By Gregory Beabout, Public Discourse.
Ten things I’ve learned from Rerum Novarum after thirty years of teaching it
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?