Editors’ note: The 8 May election of U.S. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as bishop of Rome was a surprise to most Catholics. While there may or may not be a confluence of coincidences associated with his election and choice of regnal name, Leo XIV’s succession comes at a pivotal time for humanity, one that resembles the era of Pope Leo XIII, who 134 years ago today released his encyclical, “Rerum Novarum.”
The official English version of Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking encyclical “Rerum Novarum” is subtitled, “On Capital and Labor.” Yet, it opens, “That the spirit of revolutionary change …”
The Latin title of this encyclical — which is a letter issued by the bishop of Rome concerning the church, world and doctrine — can easily be misunderstood if one is not familiar with classical Latin. The two words literally mean “new things.” In classical Latin, however, “rerum novarum” means “revolution.”
The title was a bold move on the part of its author. In writing the encyclical more than a century ago, he may or may not have recognized how its contents were going to be pivotal for church teaching in the years and decades to come, becoming as it were the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching.
The fears and hopes of one era rarely flow unchanged into subsequent eras. It is fairly accurate to assume the fears and hopes of the end of the 19th century were different than those of the second quarter of the 21st century.
Revolution, derived from the Latin for “new things,” terrified 19th-century Europeans. More than a century before Pope Leo XIII issued “Rerum Novarum,” 13 American colonies revolted and overthrew the rule of King George III, establishing a republic. Four years later, French revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy and executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. The 19th century was a century of revolutions: The revolutions of 1848 shook the Italian peninsula, France, the German realm and the Austrian Empire; and the Risorgimento of Italy established a unified Italian Kingdom in 1861 and dissolved the Papal States in 1870, eight years before Leo XIII’s papacy.
Even though Leo XIII was hardly promoting the revolutions that shook the people who remained at the core of the Catholic world, he had the great insight to see the world was changing — and changing radically. The shift from a feudal society, which Leo so clearly saw, accelerated beyond all expectations. From Leo’s death in 1903 until the mid-20th century, 22 European monarchies collapsed. The remnants of a feudal system that had dominated Europe for more than a millennium were ending forever. The worker was no longer a serf whose sole purpose was to support the overlord, but a valued human person with rights. And Leo defended the rights of these people. It is impossible for Europeans and their North American descendants to realize how, yes, revolutionary this change was.
I mentioned “Rerum Novarum” is a pivotal document in its quite unique reading of the signs of the times by Leo XIII as the church entered the 20th century. If the encyclical had profound insights into the past, in an almost prophetic way, it prepared the church for events Leo XIII could never have foreseen.
Pope Leo XIII died in 1903. Eleven years later, in 1914, Europe and the world entered more than 30 years (1914-1945) of total war in which more than 100 million people were killed. Forty-two years after Leo’s death two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, ushering in an existential nuclear threat.
On a positive note, 54 years after “Rerum Novarum,” the United Nations was founded in 1945 in an effort to promote global peace and security.
There is no human way Pope Leo XIII could have foreseen the tectonic changes in the century after his pontificate, which made those of the century leading up to it look almost local. Yet, “Rerum Novarum” was nonetheless prophetic. Faced with a rapidly and radically changing world, Leo did not flee it; he attempted to engage and transform it according to Gospel norms. Faced with the collapse of a feudal society, in which the church had often played a strong and supportive role, he did not attempt to shore up the old ways. Rather, he recognized workers as people of value with rights. “Rerum Novarum” recognizes the importance of labor unions and the right of workers to organize — rights that many in the privileged classes saw as mortal threats to a God-given “order of things.”
While Leo could not have foreseen the nuclear age, he was clear that power did not exist in a vacuum but existed to promote the common good of all. His Gospel principles challenged coming generations to recognize that progress is not moral if it ignores and leaves behind the poor, the weak and the disenfranchised.
Leo XIII and “Rerum Novarum” do not and could never provide a one-size-fits-all solution to all problems, past and present. Leo XIII, however, did provide something perhaps even more helpful: a methodology in how to encounter a radically changing world; to see the world as it is and not how we think it should be; to find good wherever we can and promote it; to harness the transformative power of the Gospel of the poor and not the coercive power of those addicted to violence; never to lose sight of the overlooked; and perhaps most subversively of all — not to be afraid of “new things.”