Catholic Social Teaching: one cannot cure sin by sin

Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil

by Anthony Esolen

t is generally held that Catholic Social Teaching begins with Pope Leo XIII’s masterly encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891).  That, as I’ve tried to show, is a dreadful mistake.  Pope Leo considered it his duty to apply to current concerns the constant teaching of the Church and of the word of God.  Like Thomas Aquinas, the study of whose works he promoted vigorously, he would have considered “originality” a vice, not a virtue.

Perhaps we are misled by the title, Rerum Novarum.  In our anti-society of rapacious consumption of the “new” and “improved,” and the unease instilled in us by mass marketers and politicians who cry that if we do not act now we will be lost—“Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n!” cries the Prince of Politicians to his fellow devils in Milton’s hell—we are apt to credit Pope Leo with seeing the light of novelty.  No such thing.  The ancient Romans held the political innovator to be a plague.  Res novameans revolution, and the “spirit of revolutionary change,” rerum novarum spiritus, writes Leo, has been disturbing the nations of the world.

What are the elements of this upheaval?  Leo names five: 

1. “The vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; 
2. the changed relations between masters and workmen;
3. the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; 
4. the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; 
5. the prevailing moral degeneracy.”  

• The first is a neutral datum; it is the stage.  
• The next three are social conditions with deep moral implications.  
• The fifth is a moral sickness which would, unchecked, vitiate any attempt to solve the problems of the working classes by monetary or juridical means—we might say, by mechanical means.

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