When there’s a new pope, a lot can be learned from a name.
When Robert Prevost presented himself to the world as Pope Leo XIV on May 8, I and many others immediately thought of Pope Leo XIII, head of the Roman Catholic Church from 1878-1903. Leo XIII was one of the longest-serving popes in the church’s history, a voracious reader, and the author of what is considered the foundational encyclical of modern Catholic social teaching: Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891.
Even more than the present, the 1880s and 90s were decades of great upheavals, especially among the workers of the world. Labor strikes, revolts, and mini-insurrections filled the headlines. In 1889, the Second International was founded. In 1892, the International Longshoremen’s Association was started. In 1892, privately hired Pinkerton Guards in Pennsylvania fired on striking steel workers employed by Andrew Carnegie, leading to 18 deaths.
The period in the United States was also one of high tariffs, ballooning government spending, loose regulations, and an entrenched oligarchy. In the 1890s too, immigrants flooded into the United States and were met with some of the same vitriol we see today. It was also a period in which the ideology of white supremacy made an explicit comeback, as it has in the United States recently.
Therefore, more than a few have made comparisons between the 1890s and the 2020s. Trump himself has held up William McKinley, who occupied the White House from 1897-1901, as a role model. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been compared to Andrew Carneigie and Cornielius Vanderbilt. And now, Leo XIV seems to making his own comparison.
So, this past weekend I took some time to sit down and re-read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, or “New Things.” It is perhaps not so surprising that I found in the old pope’s letter some ideas and themes that resonate with what I have begun to think about here at Civic Fields as “red republicanism” as an alternative to to stale liberalism, socialism, and authoritarian conservatism. Red republicanism imagines a civically oriented but economically just approach to policy, government, and education. Rerum Novarum imagined something similar.
Here I offer three thoughts on Rerum Novarum by way of reflection. It’s worth reading on your own.
First, some disclaimers are in order: I was born Catholic, but am no longer Catholic. I am not a theologian or a church historian. I cannot walk you through the history of papal encyclicals. There are things about Rerum Novarum that I am surely missing, particularly as they relate to Thomism.
Still, it is an encyclical that is written into my political and spiritual DNA. I had the privilege of being born into a Catholic family strongly shaped by the Catholic Worker movement. Indeed, my sister and I were baptized at a church in the city of St. Louis that shared this outlook and, lo and behold, at which Robert Prevost served but a few years after I was christened. My connections to the new pope run through Rerum Novarum and St. Henry’s.
As I re-read the text, its problem-solution structure was very apparent. Nevertheless, neither the problems or the solutions were as straightforward as they might at first seem.
For Leo XIII seems to have been quite rhetorically and politically savvy—in a good way. Those wanting to bring productive “new things” to our political life together could learn from him. I know both “politics” and “rhetoric” are bad words in our culture. But that fact is a very bad thing. Both politics and rhetoric are worthy and necessary arts in any democratic society. Pope Leo XIII seemed to understand this. His political and rhetorical skill shows through in the way he opens the letter in a quite reactionary manner, only to move his readers into a productive and just vision for social, economic, and political reforms.
So, to start with the opening: Though available to the public, Rerum Novarum was explicitly addressed to leaders of the church, many of whom were quite conservative, even reactionary. As such, Leo begins by channelling their alarm.
The opening paragraph describes the great upheavals and dangers in the world due to revolutionary ideas infiltrating the working class.
new developments in industry, new techniques striking out on new paths, changed relations of employer and employee, abounding wealth among a very small number and destitution among the masses, increased self-reliance on the part of workers as well as a closer bond of union with one another, and, in addition to all this, a decline in morals have caused conflict to break forth.
Leo goes on to describe the “painful apprehension” these conflicts are causing. He seems to decry labor uprisings and revolutionary rumblings as part of the great unravelling of society.
He then states that, given these dangers, he has the responsibility as pope “to refute false teaching.”
What, though, is the “false teaching” about which Leo is so worried? Here he calls out a villain. Its name is Socialism.
[T]he Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods and in its place to make the goods of individuals common to all, and that the men who preside over a municipality or who direct the entire State should act as administrators of these goods. They hold that, by such a transfer of private goods from private individuals to the community, they can cure the present evil through dividing wealth and benefits equally among the citizens.
Indeed, the first few pages of the encyclical consist of a thoroughgoing takedown of “Socialists.” They want, he argues, to destroy piety, patriarchy, and property to turn everything over to the State.
I have to say there is something off about Leo’s picture of Socialism. There seems to be a lot of lumping going on, some confusion about the facts, a general dismissal of differences among and incongruities between Socialists, and some straight-up misrepresentations. I don’t doubt that part of what the pope was worried about was the “conversion,” so to speak, of ordinary working-class Catholics to Socialism, but the caricature of Socialism seems to be designed more to appeal to reactionaries than to convince folks at factories and mines entertaining new socialist ideas.
Biographically, Leo XIII came to the papacy by diplomacy. There is, it seems to me, a Machiavellian slyness to him. (Machiavelli too is name that’s been too frequently wrongly impugned.) Leo disarms the reactionary church leadership by agreeing with them. He baptizes, so to speak, their abhorrence of “Socialism” by making a concerted defense of private property, arguing against State ownership. Indeed, at the beginning of the encyclical he sounds downright Lockean in his defense of private property.
But he does not stay that way.
Instead he turns the tables against the Capitalists and argues (1) people are not property, (2) employers have the duty to pay their employees even more than a living wage, and (3) the state should interfere in the practices of businesses when and where employee rights are violated.
Rerum Novarum, therefore, is a reform text, and by its end, there really is no “us vs. them” logic left, but rather a range of villains and, more importantly, a set of constructive ideas for ways forward out of the volatile morass.
The two big constructive ideas Leo offers are “subsidiarity” and “distributive justice.”
Subsidiarity is now a fairly well-known principle in Catholic social teaching. It says, in essence, social problems should be solved by the smallest social unit feasible. Thus, if a problem can be solved by an individual, it should be kept there. If it requires a larger unit like a family, then that’s the place for it to be addressed. And so on, up through the neighborhood, the town, the metropolis, the state, the national government, and international organizations.
Recently, prominent American conservatives under certain kinds of Catholic influence have leaned hard into subsidiarity. But they have done so in error, disingenuously, or to intentionally mislead. Paul Ryan invoked subsidiarity to justify big tax cuts. J.D. Vance recently alluded to subsidiarity to argue that Christianity teaches prioritizing love of one’s own kind over loving strangers, immigrants, or foreigners. (Though Vance, to add to the confusion, himself seems to think he was referring to the ordo amoris, which is a different principle entirely—it is remarkable how confused a man he is. Beware of power.)
Subsidiarity in Rerum Novarum looks nothing like the policies of Paul Ryan or J.D. Vance. Rather, it resembles those of Robert Putnam. Indeed, it looks a good deal like the kind of republicanism that Putnam finds at the heart of healthy communities.
Leo XIII argues for the active formation of organizations, be they trade unions, benevolence societies, activist groups, or political parties. Rerum Novarum has a cooperative, activist energy to it.
Moreover, subsidiarity is a principle of discernment for Leo rather than some sort of categorical law. He has no qualms about the state interfering in the affairs of smaller social units—say, a business—when it comes to matters of justice and rights, especially when the poor and vulnerable are at risk. “When there is a question of protecting the rights of individuals, the poor and helpless have a claim to special consideration.” (Later, at Vatican II, this teaching would grow into the “preferential option for the poor.”)
Subsidiarity in Rerum Novarum is an argument for ground-up organizing, cooperation, and social activism on behalf of various levels of the “local” against monopolies, overweening states, or global networks of power.
This brings Leo to an argument for “distributive justice.”
His is a vision of a pluralistic society, both in the sense of various classes or categories of people and in the sense of different roles and responsibilities among people. His language, at times, can seem quite organic, as if a laissez-faire approach will cause everything to fall into place in its most optimal and efficient manner. But Leo does not endorse laissez-faire. He argues explicitly for distributive justice, where “each and every class” is actively given their just due. This assumes an active role for the State, but not a unitary one.
Not long after, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton would develop Leo XIII’s argument for distributive justice into a more formal economic theory that centered, in the words of one writer, on the key principle “that ownership of the means of production should be as widespread as possible rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few owners (Capitalism) or the hands of state bureaucrats (Socialism).” Even later yet, Leo’s distributive justice would morph into the concept of “social justice” in the papal encyclicals themselves. We owe, it seems, the entrance of “social justice” into our everyday political discourse to the tradition of Catholic social teaching that Leo XIII inaugurated.
What does this all say about our new Leo, Leo XIV? We will see. But I suspect it says a good deal. With a name, he put himself in a tradition of Catholic social teaching that prioritizes workers over the powerful, pluralism over ethno-nationalism, and the distribution of economic and political power over its concentration.
Field Notes:
One of the benefits of doing Civic Fields is all the recommendations I now get for books, podcasts, and such. I take each recommendation seriously, doing my best in the limited time I have, to take them up. So, for example, I am slowly working my way through Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom. Someone else (I can’t remember who!) suggested I look at Brené Brown’s work, so I just purchased her Braving the Wilderness. And then a friend recently suggested I listen to some Sam Harris. I did. Several hours worth. Here’s my thoughts about Harris (based, admittedly, on a small sample). First, I appreciate any influential voice that speaks with moral clarity in our current moment. Harris has that. Given the media ecosystem he inhabits, which includes the likes of the conspiratorial Joe Rogan, Harris is doing a great service by demanding not only moral clarity but in insisting that public personalities should actually know what they are talking about. If you have a friend or family member who’s into the Joe Rogan “experience,” urge them to listen to Harris. They have similar vibes, but different starting points. This all said, what Harris lacks, from what I heard, is a sensitivity to moral ambiguity, even tragedy—particularly with Israel. He, like too many others, seems to think that in order to argue that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas, he has to vigorously defend Israel and its actions as coming from a clear and obvious “moral high ground” (a term he used). Hence, for all the ways I admire his moral clarity, he needs, it seems to me, to learn the public art of articulating moral complexity. Israel has clearly lost its moral compass and any moral high ground they once had.
Speaking of Timothy Snyder. As I said, I am reading his On Freedom with appreciation. This said, I was profoundly disappointed to see his and his Yale colleagues’s New York Times video op-ed this week, linked here (gift article). The tone-deafness of too many liberal intellectuals never ceases to amaze me, to the point where I think I should just cease to be amazed. This op-ed is a perfect example. It is smug, self-righteous, and worst of all, profoundly self-serving, no matter what its good intentions. If they are that worried about Fascism, why the hell don’t they stay and fight it?
One of my students from over a decade ago came across Civic Fields and sent me a very nice note this week. He was one of the better students I’ve had, did Teach for America for a stint, and went on to do public service in the federal government as a construction manager for the General Services Administration. Talk about somebody worthy of our civic regard, respect, and honor! Now, thanks to Musk & Trump LLC, he is among the ranks of federal workers looking for work. If anyone out there is looking for a great employee with top skills in communication and management, send me a note, and I will put you in touch.