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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 15, 1891
Vatican City
135 years ago
Pope Leo XIII — the architect of modern Catholic social teaching, who occupied the papacy from 1878 to 1903 and produced what became known as the foundational document of Catholic social doctrine.
On May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical letter titled Rerum Novarum — literally 'Of New Things' — addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world. Its subject was the condition of workers in industrialized societies and the rights and duties of capital and labor. It was the first major statement by the Catholic Church on the social and economic questions raised by the Industrial Revolution, which had been underway for over a century and had produced both extraordinary wealth and extraordinary misery.
The industrial economies of 1891 were operating with almost no labor regulation. Children worked in mines and factories. Adults worked fourteen-hour days for wages that could not sustain their families. Trade unions were frequently banned or persecuted. Workers injured in industrial accidents had no recourse. The socialist movement was growing rapidly in response, and the Communist Manifesto had been in circulation for forty-three years. Leo XIII was explicitly addressing both the injustice of unregulated capitalism and what he saw as the dangerous errors of socialism.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Child labor in coal mines — the conditions of industrial exploitation that Rerum Novarum directly addressed, at a time when workers across the developed world had few rights and no legal protections.
Rerum Novarum made several arguments that were radical for a major institution of the time. It affirmed the right of workers to form unions and to organize collectively. It argued that wages should be sufficient to support a worker and his family — what later became known as a 'living wage.' It stated that the state had an obligation to intervene in the economy to protect workers from exploitation. It condemned child labor. None of these positions were obvious in 1891; they were contested by powerful economic interests across the industrial world.
The encyclical was simultaneously a critique of socialism and a critique of laissez-faire capitalism — a position that made it uncomfortable for both the left and the right. Leo XIII argued that private property was a natural right, against socialist collectivism; but he also argued that property carried social obligations and that the rich had duties to the poor. This 'third way' between capitalism and socialism became the foundation of Christian democratic politics across Europe and Latin America in the twentieth century.
Rerum Novarum has been reaffirmed and developed by every pope since Leo XIII. The documents it inspired — including Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pacem in Terris (1963), Laborem Exercens (1981), and Laudato Si' (2015) — constitute a body of Catholic social teaching that has influenced labor law, economic policy, and democratic politics across much of the world. The principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good that it established are still cited in policy debates and political programs.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Rerum Novarum was the first major institutional statement that workers had rights that the state was obligated to protect. In 1891, this was not a universally accepted principle. Its assertion by the world's largest religious institution gave it a moral authority that contributed to the subsequent development of labor law across much of the world.
The encyclical created the intellectual foundation for Christian democratic politics, one of the most significant political movements of the twentieth century. Christian Democratic parties that drew explicitly on Catholic social teaching governed much of Western Europe from the 1940s through the 1990s. The political settlements they created — the European welfare state, German social market economy, Italian postwar reconstruction — were shaped by the principles Leo XIII articulated.
Its framework for thinking about the relationship between economic freedom and social obligation remains relevant in debates about globalization, inequality, and the gig economy. The question Rerum Novarum posed — what do workers owe to capital, and what does capital owe to workers? — has never gone away. It resurfaces every time the economy changes rapidly enough to outpace the protections workers have won.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 15, 1891, an eighty-year-old pope published a letter about factory workers. It affirmed the right to form unions, demanded living wages, condemned child labor, and called on the state to protect the poor from exploitation. It created a body of social teaching that shaped a century of politics. Most people have never heard of it.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"The condition of workers is the pressing question of the hour. Some remedy must be quickly found for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class."
— Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church's social teaching, Christian democratic politics, and how a nineteenth-century papal letter shaped the labor laws and political parties of the twentieth century?
