They Lied to You About Rerum Novarum
They Lied to You About Rerum Novarum
The foundational document of modern Catholic Social Teaching calls private property sacred and condemns instigating class envy in the poor.
In his first address to the College of Cardinals, Leo XIV explained his choice of name was inspired by “Pope Leo XIII [who] in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”
I knew of Rerum Novarum as the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching, and I had accepted the common claim that it rejects both socialism and capitalism. But there was a certain dissatisfaction about this understanding, a sense that I must have been missing something. As the daughter of Cuban exiles, I could not fathom how the Church could reject these two systems to the same degree when one had lifted millions out of poverty while the other had slaughtered millions in the name of equality.
So, now that Leo XIV had given this encyclical a place of honor in his new pontificate, I stopped relying on …