A New Pope Leo for a New Industrial Revolution

W hen I heard that Cardinal Robert Provost had been elected pope, I was among the many pleased to see that he had taken the name “Leo.” Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until 1903, was a great pope, not least because of his record 86 encyclicals which, even today, repay careful reading.

Leo XIII’s most important encyclical was Aeterni Patris (1879). Here he insisted that the Church must study more attentively the writings of Thomas Aquinas. This led to a revival in Thomistic theology and natural law philosophy throughout the Catholic world.

Aquinas’s wisdom, Leo XIII believed, was truly aeterni (eternal). But its revival also mattered to him because he believed that sound intellectual tools were essential if the Catholic Church was going to address its primary challenge at the end of the 19th century: its relationship with modernity.

Since the late-Enlightenment, that relationship had been contentious. Particular Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire considered Catholicism an affront to the human intellect. Some of that antipathy achieved violent expression during the French Revolution, when thousands of Catholic clergy were imprisoned, exiled, lynched, or guillotined, and the Church was stripped of its property by the French state.

Herein lies some of the reasons why successive popes were so wary of what came to be called “liberalism.” After all, if “liberalism” meant the expungement of religion from public life, the destruction of Catholic churches and schools, the nationalization of church property, and the slaughter of priests, monks, and nuns, what serious Catholic could possibly be on board with “liberalism”?

To be sure, there were 19th-century Catholic thinkers — the historian Lord Acton, the Dominican priest Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, and the politician Charles de Montalembert — who sought reconciliation between the Church and liberalism. But much depended on what “liberalism” meant.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that the fellow Catholics he encountered in the overwhelmingly Protestant United States of the 1830s were happy with the form of liberalism that existed in America, not least because it was a religion-friendly liberalism. The contrast with the deep antagonisms between Catholicism and liberalism in much of continental Europe impressed and worried Tocqueville deeply.

Such was the challenge that Leo XIII was determined to address. He had no intention of compromising Catholic doctrine. If anything, he was a doctrinal hardliner. But Leo XIII did believe that the Church should and could distinguish those aspects of modernity that it could affirm from those which it had no choice but to oppose.

This brings me to the most well-known of Leo XIII’s encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (1891). Its opening line refers to the “spirit of revolutionary change.” The change that Leo had in mind was less about politics than economics. The meaning and morality of the epochal economic transformations that had been reshaping the world since the late-18th century were heavily disputed by liberals, conservatives, socialists, and Marxists. Leo believed that it was vital for the Church to enter that fray.

Leo XIII was unusually well-equipped to address these topics. While we don’t know for certain if he read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the text suggests that he and Rerum Novarum’s initial drafter, the Thomist philosopher Cardinal Tommaso Maria Zigliara, knew the primary arguments of Smith’s book. We do know, however, that Leo had carefully read the writings of the French liberal economist Frederic Bastiat. Only 18 months before being elected pope, while still a cardinal, he wrote in a pastoral letter that “A celebrated French economist, Bastiat, has grouped and shown as in a picture the multiplied benefits man finds in society.”

In other words, Leo XIII was impressed by what good economics could teach us. Rerum Novarum reflected his appreciation of concepts like unintended consequences or how capital accumulation contributes to economic growth.

Perhaps Rerum Novarum’s most striking part was its fierce condemnation of socialism and an accompanying insistence that there were strict limits to state power in the economy. That translated into criticisms of “excessive taxation” as well as strong support for those free associations that are today called “civil society.”

This went hand in hand with Leo’s powerful affirmation of the rights of property. Before outlining Aquinas’s classic arguments for private property, Leo stated a clearly Lockean understanding of private property being derived from mixing one’s labor with the things of the earth — an argument never repeated in subsequent Catholic social teaching.

It’s not a coincidence that Rerum Novarum’s underscoring of property rights is accompanied by its stressing the limits of the state’s authority vis-à-vis the family. A widely read man, Leo was very aware that Karl Marx had identified private property, religion, and the family as things to be disposed of in the Communist heaven-on-earth.

As for capitalism, Rerum Novarum’s treatment is notable for its nuance. On the one hand, it decried the working conditions of the industrial classes and condemned instances of exploitation. Yet the encyclical betrays no sense of nostalgia for a rapidly vanishing rural world in which the vast majority of people lived short and unhealthy lives in backbreaking poverty. Rerum Novarum also specifies that there are occasions when the state can intervene in the economy but insists that “every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit.”

This is the context in which Rerum Novarum discusses the role of unions. In many European countries at the time, unions were proscribed by law. Leo, however, grounds the legitimacy of unions on the right of free association (which also implies that no one should be forced to join a union), as well as Aquinas’s insistence upon the importance of private groups in any social order and the need to protect them from arbitrary state power.

Leo also warned, however, that some unions were “managed on principles ill-according with Christianity and the public well-being; and that they do their utmost to get within their grasp the whole field of labor, and force working men either to join them or to starve.” This sounds like warnings against 1) allowing unions to be dominated by socialists, Marxists, or criminals, and 2) efforts to give unions a monopoly of the labor supply: cautions that, given the history of unions in many countries, deserve greater attention.

All these reflections in Rerum Novarum underscore how the encyclical initiated a new way for the Catholic Church to address social and economic issues. In his first address to the College of Cardinals, the new pope Leo XIV stated that one reason that he adopted the name “Leo” was his desire to engage “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence.”

Here’s hoping that the 21st-century Leo provides answers shaped by the unchanging truths that it is his responsibility to guard and proclaim, but also by a grasp of the insights afforded by the natural and social sciences. That surely ranks among the toughest of endeavors, but its importance is of the aeterni variety.