The road to Rerum Novarum and the evolution of Catholic social teaching

From the pontificate of Gregory XVI down to the present day, there has been an ongoing crisis precipitated by the advent of the “New Things” (rerum novarum) of socialism and modernism. Since 1832 and the development of Catholic social teaching as a distinct field within the Magisterium, the public face of Catholicism has been shaped by the Church’s response to these “novelties.”¹ This is not surprising, given the relentless effort to change what it means to be Catholic and, at times, human.

Using faith, instead of reason applied to empirical evidence, to discern knowledge of God’s existence and the content of the natural law is the basis of the New Things. Admittedly, as Aquinas noted, reason must be guided and illuminated by faith. This is because most people simply do not have the time or other resources to reason these things out for themselves and necessarily take them on faith.²

This results in one of the most subtle dangers of modernism and one of the most obvious threats of socialism. Those whose faith, whether religious or secular, is not anchored in reason inevitably conclude that “might makes right.” Whoever has the strongest faith — or the ability to force his faith on others — must be the unquestioned authority . . . until someone stronger comes along.

With no objective, absolute, reason-based standards or fundamental principles, anything goes, even (as Ven. Fulton Sheen pointed out) to the point where man, God’s creation, recreates God in man’s image and likeness.³ God changes from the absolute, transcendent, Supreme Being, to a conditional, immanent, Subservient Becoming.

A Temporary Compromise

Following the death of Pius IX, reactionaries and radicals angled to seize control of the conclave to elect the next pope. Reactionaries wanted someone to return them to a mythical Medieval, centralized, all-powerful institutional Church. Radicals wanted a leader to transform Catholicism into a freethinking, modern, devolved movement. After the longest papal reign in history, everyone wanted a short pontificate.

Unable to reach a decision, the different factions agreed to a compromise to buy time to surface viable candidates. As a stopgap, the College elected the elderly and seriously ill Cardinal Archbishop-Bishop of Perugia, Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci, whom everyone (including himself) expected to die within a few weeks. Taking the name Leo XIII, Pecci survived to have the second-longest pontificate in history until that of St. John Paul II.

Never in the best of health, the new pope worked tirelessly to implement the reforms of Vatican I. His goal was to repair the damage done by socialism and modernism in both civil and religious society.

Continuing the work of Gregory XVI and Pius IX, Leo’s first encyclicals explained the errors of modern society (Inscrutabili Dei Consilio), pinpointed socialism as the chief danger (Quod Apostolici Muneris), and prescribed reason guided and illuminated by faith as the principal remedy for the New Things (Æterni Patris). These and other encyclicals presented a framework within which people could become virtuous and prepare themselves for their final ends — if they had the power to do so.

“Power,” however, as Daniel Webster pointed out during the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820, “naturally and necessarily follows property.” Given the economic conditions of the nineteenth century, ordinary people were losing power at an accelerating rate. Small ownership was disappearing, and the value of human labor as an input to production was declining in competition with advancing technology. Lacking access to money and credit, most people were unable to purchase the machines that were depriving them of their traditional livelihoods.⁴

Frustrated and angry, people turned away from organized religion that seemed to offer only empty promises. They demanded governments “do something” to take care of people.

In response, modernists sought to reorient Christianity to focus on material needs at the expense of sound doctrine. Socialists advocated completely new forms of religion or its abolition, with the Catholic Church a special target for reform or elimination.

The Game Changer

Matters appeared to have reached a stalemate when an unexpected series of events changed everything. It began when the agrarian socialist Henry George decided to run for mayor of New York City as the United Labor Party candidate. Abram Stevens Hewitt was the Democratic candidate, while the Republicans selected a relative newcomer, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. All three ran on a reform ticket to clean up the shambles left by Boss Tweed and his successor, “Honest John” Kelly.

What George hoped to accomplish as mayor remains unclear to this day.⁵ There is a possibility that he entered politics as a publicity stunt to sell more copies of his Progress and Poverty, one of the two most influential American socialist books of the nineteenth century. (The other was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.)

If marketing was George’s original motive, however, it soon grew into something more. As far as the unchurched Protestant George was concerned, the campaign became a contest of wills and a showdown between the outdated and anti-American Catholic Church, and himself as the prophet of the New Christianity.⁶

George, whose theories inspired the formation of the Fabian Society,⁷ believed that only humanity, not any individual human being, has the right to own anything created by God.⁸ “Humanity,” however, is an abstraction made by man, not by God. God is omniscient and does not abstract.⁹ Evidently, it did not occur to George that his theories made man greater than God.

Father Edward McGlynn, whose advocacy of socialism and modernism disrupted the New York Archdiocese for years, had joined George a few years before. Archbishop Michael Corrigan and his predecessor, John Cardinal McCloskey, had warned McGlynn repeatedly to stay out of politics. Given direct orders by Corrigan to take no part in the campaign, McGlynn obeyed, after a fashion. He accompanied George throughout the campaign, but carefully refrained from speaking in public.

Despite his apocalyptic speeches and appeals for a reformed, socialist Catholicism, George lost the election to Hewitt. Clinching Hewitt’s election, Republican bosses instructed their people to vote Democrat, breaking their promise to Roosevelt. Roosevelt never forgave them, especially when the final tally revealed that he might have won. A quarter century later, the Republican Old Guard pulled a similar stunt in the 1912 presidential race to prevent Roosevelt’s election and secure that of Woodrow Wilson.

Election Aftermath

Even though Horace Greeley declared that the election was the cleanest New York had seen in years,¹⁰ George and McGlynn claimed George’s loss was due to a conspiracy by venal Church leaders and corrupt politicians.¹¹ Corrigan issued a pastoral letter condemning socialism, consisting largely of quotes from Quod Apostolici Muneris, but without naming either George or McGlynn.¹² In response, McGlynn made speeches and published articles, while George started a newspaper, The Standard, that from the first issue repeatedly attacked the Catholic Church for its stand against socialism.¹³

Leo XIII summoned McGlynn to the Vatican to explain himself. At first, McGlynn said he would go, but then allowed George to talk him out of it. Initially, this was on the grounds that no good American would ever accept any authority that did not come from the people. Later, he gave poor health as the excuse.

As the situation heated up, Corrigan sought the advice of Bishop Bernard John McQuaid of Rochester. Among other things, McQuaid pointed out that George’s claims of having been endorsed by Bishop Thomas Nulty of Meath, Ireland, and Edward Cardinal Manning of England were false and misleading. Nulty had repudiated George years before,¹⁴ while Manning wrote two open letters to the New York newspapers denying George’s assertion that the Church had never taught private property in land is a natural right.¹⁵

It was then that the seed that eventually became Rerum Novarum appears to have taken root. As McQuaid wrote to Corrigan, “McGlynn’s defense that his doctor forbade him to go to Rome comes too late. The Holy Father will probably issue a dogmatic decision on the question. The worse George writes against you, the better for you. Many of their poor people have been led astray by the use of the names of Cardinal Manning and Bishop Nulty.”¹⁶

After repeated warnings, in May 1887, on orders from the Vatican, Corrigan informed McGlynn that if he did not go to Rome as instructed, he would be excommunicated for disobedience. McGlynn again ignored the summons and was excommunicated July 4, 1887, effective July 5 due to the holiday.

Buildup to Rerum Novarum

Efforts were made over the next four years to persuade McGlynn to meet two conditions and be reinstated, viz., go to Rome as originally ordered to explain his views on socialism, and apologize to those whom he had insulted. It is important to note that McGlynn was excommunicated not for holding socialist views, but for refusing to go to Rome to explain them.

Both George and McGlynn were now in decline, although for different reasons. McGlynn found that as a rebellious priest he made headlines, but as an excommunicate he was usually relegated to the back pages on the infrequent occasions journalists deemed him newsworthy. As for George, his attempt to enter politics marginalized him as a political philosopher and he became just another failed socialist politician.

For the next few years both men strove to get back into the limelight. George worked to advance his political career while McGlynn attacked the Church whenever possible. His favorite themes were the Church’s anti-Americanism (manifest in the new parochial school system¹⁷), the persecution to which he was subjected for being a socialist,¹⁸ and the knavish imbecility of the Catholic hierarchy.¹⁹

At one point, due to George’s pursuit of a political career, some people saw McGlynn as a stronger proponent of George’s ideas than George himself. As both men had large egos, this caused a breach when George decided to run for president, a move McGlynn saw as a betrayal.

The quarrel became acrimonious when McGlynn announced his own candidacy in opposition to George. This was to demonstrate McGlynn’s fidelity to the principles he claimed George had abandoned. Matters did not improve when it turned out people were more amused by their antics than they were edified by their ideas.²⁰

At the same time, increased efforts were made to return McGlynn to obedience and get him to agree to the conditions for lifting the excommunication. These always failed due to McGlynn’s ego and the fact that he never passed up an opportunity to air his mostly imaginary grievances. When popular interest in his speeches waned, McGlynn claimed attempts were made to bribe him.²¹ When that failed to get him enough attention, he made speeches attacking everyone from Corrigan to Leo XIII in terms that outraged both Catholics and Protestants.²²

Meanwhile, Leo and a team of scholars began work on the encyclical that would be known as Rerum Novarum. While not the sole or even primary reason for the encyclical, the McGlynn case and the worldwide attention it attracted clearly showed the inadequacy of previous attempts to deal with the New Things. If nothing else, McGlynn served as a graphic demonstration that a new approach was needed.

The Evolution of Catholic Social Teaching

Gregory XVI’s 1832 Mirari Vos introduced encyclicals that addressed an entire paradigm instead of being limited to a single issue. In it, the pope identified and condemned certain “novelties” that endangered Church and State. His later social encyclicals expanded on this, notably Singulari Nos in 1834, in which, for the first time, socialism and modernism were referred to as rerum novarum, “New Things.” Gregory did not, however, go beyond a philosophical and theological analysis of the situation.

Pius IX, who almost certainly read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, added political reform to the Church’s social magisterium. Pius’s personalist, American type of liberal democracy, however, came into direct conflict with the radical European collectivist version. His efforts to provide a democratic political model in conformity with Catholic teaching failed due to the 1848 revolutions and Sardinia’s subsequent conquest of the Papal States. Radicals labeled Pius a reactionary for resisting socialism, creating a Leyenda Negra that persists to the present day.

Even before his election, Leo XIII knew that lasting political democracy can only be built on a foundation of economic democracy. Only an economically free people can sustain a truly free and just society, regardless of its specific form. That is why as papal governor of Perugia before being ousted by the Sardinian takeover, he started the Perugia Savings Bank, capitalized primarily with his own money. His idea was to enable workers to save and purchase farms or businesses. This would shift them from dependence on wages, to independence based on capital ownership.²³

Unfortunately, few people then or now understood Leo’s goal. Most socialists and modern economists assume that only human labor is productive and thus creates value. In Keynesianism, for example, capital as the non-human factor of production, whether land or technology, is not itself productive. It only provides the environment within which human labor can produce.²⁴

This “labor theory of value” accounts for the socialist doctrines that private property in capital must be abolished, and that wages paid for labor are the only legitimate source of income. Ownership income, except to recover the labor cost of forming capital, is surplus value stolen from workers and consumers. “Property,” as the anarcho-socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared, “is theft.”

Leo realized that countering the evils of society required a new approach. Gregory XVI’s philosophy and Pius IX’s politics were of little or no interest to people caught between the upper and nether millstones of capitalism (defined here as concentrated private ownership of capital) and socialism. People turned to the New Things and followed demagogues like George and McGlynn because socialism and modernism offered hope for a better life now, not in some vague and shadowy afterlife.

Then, on May 15, 1891, Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum.

“On Labor and Capital”

Understanding the context in which Rerum Novarum was written helps to gain a proper appreciation of Leo XIII’s achievement. Philosophy and politics alone were not effective in countering the New Things. An alternative to socialism was essential if the Church was to regain lost ground.

A new approach would allow the Church to guide the formation of a justly structured social order in conformity with principles of natural law.²⁵ The goal was to provide a suitable environment in which people could become virtuous, that is, more fully human.

Leo was aware of the importance of private property in securing respect for human dignity and empowering people to acquire habits of doing good. He therefore made widespread capital ownership the cornerstone of his social teaching.²⁶

Such a proactive social agenda by the Church was unprecedented, and it took socialists, modernists, and capitalists completely by surprise. They had expected the usual condemnations (and got them), but not an alternative to socialism’s abolition of private property or capitalism’s concentration of it in the hands of a few. Still, despite the revolutionary nature of this new type of social encyclical, Leo’s argument was straightforward:

• The political and economic situation is such that the non-owning working classes — Leo did not restrict his program to workers alone — are struggling under “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”²⁷
• To alleviate this, the socialists propose to abolish private property and give the State total control over human life. They confuse justice and charity, overthrowing the natural law.²⁸
• Private property, however, is a natural right, inherent in every human being. Furthermore, the State was made for man, not man for the State.²⁹
• Although the socialists mandate collective ownership and redistribution as a matter of justice and a way of life, it is instead a moral duty under charity and cannot be coerced, except in extreme circumstances as a temporary expedient in an emergency.³⁰
• Ownership of capital is the natural way to make a living. A just social order at all levels of the common good assumes the validity, even necessity of the institution of private property in capital.³¹
• “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”³²

Leo then listed three major benefits that would accrue from a program of widespread capital ownership. One, ownership will be more equitably divided, ameliorating social and economic differences, bringing the different classes together based on their common humanity. Two, because people work harder and more effectively when they own, everyone will participate in an increased material prosperity. Three, people will seek to improve their lot in their own countries instead of abandoning family and friends to immigrate. His Holiness then reminded politicians that oppressive taxation not only militates against these benefits, but, because private property is a natural right, is also contrary to justice.³³

The remainder of the encyclical considers various things that should be done in the then-current state of society to improve conditions while restructuring the social order. These include fair pay and benefits, better working conditions, the right of laborers to organize, government assistance when necessary, and so on.

Leo’s understanding of finance was not as advanced as his philosophical, political, and economic thought. He assumed the only way for non-owners to become owners is to consume less than they produce and accumulate the excess as money savings. In wage system terms, this means workers must be paid enough so that they can afford to save to purchase capital.

Increasing wages without increasing production, however, raises costs so that workers and consumers are often worse off than before. This allowed both capitalists and socialists to sidestep the main issue. They wrote off Leo’s prescription as unrealistic or prudential matter and declared that the focus of the encyclical was wages, not property.

Despite capitalists, socialists, and others criticizing and reinterpreting Leo’s tremendous accomplishment, attempts were made to implement the program. Notable among these was “distributism” proposed by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, although it was characterized as a goal instead of a specific program: a policy of widely distributed ownership, with a preference for small, family-owned farms and businesses.³⁴

It would not be until the 1950s and the publication of Louis Kelso’s and Mortimer Adler’s book The Capitalist Manifesto that a morally sound and financially feasible method of funding expanded capital ownership was presented. Still, without Rerum Novarum, the groundwork would not have been laid, as Adler acknowledged in his preface.

• Related at CWR: “The Story of the First Social Encyclical” (July 19, 2022) by Michael D. Greaney

Endnotes:

Catholic World Report