Rerum Novarum

Rerum Novarum takes its name from its first two words, on new things, and the new things are industrial. Leo XIII writes in 1891 to a Europe of factory towns, long hours, child labour and the collapse of the guilds that had once regulated a trade. Two answers were in the field and he rejects both. Liberal economics held that a wage agreed between a free worker and a free employer was by definition just. Socialism held that the remedy was to abolish private ownership of the means of production.

Against socialism the encyclical defends private property as rooted in the nature of the person, arguing that a man who works the land or the machine has a claim on what he makes and on what he can put by. Against unregulated contract it makes the argument that gave the document its later force: a wage may be freely agreed and still be unjust, because the worker's consent is not free when the alternative is destitution, and because the remuneration ought to be enough to support a frugal and well behaved wage earner.

From those two positions the practical claims follow. Workers have a natural right to form associations of their own, which in the conditions of 1891 meant trade unions, and the state may not forbid them. The state has a positive duty to protect the weaker party, to limit hours, to safeguard women and children in industry, and to secure a day of rest. Charity is not a substitute for justice.

The encyclical was not the first Catholic writing on industrial conditions. Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler in Mainz, the Fribourg Union, and a scatter of French and Belgian social Catholics had been arguing these questions for decades, and much of their language reaches the text directly. What Leo XIII added was standing. A pope had now said it, at length, in a document addressed to the whole Church.

The immediate effect was institutional. Catholic trade unions, cooperatives and mutual societies multiplied across Germany, Belgium, Italy and later Latin America with a document they could point to. Christian democratic parties in the twentieth century traced their economic programme to it. In the United States it shaped the labour advocacy of John A. Ryan and, through him, several New Deal arguments.

The other effect was to create a genre. Pius XI marked the fortieth anniversary in 1931 with Quadragesimo Anno, which introduced the principle of subsidiarity. John XXIII marked the seventieth with Mater et Magistra, Paul VI wrote Populorum Progressio in 1967, and John Paul II marked the hundredth with Centesimus Annus in 1991, which reassessed the whole tradition after the fall of the Eastern bloc. Each is written as a commentary on the one before, and all of them are dated from 1891.

That chain is why the atlas files the encyclical as an instrument rather than only as a text. It did not merely say something; it established a form of saying it that the institution has used ever since.