the Encyclical was regarded as definitely “advanced”, and even daring. Individualism was still the dominant creed and policy among economists and legislatures. Socialists, then almost an infinitesimal minority in English-speaking countries, had reason for acclaiming the Pope as having struck a resounding blow against the currently accepted maxims of economics. We must guard against exaggerating the novelty of the orientation given to social thought by the Encyclical. It was rather an authoritative endorsement of what had already become the stronger tendencies in the Catholic social movement throughout the world. The Pope was pronouncing judgment on causes submitted to him, as well as giving a lead. It would be an injustice to the Church to infer that there had not been leading Catholics aware of the urgency of the modern social question from its first beginnings…Bishop Ketteler had begun his social apostolate several years before Karl Marx published the first volume of his Capital. Leo XIII himself, in 1877, a year before his accession to the Chair of Peter, had issued a pastoral as Archbishop of Perugia, in which he said:
The modern schools of economics have considered labour as the supreme end of man, whom they take into account as a machine of more or less value, according as he aids more or less in production. Hence no consideration for the normal man and the colossal abuse that is made of the poor and lowly by those who seek to keep them in a state of dependence in order to grow rich at their expense. And even in countries which have the reputation of being the foremost in civilisation, what grave and repeated complaints do we not hear of the excessive hours of labour imposed on those who must earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.
And does not the sight of the poor children, shut up in factories where, in the midst of their premature toil, consumption awaits them – does not this sight provoke words of burning indignation from every generous soul, and oblige Governments and Parliaments to make laws that can serve as a check to this inhuman traffic? And were it not for Catholic charity, which, with its asylums and various institutions, never ceases to provide relief to their misery, how many of these children would now-a-days be left without protection and abandoned to themselves by their fathers and mothers, whom the frenzy of labour drags from the domestic hearth. Oh! Most beloved children, when we see these things or hear them related by organs that are above suspicion, we are impotent to contain the feeling of indignation which is ready to burst forth against those who are of opinion that the destinies of civilisation should be entrusted to the hands of these barbarians. And they call this “encouraging progress!”
Having become Pope, Leo XIII gave the world a long series of social Encyclicals, but he did not write pontifically on the subject of Capital and Labour till 1891. By that time the Catholic social movement had a long record of successful achievement.
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If nothing is said here of the Catholic social movement in other countries, like Austria and Switzerland, it is not because they did not play magnificent parts. I must restrict myself to sketching the situation which, according to my limited reading, determined the appearance and form of the Encyclical. The Catholic movement was divided into two schools, the Conservatives and the Social Reformers. By the Conservatives is not meant those Catholics, unhappily numerous in all countries, who thought very little of the application of their religion to social life, and who more or less adopted the secularized philosophy of those around them. The Catholic Conservatives believed intensely in the social importance and power of the Church, and were deeply religious and conscientious. But they trusted so much to religion and conscience as to oppose State action directed towards social reform…State intervention, according to the Conservatives, should be limited to the protection of strict rights and should not extend to the protection of the weak nor to the enforcement of obligations of charity.
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In 1877, before he was Pope, Leo XIII, as we have seen, had published a remarkable pastoral on the Labour Question; in 1882, he formed a committee in Rome to study the question; in 1884, he received a pilgrimage of French employers of labour; in 1887, he delivered an address on the social question to a gathering of French working-men pilgrims; in 1890, he outlined the leading ideas of social reform in a letter to the Kaiser.
Some non-Catholic writers make a good deal of an appeal to the Pope to speak on the social question made by an old St. Simonian named Pereire. This appeal was addressed to the Pope in 1878, and St. Simon himself had made a similar appeal to the Holy See fifty years before. There is no reason to think that non-Catholic invitations had any particular influence. Leo XIII, who had been or was in touch with men like Bishop Ketteler, Baron Vogelsang, the Comte de Mun and Cardinal Mermillod, did not need non-Catholic prompting. In 1887 Mermillod was able to tell his associates of the Fribourg Union that the Pope had resolved to issue an Encyclical on Labour, and minds were well prepared for the doctrine that was proclaimed in 1891. True though it is that the effect of the Encyclical was to strengthen the Social Reformers rather than the Conservatives, the Pope’s language was so prudently chosen and his recommendations so carefully balanced that no loyal Catholics, and the Conservatives were certainly such, could feel any hurt. On the chief issue which divided Catholics, the limits of State action, the Pope was reserved. While laying down that the wage-earners, being among the weak and necessitous, should be specially cared for and protected by the Government, Leo XIII showed himself anxious to limit State interference, “the principle being that the law must not undertake more nor proceed further than is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the mischief.”
…The Catholic social movement entered upon a period of intense activity, interrupted by the War, and now resumed. This is the real proof of the importance of the Rerum Novarum; it brings forth works worthy of Truth. The Catholic parties in Germany, Belgium and Holland owe their enduring political strength to their sound and progressive social programmes, based as they are on the teachings of the Rerum Novarum.
…The Report of the International Labour Office in 1928 may be quoted as evidence of the activity of the Catholic Church in the field of social economic policy. The following are extracts from the report:
The Catholic Hierarchy has remained faithful to the spirit of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, and is intensifying its efforts to make the influence of the Encyclical felt in everyday life. Provincial decrees, pastoral letters, collective manifestoes, and catechisms all reiterate and expand the teachings of Leo XIII on the rules of a really Catholic social organisation, on an adequate wage, legitimate strikes, conciliation and the duties of the work man to assist his companions in joining “associations which support in a Christian manner the interests of the workers”.
…In the same year seven Austrian Bishops, in a joint Christmas Message, expressed their reprobation of that laissez-faire doctrine which “has changed to capitalism in the worst sense of the word and to the tyranny of ownership-the principal cause of the disorder and the ruin of our economic structure.” The message did not condemn modern industry, the present system of credit, or the wage-earning system, but it did vigorously denounce that “uncontrolled plutocracy ” which “flouts justice and monopolises the power to raise prices.” On the duties of securing work for the workers or of fixing a just wage, joint messages issued by the Bishops in the United States, Belgium, Austria, Northern France and Lyons all likewise develop the doctrines of the Encyclical. The Bishops of Lombardy emphasised that, in exceptional periods of economic crisis, it is only just that the capitalist and property-owner should accept reductions in their income before the workman, who can economise nothing of his own needs. And the United States Bishops, in their “programme of social reconstruction,” demand legislation fixing a scale of wages which should at least suffice for the decent support of a family in the case of a wage-earning man, and in the case of a woman should allow her to live alone according to a reasonable standard. In the absence of such legal minimum wage, the State should provide for sickness insurance as well as unemployment and old age insurance….
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The Encyclical is, perhaps, most popularly known for its assertion of the labourer’s right to a Living Wage, as opposed to the prevalent economic theory that wages should be left to be determined by competition. Partly owing to the increase of wealth throughout the world real wages are now generally higher than when the Encyclical appeared, and in Great Britain legislation and organisation have enabled labour to improve its share of the national product at the expense of capital.
If I may express a personal view, it is that the world has to thank the Encyclical for a new and most valuable system of labour remuneration which was at first called the “sursalaire” in the country of its origin and is now known as family allowances. The scheme allows workers to be paid, in addition to the standard wage, extra remuneration according to the number of their dependent children. It is an effort to translate the idea of a “family living wage” into economic fact. It was started first by Catholic employers in France, who had taken the Pope’s teaching to heart and wished that their workers should receive a wage sufficient for decent if frugal livelihood…The system has its critics, not least among the trade unions, but it has spread through out Europe and has endured through times of good trade and bad. It has not been adopted in Britain, though it was recommended for the coal mining industry by a Royal Commission in 1926, and the advocates of family allowances in Britain are disposed to claim them not for the workers from industry but for poorer classes from the State.
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Though, as was remarked at the beginning of this article, the Rerum Novarum is a great seller and much quoted, there is reason to suspect that some readers go to it only for what suits their predilections. There are different passages which anti-capitalists and anti-socialists respectively can extract and declaim with great effect for their partizan purposes. But to obtain its constructive value the reader must study the whole Encyclical and pay as much attention to what is said about the Church as about the State and trade unions and other temporal agencies and measures. The programme of the Rerum Novarum can only be realized in a Catholic society.
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