Pope Leo is sometimes called the founder of Catholic social teaching. He would have been appalled by the credit.

Revisiting Pope Leo XIII and 

Reclaiming Catholic Social Doctrine

by Gregory J. Sullivan

Anthony Esolen's new book is a lively defense and erudite explanation of "first principles and human realities"

Anthony Esolen, a professor of English at Providence College and—among a multitude of other scholarly and intellectual accomplishments—a translator of Dante, is one of the most appealing Catholic thinkers of our time. He writes on Catholic matters with remarkable lucidity and applies the transcendent truths of the Church to contemporary questions with the deftness of a master. In his work, Esolen shows again and again the thrill of orthodoxy that Chesterton famously celebrated.

With his newest book, Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church’s True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State (Sophia Institute Press, 2014), he turns to the vital area of Catholic social doctrine at a moment when it is both very salient and utterly misunderstood.

Characteristically emphasizing what he calls “[f]irst principles and human realities,“ Esolen relies almost exclusively in this act of reclamation on Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), whose estimable corpus of writings—including, most prominently, the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum—he has thoroughly absorbed and uses to explicate the Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and the state in our time.

Esolen’s concentration on the prolific and influential pontiff forms the essence of this book. In this study, he brings to Pope Leo XIII—a man who was a prolific genius of the sort the nineteenth century produced in abundance—a proper understanding of what makes his work so enduring. There is real insight in Esolen’s subtle depiction:

Pope Leo is sometimes called the founder of Catholic social teaching. He would have been appalled by the credit. He intended nothing other than to apply to current concerns what Jesus taught. His Apostles and what they handed down to their successors. He intended to teach nothing new. He is blessedly free of the mercurial ingenuity of a vain scholar and the meddlesome pride of an innovator. His thoughts derive not from the nature of the spanking-new modern State, nor from social advances sometimes more apparent than real, but from the changeless nature of man, discoverable by reason and frank observation, and by humble attention to the revealed word of God. Leo never supposed that one could devise any social teaching without understanding what a society is to begin with, which requires that we understand what human beings are, and why they are – for what end God made them, male and female, in His image and likeness. Leo surveys the world from a mountaintop. He possessed a manifestly keen mind, but it was not that mind that gave him the vantage. It was the Faith.

Esolen’s study of the Church’s social teaching does not, as would be the case with any number of lesser writers, result in a dry theological treatise.

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