Leo XIII Beyond Rerum Novarum

Anuncio vobis Gaudium magnum. Habemus Papam! Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Robertum Franciscum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Prevost qui sibi nomen imposuit LEONEM XIV.

I will always remember where I was when I heard this pronouncement. Having written a dissertation on Leo XIII during my doctoral program, I exploded with joy and excitement to hear that our new Pope had selected the papal name of Leo. I was fairly sure this was to pay homage to the most recent Leo, who reigned as pontiff from 1878 to 1903. Within a day of his election, Leo XIV confirmed the rationale for his name selection: he was trying to draw a connection to Leo XIII.

Predictably, this led to a flurry of news interviews and podcasts where people began reflecting and trying to predict what this could mean. If the new Pope has selected Leo with an eye to the last pontiff of the nineteenth century, what particular lines of thought would he want to continue or develop?

In these very pages, there have been essays reflecting on perhaps Leo XIII’s best-known contribution to the Church with is 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum as well as thinking about Leo’s greater contribution to questions of political economy. What I want to do in this essay is try to give us a frame of reference for the broader picture of Leo XIII, a pope who served for nearly a quarter of a century, and whose ideas have impacted the Church in many areas beyond Catholic social doctrine.

A Modern Pope

While Leo XIII became pope somewhat by surprise, he soon began a papacy that had a very broad program. He was intensely interested in how to shape the Church’s response to the changes of the modern world, and he made a number of philosophical and theological contributions that would have a major impact on the future of the Church. But aside from his papal “platform” and the specific ideas that he built his teaching on, Leo established some precedents that now are part of the ordinary course of affairs for new popes, and he changed the public expectations of the office of the papacy.

The papacy of Pius IX had led to some estrangement between the Church and the world, and with the loss of the papal states and the general political turmoil surrounding the Vatican, Leo XIII was ushered into office under duress. He set out with a method that showed a willingness to dialogue with the world rather than merely relying on opprobrium. And his primary form of engaging the world is what we could now call using “modern technology” to evangelize: he began writing documents to guide the Church.

Since he was a prisoner of the Vatican, he could not make visits abroad to try and negotiate the good of the Church, to encourage pastors, and to build up the faithful. Instead, he turned the encyclical into his regular teaching vehicle. This is no understatement: Leo XIII gave us the modern concept of the encyclical. While popes had previously written bulls and certainly the idea of an encyclical itself was not new, Leo used this tool in a new way and with a frequency that has forever changed the office of the papacy. In the 150 years prior to Leo’s election, less than fifty encyclical letters were written.[1] But Leo wrote more than eighty during his pontificate, which is nearly more than all of the popes of the twentieth century combined.

During his pontificate, the world and the Church began to expect this form of teaching and communication from the Successor of Peter, and that tradition has continued. When a new Pope is elected, we wait for their first encyclical with bated breath because we know it is a sign of their interests and their concerns. We owe this set of expectations to the way Leo XIII shaped the papal office during his tenure.

Leo was also the first pope that we have video footage of and the oldest-born person to appear on video, having been born in 1810. Popes of course are now on camera nearly all the time, and it is not quite accurate to say this is a tradition that Leo consciously initiated, but he is the first Pope to appear on film.

In addition to breaking ground on video, Leo was the first pontiff to grant interviews to the press. According to Bernard O’Reilly, he granted several interviews, but his most famous example was with the French newspaper Figaro.[2] His interviewer was a French woman who described herself as a feminist and a socialist. The interview discussed pressing questions about anti-Semitism in France, along with the question of the limits of religious liberty.

To these we might add a few items highlighted by the historian Thomas Bokenkotter, which can help us to characterize Leo as a figure interested in advancing the Church in the modern world, rather than closing in and simply trying to stand athwart modernity: (1) the naming of John Henry Newman as a cardinal, (2) the opening of the Vatican secret archives to scholarly research, (3) his biblical encyclical, and (4) his publication of encyclicals calling for social reform.[3]

Contextualizing Leo’s Corpus

Aside from this general sense that Leo was an innovator in some unsuspected and often-unknown ways, there are other dimensions to his papacy that merit serious attention. It is my contention that Leo’s papacy can be best understood as trying to make a coherent response to the changes of the modern world. The changes for Leo’s time were many: new philosophical systems were dominating, sciences were emerging, new forms of government were beginning to take shape, and through it all there were doubts about previously held truths. If, for instance, the scientific method was as powerful as some of its proponents insisted, what then was the value of divine revelation? If archaeological study could illuminate aspects of the Bible, then how should Christians evaluate Patristic commentaries? If divine-right kingdoms were becoming constitutional republics or democracies, what does this do to the Church’s role in guiding the culture?

From Leo’s first encyclical letter, we can get a sense of his basic posture. He sees a world which is filled with many contradictory teachings, and many illusory promises. Modern man, especially the young, were being berated by new forms of philosophy which distorted their sense of truth and made the evangelization of the world more difficult. In this line, we can see a sort of microcosm of the way Leo would respond to the new challenges:

The more the enemies of religion exert themselves to offer the uninformed, especially the young, such instruction as darkens the mind and corrupts morals, the more actively should we endeavor that not only a suitable and solid method of education may flourish but above all that this education be wholly in harmony with the Catholic faith in its literature and system of training, and chiefly in philosophy, upon which the direction of other sciences in great measure depends. Philosophy seeks not the overthrow of divine revelation, but delights rather to prepare its way, and defend it against assailants, both by example and in written works, as the great Augustine and the Angelic Doctor, with all other teachers of Christian wisdom, have proved to Us (Inscrutabili Dei Consilio §13).

Here, Leo mentions two concepts that, I argue, constitute the broad outline of his papal teaching: the importance of training in philosophy, and the harmony between proper Christian philosophy and divine revelation. Note that he laments the way “enemies of religion” were using education to corrupt young minds. He sees the revitalization of philosophical training as a necessary antidote to this problem, particularly for the young. But he notes that this reliance on philosophy is not meant to minimize the importance of divine revelation. The two, rather, are mutually complementary. In the course of Leo’s long papacy, and across his many encyclical documents, these themes are drawn out and refined. This is especially clear in two major documents: Aeterni Patris (1879) and Providentissimus Deus (1893).

Aeterni Patris and the Role of Reason

In Leo’s seminary days, he was trained by a group of Italian Jesuits who were part of a resurgence of interest in Thomas Aquinas. There were Thomistic academies popping up around Europe during the late 1700s and early 1800s, but they were still a minority project.[4] When Leo became the Bishop of Perugia, one of his first goals was to build an academy dedicated to the study of Aquinas, which was eventually opened for his clergy. When he became pope, he did not wait long to deploy a similar plan for the Roman universities. Soon enough, he had initiated a revival of the study of Aquinas across the entire Church. This move to renew attention on the Angelic Doctor changed seminary formation swiftly, led to the Neo-Thomistic movement in the early twentieth century, and is still impacting the Church, as the Leonine edition of Aquinas’ works is still being compiled, after almost 150 years of work.

Leo’s 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris, called for an increased focus on Aquinas, but it did so in a very nuanced way. Leo recommends the study of Aquinas not as an answer to every problem, but as a way of recovering Aquinas’ method, and his balance between the function of human reason and divine revelation. Thus, before even mentioning Aquinas in Aeterni Patris, Leo discusses the nature and limits of human reason, its capacity to know certain truths, and the sense in which divine revelation acts as a safeguard for human reason. He shows how the Church deftly sifted through the philosophical systems in the patristic era, and how this same kind of method could be ably utilized in his day. It is with this kind of general view that he then turns to Aquinas and recommends him as a helpful resource. But note this particular phrase:

Clearly distinguishing, as is fitting, reason from faith, while happily associating the one with the other, he [Aquinas] both preserved the rights and had regard for the dignity of each, so much so, indeed that reason, borne on the wings of Thomas to its human height, can scarcely rise higher, while faith could scarcely expect more or stronger aids from reason than those which she has already obtained through Thomas” (Aeterni Patris §18).

This statement, about the relationship between faith and reason, is critical to the argument of Aeterni Patris. We can also see that Leo points to Aquinas as an example not just because he was a chief authority recognized at the Council of Trent, or because he was a saint, or because the founders of other religious orders also study Aquinas (all things which Leo argues in the letter). Rather, it seems to me that the primary reason Aquinas is held out as a model to follow is because he grasped the critical relationship between faith and reason.

One need not read far into the Summa Theologiae to see Aquinas’ basic view on the matter, and it is this fundamental instinct of Aquinas that Leo will go on to develop in the course of his papacy. Aquinas argued that divine revelation was necessary, even while human reason has a great capacity for knowing basic and foundational truths. Why? Because only a few people, with a great deal of effort, and with a lot of errors along the way, would fully realize the basic capacities of the human intellect.[5] Thus the Lord gives us divine revelation to clarify and make certain those basic truths that the human mind can know by reason alone, and also to elucidate some of the things we can know only by God freely revealing them such as the nature of the Trinity.

The primary contribution of Leo’s seminal document on the importance of philosophy in the modern world, then, is not really about Aquinas. It is about restoring the role of reason in the human endeavor and (critically) the way human reason, guided by true philosophical principles, affects the social order. Leo really believed that the functioning of society was impacted, for better or worse, depending on the kind of philosophy being taught widely, and the way divine revelation was treated.

Leo XIII on the Bible

In 1893, Leo wrote the first papal encyclical dealing with the Bible. He was responding to debates surrounding some aspects of Vatican I, but also and more importantly wanted to enter into a dialogue with the main lines of Biblical scholarship that had been developing in the Enlightenment era. One of the tensions he was seeking to address was the fact that (largely) Protestant scholars were making great advances, and expending serious efforts in their study of the Bible by utilizing newer methods of study. Catholic scholars needed guidance on how to respond to these new developments.

Rather than merely issuing a legal text or a letter concerned primarily with rules for scholars to follow, Leo’s Providentissimus Deus is a surprisingly comprehensive text which treats questions about divine inspiration, inerrancy, the canon of scripture, along with more pressing contemporary concerns. The core of Leo’s view is that the Bible, a divinely inspired and inerrant text, is not a book only for priests or even only for Christians.[6] The Bible and its teaching is necessary for a flourishing world. Just as philosophy is necessary, so too the Bible fills a critical need in our human nature. To be human means nourishing our intellect and also embracing what God has revealed, and this means we need more than sound philosophy: we also need a coherent way to interpret the Bible.

While Leo makes very strong arguments for divine inspiration and inerrancy, perhaps the most important aspect of Providentissimus Deus is that it opens the door for theologians to do research on the Bible using modern methods. Critically, Leo sees the importance and value of philology, archaeology, the study of other ancient texts, and the knowledge to be gained from learning ancient languages. He calls for the use of the most reliable ancient manuscripts and translation from those manuscripts for the foundation of new vernacular translations of the text, rather than simply relying on the Vulgate.[7] Leo balances his praise and openness for these new approaches to the Bible with caution that scholars utilizing these new approaches nevertheless avoid being drawn in by the philosophical assumptions that underly most of these fields.

The text of Providentissimus Deus is incredibly rich, as it offers a response to new ways to interpret and study the Bible, but it also calls for priests to be given special training in reading of the Bible, and lays out a program of study for clergy. He also pleads for some priests to be given extra training in Scripture so that they can train others. He lauds the ancient patristic commentaries and is clear that new methods do not simply replace the Church’s traditional way of reading the Bible. But just as he holds onto the value of these older models, he is clear that the Church has to engage in the new paradigm.

The Long Influence of Leo XIII

Many scholars, and many of those interviewed about the new pope’s namesake, are quick to note that Leo XIII established the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. His landmark encyclical of 1891, Rerum Novarum, is indeed the first in a series of papal documents addressing various pressing social concerns. Other popes wrote “sequel” encyclicals to carry on this tradition. But Leo XIII has a similar track in at least two other areas: his teaching on philosophy was carried forward by John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, and was echoed by Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address. There is an even stronger heritage with respect to Leo’s thoughts on the Bible. After 1893, he established the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902, and Leo’s teaching on biblical inerrancy and divine inspiration are carried forward in a lengthy series of papal documents, not to mention Leo’s foundational role in Dei Verbum. Indeed, if you study closely the Church’s documents on sacred scripture, you cannot help but see Leo’s guiding hand.

In my research, I argue for the twin aspect of Leo’s mind: seeing the importance of philosophy and the simultaneous need for divine revelation. These form a duality for Leo, that lay the groundwork for his other areas of concern. It is in this way that his social teaching comes into focus. In the wide array of his Church/state writings, and in Rerum Novarum, we see Leo trying to apply the reason/revelation prism to the practical affairs of the world. Where revelation is, in the final analysis superior to human reason, Leo would say the Church is in some way superior to the state. This is not to be understood as a conquest or competition. Just as we need reason along with revelation (and not just revelation alone), so too the human person needs the service of the Church and the state. Kept in their proper relationship, both reason/revelation and Church/state are necessary and lead to human flourishing. Leo’s emphasis on this question would impact discussions on religious liberty at Vatican II, and continue to show us a model for how the Church can engage in the modern world not merely through our theology, but through concrete social questions.

When our new pontiff announced his rationale for selecting the name of Leo, he indicated in his first public remarks that this was inspired by Rerum Novarum. Time will tell how much this influences his own pontificate, but if he looks to Leo XIII in a more broad and deep way, there is a vast array of other ideas and projects to continue developing. Let us pray for Leo XIV!

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: Beyond Novarum Rerum XIII