Rerum Novarum

Context

Michael Fox:

"The Industrial Revolution Produced the First Great Social Encyclical

When Leo XIII wrote in 1891, European and American society was being remade by industrial capitalism. Workers labored long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions. Capital concentrated in fewer hands. Whole populations moved from farms to slums. Socialism offered one answer -- abolish private property, let the state own the means of production. Unregulated capitalism offered another -- let the market sort everything out, unburdened by moral constraint.

Leo XIII rejected both. Workers possess a dignity that no employer and no state confers, because that dignity flows from their creation in the image of God. From dignity come rights: to a just wage, to rest, to form associations, to own property, to be treated as persons rather than instruments. The state has a duty to protect the weak against exploitation by the strong. The market is not a self-justifying moral order.

Rerum Novarum set the pattern for everything that followed. The Catholic Church would not bless either ideology of the age. It would judge both against a prior standard -- the human person, considered whole and entire."

(https://mikefoxcatechist.substack.com/p/optimizing-integral-human-development)

Excerpt

Condemning the abolition of worker's protective associations

In the following passage Pope Leo sketches the process by which State abolition of the guild system .., State authorization of usury .., and the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few .. all worked together for the oppression of the working man.

- "some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last [the eighteenth] century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."

(http://distributistreview.com/mag/2011/08/the-austrian-version-of-the-english-enclosures-iii/)