Rerum Novarum (1891) begins with this sentence: “That the spirit of new things [revolutionary change], which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising.”
Since the French Revolution, Catholics had been rethinking the social order—chiefly with regard to the relationship between the Church and the new states, but also in what pertained to “practical economics.” When Pope Leo XIII was elected in 1878, “social Catholicism” was flourishing, despite a paucity of magisterial teaching on the subject. This was the era of Catholic circles and associations, led by such luminaries as François René de La Tour du Pin, Léon Harmel, Albert de Mun, Emmanuel von Ketteler, Frédéric Ozanam, and Adolph Kolping. The Fribourg Union, established in 1884, was the first international organization of Catholic social thinkers. Its representatives urged Leo in 1888 to teach from on high about the cluster of social issues related to economy.
He did so in Rerum Novarum. It is not surprising that the opening sentences of that encyclical should refer to the French Revolution. Rerum Novarum was written in 1889–1890, during the revolution’s centennial celebration. The main celebration was in Paris, of course, where some 32 million visitors found their way to the Exposition Universelle. Its organizing committee accepted architectural drafts for an enormous Centennial Tower. After rejecting several submissions, including a plan for a 300-meter tower in the form of a guillotine, the committee awarded the contract to Gustave Eiffel. Reckoned the tallest building in the world, the Eiffel Tower celebrated French science and economic prosperity. American celebrities like Thomas Edison and Buffalo Bill attended the Hall of Machinery and the Colonial Exhibition, which portrayed the fruits of science and money—especially the mastering of lands and peoples beyond the seas. More than half the funding for the exposition was supplied by a private investors’ guaranty association, which yielded a healthy profit. Welcome to modernity: the French Revolution brought to you by Goldman Sachs. The theme song of the exposition included the line “I have destroyed the old laws, I bring hope.”
Until the rise of the totalitarian movements in 1917, the French Revolution provided the social vision against which Catholic social thinking sought to define itself. Leo referred to the revolution as the “Great Conflagration,” like an event out of the Book of Genesis that had destroyed an original order of things. The revolution had indeed effected a major reorganization of society. Even in its decadent eighteenth-century estate, French Catholic society had been a culture of vows. In 1789 and the years following, that culture swiftly capsized.
In 1790, the revolution issued decrees prohibiting monastic vows, then solemn vows, and in their place required a clerical oath to the Civil Constitution of the Church. In 1791, marriage was made only a civil contract, and celibacy for the secular clergy was relaxed. In 1792, two further decrees finished the reorganization of society: The first provided for unilateral and no-fault divorce; the second abolished the monarchy. Thus came about the demise of the two great vows of the laity, that of husband to wife and king to the realm.
Revolutionary change soon spread to the colonies and former colonies. Pope Pius IX played the role of Cassandra, issuing the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which included the infamous condemnation of the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and recent civilization.”
Leo issued no Syllabus of Errors. Instead, he asked a question that was at once more philosophical and more practical: How do we civilize this situation? What is our proposal for social order? What can we work with in social matters, and how do we measure what’s been lost and what might be regained? He remarked: “Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is.” The paradigm of Catholic social teaching formulated by Leo resisted the temptation to utopianism, so seldom resisted elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Leonine paradigm for social analysis was simple and sturdy. It was a neo-Aristotelean effort to put the “spirits” of the age into perennial wineskins.