As European society was grappling with the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of socialist ideology in the late 1800s, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical that expressed empathy with the discontentment of laborers but outright condemnation of the socialist movements of the time.
The papal encyclical, called Rerum Novarum and published in May 1891, emphasizes a need for reforms to protect the dignity of the working class while maintaining a relationship with capital and the existence of private property.
The message was promulgated fewer than 50 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848 and after Pope Pius IX denounced both socialism and communism in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum.
As Americans celebrate Labor Day in 2024, Pope Leo’s teachings can still help inform readers on the proper relationship between labor and capital.
Leo writes of a “great mistake” embraced by the socialist-leaning labor movements, which is the notion that “class is naturally hostile to class” and “wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.”
This view, he asserts, is “so false … that the direct contrary is the truth.”
“It [is] ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic,” Leo teaches. “Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.”
The pontiff, who reigned from 1878 until his death in 1903, saw a need “in drawing the rich and the working class together” amid the strife brewing between these groups throughout the continent.
This can be done, he said, by “reminding each of its duties to the other” and “of the obligations of justice.”
For the laborer, this includes a duty “fully and faithfully to perform the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon” and to never destroy property, resort to violence, or riot to achieve a goal.
For the wealthy owner, this includes a duty to “respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character” and to never “misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain or to value them solely for their physical powers.”
“The employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family or to squander his earnings,” Leo says.
Leo contends that employers must pay workers the whole of their wages and workers must do all of the work to which they agreed. But, in the context of wages, he adds that this “is not complete” because workers must be able to support themselves and their families.
“Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner,” Leo writes. “… If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income.”
In certain cases, Leo encourages the intervention of government, such as when “employers laid burdens upon their workmen which were unjust,” when “conditions [were] repugnant to their dignity as human beings,” and when “health were endangered by excessive labor.” He adds that such interventions should not “proceed further than [what] is required for the remedy of the evil.”
Leo also expresses support for “societies for mutual help” and “workingmen’s unions” but also exerts caution against any associations that promote values contrary to Catholic teaching. He encourages the creation of associations that are rooted in Catholic teaching.
The pontiff says there is much agreement “that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” Yet, he accuses socialists of “working on the poor man’s envy of the rich” to “do away with private property” and turn “individual possessions” into “the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies.”
“Their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer,” Leo says. “They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the state, and create utter confusion in the community.”
Using this remedy to resolve poor conditions for the laborer, the pontiff contends, “is manifestly against justice” because “every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.” He further argues that government intrusion into the rights of property and the right to provide for one’s family is “a great and pernicious error.”
“That right to property … [must] belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group,” Leo says. “It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.”
Rerum Novarum set the foundations of Catholic social teaching about labor. Other popes have since built on the teachings laid out in the encyclical, including Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno on the 40th anniversary of Leo’s writing and Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens on the 90th anniversary.
