The Accomplishment of Leo XIII: Rerum Novarum
The immediate purpose of Rerum novarum was public policy, specifically the question of just wages for laborers and their right to form associations. In no letter do we find Leo writing so ambidextrously with respect to policy and theory. We leave the policy issues to one side in order to see what the encyclical teaches about structured pluralism. As usual, Leo treated property and associations in light of divine providence giving rise to different kinds of human prudence.
Arguments for a natural right of possessing and using private property can be summarized under three anthropological points. First, the human person is an intelligent animal, and hence providential for himself or herself. What is most characteristic of human intelligence is not having but ordering. For this reason, property cannot be possessed in a way that befits human beings if it is merely for “temporary and momentary” use. Second, the ordering wisdom requires the agent to possess something “as his very own,” for one cannot dispose and give what one does not have. Moreover, the fruit of the agent’s labor bears “the impress of his own personality.” Third, because the family is a “true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself,” the father must have a native competence and right to acquire property and to order it according to the needs of the household. Thus, Leo concludes:
Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed . . . the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, [and] the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature.
Property befits human beings chiefly because of the dignity of intelligent labor and the capacity to make ordering judgments. The “sacred law of nature,” in this regard, is not mere preservation, but provident action that freely fulfills duties and social offices. “This great labor question,” Leo wrote, “cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership is a ius sanctum. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” Although Leo certainly emphasized more than Thomas the right of possession, the overarching argument is possession as a condition of being able to intelligently order and dispose resources for the good of others.
The other main issue of Rerum novarum is the right of voluntary associations. The following passage deserves to be quoted in full because it is so important for the development of papal social doctrine:
These lesser societies and the larger society differ in many respects, because their immediate purpose and aim are different. Civil society exists for the common good, and hence is concerned with the interests of all in general, albeit with individual interests also in their due place and degree. It is therefore called a public society, because by its agency, as St. Thomas of Aquinas says, “Men establish relations in common with one another in the setting up of a commonwealth.” But societies which are formed in the bosom of the commonwealth are styled private, and rightly so, since their immediate purpose is the private advantage of the associates. “Now, a private society,” says St. Thomas again, “is one which is formed for the purpose of carrying out private objects; as when two or three enter into partnership with the view of trading in common.” Private societies, then, although they exist within the body politic, and are severally part of the commonwealth, cannot nevertheless be absolutely, and as such, prohibited by public authority. For, to enter into a “society” of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them; and, if it forbid its citizens to form associations, it contradicts the very principle of its own existence, for both they and it exist in virtue of the like principle, namely, the natural tendency of man to dwell in society.
By “societies of this kind,” Leo referred to a wide range of associations, such as labor associations, confraternities, schools, and religious orders that, “by sanction of the law of nature,” have legal personality and thus “rights as corporate bodies.” They are called “private” in the sense that their nature, purposes, and rights are not constituted by the state. The legal world of private law (lex privata) developed from contracts, associations, charters, endowments—and, in the case of religious orders, of course, constitutions under the public law of the Church. What puts private societies into a distinct category from marriage is the fact that their forms are amenable to human prudence. Whereas through birth one can enter a family, a political community, and a church, membership in voluntary associations depends upon choice.
Interestingly, Thomas’s tract on the life of voluntary poverty, which comes down to us under the title Contra impugnantes, shaped Leo’s discussion of the right of association. The tract helps us to understand how Leo adapted medieval notions to contemporary situations. Thomas Aquinas argued that every society is a friendship involving “communications.” The word communicatio means making something common, one rational agent participating in the life of another. The multiplicity of vocations and avocations are grounded “primarily in Divine Providence, and, secondarily, in natural causes whereby certain men are disposed to the performance of certain functions in preference to others.”
At issue was laity and religious partaking in a common work of teaching and learning. Thomas contended that “an association of study is a society, established with the object of teaching and of learning; and as not only laymen, but also religious, may lawfully teach and learn, there can be no doubt that, both these classes are able to unite in one society.” Competence to perform the common activity rather than one’s status should be the measure of voluntary societies. To insist that “religious and laymen ought not, mutually, to communicate their gift of knowledge” is contrary to the scriptures, specifically to 1 Corinthians 12:21: “The eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help.” The contemplative is not less graced in preaching what he or she receives from God; nor is the teacher less learned when he or she communicates knowledge to the student; nor is anyone less “free” by virtue of imparting a gift to another. Thomas here quoted Augustine’s De doctrina christiana: “Everything that is not lessened by being imparted, is not, if it be possessed without being communicated, possessed as it ought to be possessed.”
But what about authority? Is it not depleted if multiplied? Thomas answered that the free “communications” of a private society are lawful because they proceed from friendship. No human authority can ban friendship, so long as it is for a blameless purpose. Private voluntary societies exhibit authority, but the kind of authority that ensues upon meeting standards inherent to the activities. Such societies are therefore not in competition with civil and ecclesiastical legislators.
Leo’s use of this literature calls our attention to two points of capital importance. First, he did not depict civil society in its negative function of counterbalancing the state. That idea comes from Montesquieu, who held that liberty is found only in moderate governments, where “power must check power by the arrangement of things.” We notice that Leo did not use the term “intermediate” societies, which suggests not a plurality of inherently valuable social forms but a merely instrumental good, a “buffer” between the individual and the state. Second, his analysis emphasized that these are “real societies” that embody the principle of friendship. The question is not whether they are cost-effective, or whether indeed private action is more efficient than the state. No natural right could depend upon such a contingency.
The strong claim for these societies is that they bring about mutual perfection by free activity, with the emphasis upon the activity more than the product. Leo insisted that “the State should watch over these societies of citizens banded together in accordance with their rights, but it should not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their organization, for things move and live by the spirit inspiring them, and may be killed by the rough grasp of a hand from without.” This assertion is the germinal form of the principle of subsidiarity developed by Pius XI.
The situation of the Catholic Church is a more complicated subject. The post-1870 Church, we said, had rejected the ecclesiological and canonical grounds for civil rulers exercising the role of episcopus externus. Unbendingly opposed to every trace of regalismo, Leo was intent upon drawing a sharp line between the Church and the governments. Considered solely in terms of ecclesiology, this goal was the easiest part of the puzzle, for there was no significant dispute within Catholicism that the Church is directly instituted by Christ with a visible hierarchy and a public law. The First Vatican Council had decisively eliminated the historic option of de facto or de jure national churches. Ongoing persecutions and legal harassment usually clarified rather than obscured the situation. Nor was the bilateral relation of church and state especially difficult to formulate in the abstract. Leo refurbished the ancient two power (duo sunt) doctrine of Pope Gelasius: “So there are twin powers,” Leo wrote, “both subordinate to the eternal law of nature, and each working for its own ends in matters concerning its own order and domain.” Divine providence decrees (1) that these twinned powers operate each in its own order (in suo ordine), and (2) that concord (concordia) ought to mark their relationship.
The more difficult issue was the triadic relation of church, state, and society. One way to eliminate the tension would be to think of the Church as a private, voluntary society. Under the rubric of “separation,” some states attempted to fashion a solution along this line. In the first act of separation in Latin America, Colombia (1853) confiscated church property and transferred it to laity in the parishes. This action was but a prelude to the infamous French laws (1902–5), which transferred church property to cultural associations administered by the laity. Leo wrote repeatedly against such policies and argued not only that they violate Catholic ecclesiology and discipline, but also that these policies implicitly assert that what exists outside the state ceases to be a true society. John Courtney Murray would call this social form the monistic “society-state”—that is, what is truly social is, or belongs to, the state, all else having the status of individuals temporarily in concert for merely private purposes. Leo saw clearly enough that this solution doomed the Church and the principle of voluntary societies.
As the separationist movement gained steam in France, Leo warned that separation is “indifferent to the interests of Christian society, that is to say, of the Church,” and has as its aim putting French Catholics “outside of the common law itself [le droit commun].” Similarly, with respect to the purported “neutral” marriage laws in Italy, he wrote:
What judgment is to be formed of a Catholic state which throws overboard the sacred principles and the wise enactments of the Christian law on matrimony, and sets about the wretched job of creating a marital morality all its own, purely human in character, under forms and guarantees that are merely legal; and then with all its power goes on forcibly to impose this morality on the consciences of its subjects, substituting it for the religious and sacramental morality.
In these passages, Leo was not recommending a state establishment of religion; he rather complained that the state, by refusing to recognize the habits, customs, and conscience of the people, imposes its own morality upon society. In effect, the Church is separated from society.
Leo returned time and again to the liberty of the Church, particularly with respect to its sanctifying and teaching missions. In Quod Apostolici, he appealed to the governments: “Let them restore that Church to the condition and liberty in which she may exert her healing force for the benefit of all society.” The Church’s role is to communicate the wisdom of Christ, and, through sacramental action, to impart a supernatural “form” to society. Society needs more than a morality drawn from the natural law, not only because of the deformation of sin, but also because it is a part of human dignity to be open to a supernatural life, without which “it is impossible to please God (Heb 11:6).” The civil power receives from God no power to sanctify; power to govern souls “excludes altogether the civil authority.” The Church “alone in divine matters” exercises a doctrinal magisterium.
There are thus two powers, the proximate end of one being “the temporal and worldly good of the human race,” the other religious, “whose office it is to lead mankind to that true, heavenly, and everlasting happiness for which we are created.” Yet this distinction is not an entirely tidy boundary. With respect to society, the Church is superior to the state not only in the “mixed matters” like marriage and education, but also more generally in the Church’s having a superior title to imprint itself upon society. In Immortale Dei, Leo asserted, “Whatever therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church.”
For practical purposes, Leo was happy enough to abide an accommodation where church and state enjoy a kind of equal access to society. On more than one occasion, he warmly noted that the Church thrives in the United States, where the two powers do not “trespass on the rights of the other,” and where each can be about its business without “barren quarrels.” “The Church,” he added, “claims liberty before all else.” It is a mistake, however, to think that Leo regarded negative liberty as a perfectly satisfactory situation. He wrote to the American bishops that the Church ought to have the “favor of the laws.” In Immortale, he insisted that the civil power should “not in any way hinder” but also “in every manner to render as easy as may be the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek.”
Did Leo believe in the “establishment” of religion? He certainly did not abjure a union of church and the civil commonwealth “as between soul and body.” But, with respect to what we mean by establishment, the answer is (a complicated) no. First, he spent his ecclesiastical career trying to protect the Church from the strange “establishments” that survived the revolutions. If he sometimes yearned for the status quo ante, it was for the twelfth and not the eighteenth century, and even then he accented the social form rather than the political details. Second, Leo was an anti-separationist. In his world, anti- separationism did not mean a state church. It meant a rather rich and proactive concordia in which each power recognizes the other’s theological title to rule. Leo did not think that civil authorities ought to be epistemically blind about their place in the order of providence. The state’s incompetence to teach doctrine does not entail its incompetence to be taught and to learn; moreover, the concord should include adiumenta, assistance, especially on mixed matters such as marriage and education.
Leo’s position on the “form” of government departed markedly from that of his predecessors. While “God has always willed that there should be a ruling authority [principatus], and they who are invested with it should reflect the divine power and providence in some measure,” it is not “necessarily bound up with any particular form of government.” Here he suggested two conditions that must inform prudential creation or alteration of political forms. The first is that God has always decreed that human beings come under a visible ruling authority. He dismissed a hypothetical state of nature, the scenario allowing human beings either to invent or to render absent political authority. Second, the word principatus signifies a real, active ruling power having authority to bind and loose in a political community. It is not, therefore, merely a power giving executive force to collective decisions. When Leo spoke critically of a “novel conception of law [ius],” he referred not to new constitutions but to the idea that there can be law that facilitates liberty but has no authority to bind. The conception, he believes, is “simply a road leading straight to tyranny.” The first institutional limit on government is that it be a real government.
The political common good and the principle of the principatus are mutually entailed. A mere steering mechanism suggests no political community. It is true, of course, that the civil authority is limited by the presence of other social forms—the Church, family, voluntary associations—each having a different mode of authority. While these entities indicate social goods to be coordinated, they cannot of themselves establish the civil principatus. For this reason, we will not find in Leo’s thought the notion of an instrumental state, an idea that in fact will emerge (with important qualifications) in Catholic social thought during World War II.
When Leo wrote about the civitas “rightly apprehended,” his thoughts were never far from the situation in France. This was a nation that suffered a dozen changes of power in Leo’s lifetime, that squabbled constantly over the “forms” of government, and that had a pronounced sense of the sacrality of political power. In a letter addressed to all French Catholics, he wrote that while the Church must cross the “changeable ocean of human affairs,” it has no legitimate prudence over its “essential constitution,” received directly from Christ; but, “in regard to purely human societies, it is an oft-repeated historical fact that time, that great transformer of all things here below, operates great changes in their political institutions.” Regarding the temporal regime, it falls legitimately to the human intelligence to make prudential judgments of a constitutional nature—the distribution of authority according to the pattern of one, few, many, or indeed a mixed regime.
Leo often made the point that it is not “of itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of government,” that there are “plural forms” of legitimate regime, and that it is not the prudence of the Church “to decide which is the best amongst many diverse forms of government and the civil institutions.” Indeed, he even allowed that human prudence extends to the judgment of whether to change a regime midstream, if necessary, to remedy a great evil. All of these assertions are qualified by the proviso that “the respect due to religion and the observance of good morals be upheld.”
Did Leo abandon interest in the classical question of what form of government makes the best regime? In one sense, yes. His practical imperative was to extract the Church from the “regime politics” tearing nations apart in the Catholic world. To the French, he wrote:
By giving one’s self up to abstractions, one could at length conclude which is the best of these forms, considered in themselves; and in all truth it may be affirmed that each of them is good, provided it lead straight to its end—that is to say, to the common good for which social authority is constituted; and finally, it may be added that, from a relative point of view, such and such a form of government may be preferable because of being better adapted to the character and customs of such or such a nation. In this order of speculative ideas, Catholics, like all other citizens, are free to prefer one form of government to another precisely because no one of these social forms is, in itself, opposed to the principles of sound reason nor to the maxims of Christian doctrine.
Above all, however, he was interested in the best society, where he thought the mission of the Church is best directed. Important as the issue of political “forms” might be for jurisprudence, Leo thought it was a distraction from the problems of his era. In these senses, his teaching represents not only a post-Christendom but also a postclassical moment for the Catholic mind. His position was well accepted in the United States, where Catholics had a connatural understanding of how to align political prudence under general providence or “higher law.” In France, however, Leo’s policy of ralliement, rallying Catholics to the Third Republic, fell flat. As he lay on his deathbed, the regime politics of the Dreyfus Affair (1898–1900), which originally targeted a Jewish officer accused of spying for Germany, spilled over into anticlerical laws.
One aspect of the question of political “forms” cannot be passed over in silence because it is so important to Leo’s teaching as well as to the subsequent development of Catholic political theory. This is the question of the relation of the “form” and the “power.” Leo recognized that the people can establish a form of government, if this be understood as “designating the ruler,” but not if it be understood as conferring the very “authority of ruling.”
Human beings are free to designate the form (designatur principes), which is to say the distribution of offices and holders of office. Human beings are not free to confer the authority (non conferuntur iura principatus) by which a multitude is bound by laws and legitimate commands. The immediate background of this distinction is modern contract theories of the origin of political authority. Leo held that no human being has a natural right to bind another, for this power is divine, and can only be participated. Catholic conservatives, such as Joseph de Maistre, hold that “human will counts for nothing in the establishing of government.” The remote background, however, concerns the arguments of Baroque-era Thomists such as Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez, Tommaso Cajetan, and others.
They argued that when the people communicate a new form of government, they do more than merely designate a ruler. To be sure, all authority comes from God, and therefore no human can create the principatus; yet Thomists of this time contended that by natural law God vests political authority in the entire people. Any additional specification of the proto-populist form entails what was called a “translation” from the people to the king or the parliament. Mere designation of the office does not settle how political authority is translated whole and complete to the new form. If it is not so translated, whoever holds the office does not possess true authority. Thus emerged a scholastic dispute between “designation” and “translation” theories, both claiming pedigree in the texts of Thomas Aquinas.
The translation theory achieved its full elaboration during the struggle against the absolute monarchs, while the designation theory came into vogue during the nineteenth-century struggles against the extreme democrats. Leo and his advisors appeared to side with the designation theory, among other reasons to head off the idea that the Church’s own constitution requires a translation from the people. But it is hard to say absolutely, because Leo never addressed the dispute ex professo. In fact, it has never been settled by the papal magisterium. The reader may wonder what difference it makes whether a God-given principatus is designated or translated by the people. The translation account is a much more powerful ground for the norm of democracy; if the eternal law vests political authority in the people, the specific democratic form of a regime corresponds to the prototype, and, furthermore, it would seem that a principle of consent is crucial for it to be otherwise.
Within a generation of Leo’s death, Thomists recovered the translation theory and deployed it against totalitarian regimes. We may doubt that Leo subscribed to the translation theory, just as we may doubt that this axiomatic principle of neo-Thomism is very clearly rooted in Thomas’s own work. Yet Leo certainly triggered the issue by opening up three lines of thought. Against the conservatives, he allowed human prudence to invent regimes. Against the Enlightenment, he denied a merely anthropocentric ground for the principatus. And finally, he denied that any human being has a natural right to bind another. We should not be surprised that the tension would be resolved in favor of a divine blessing on popular sovereignty.
Leo’s immediate successor, Pius X (1903–14), directed his energies to internal matters of the Church. While he took some important practical steps in the relationship between church and state during the French separationist crisis (1905) and undertook a reform of canon law that took into account the post-1870 changes in the Church’s law, Pius was content to leave the Leonine teachings untouched. So untouched, indeed, that he did not once refer to Leo’s favorite theme of eternal law. The pope most responsible for developing the Leonine tradition was Pius XI (1922–39), who cited Leo more than one hundred times in his encyclicals.
Ordained a priest in the first full year of Leo’s pontificate, and eventually taking three doctorates, Ambrogio Achille Ratti studied under Leo’s Thomist colleagues. Like Leo, Ratti looked to Thomas for the twofold pedagogy of “the natural and the supernatural order.” When Ratti was elected pope in 1922, he faced a world ruined by World War I; in a few years’ time, he faced virulent totalitarian regimes and the onset of the Great Depression. In the midst of these crises, Pius XI reworked the Leonine legacy and rendered to social doctrine a sophisticated and supple body of thought. He was the first pontiff to speak of social teachings as a single body of “social doctrine.” On his watch emerged the now familiar concepts of “social justice” and “subsidiarity.” Though Pius regarded himself as reaching the “true and exact mind of Leo,” most scholars would judge Quadragesimo anno (1931) a significant improvement over Leo’s Rerum novarum in that the later document made clearer the relationship between possession and use of property.
The Leonine understanding of the double pedagogy, the motif in Wisdom 8:1 of God’s law “sweetly” moving creatures, the native authority of the family, the intrinsic value of social forms, and the dignity of the human soul radiate through papal letters of the twentieth century. Pius XII’s inaugural letter, Summi pontificatus (1939), published at the beginning of World War II, was a compendium of Leonine arguments. Yet, in his famous Christmas address of 1944, Pius recommended democracy and thus went well beyond Leo’s philosophical rumination on the legitimacy of plural forms of regimes.
The documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) quote Leo more than forty times, and his letters were pivotal in the protracted debate over the Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis humanae (1965). John Courtney Murray’s crucial summary of the debate for the drafting committee in 1964 called Leo’s letters a ressourcement of the program of Gregory VII on the liberty of the Church. That argument, Murray contended, posed no impediment to affirming religious freedom as a civil liberty. John Paul II’s Centesimus annus (1991), celebrating the centenary of Rerum novarum, offered some new and very strong lines of reinterpretation in relation to the situation of peoples at the end of the Cold War. The encyclical Veritatis splendor (1993), on the other hand, presented a classic Leonine understanding of how human practical reason is situated in the order of divine providence.
Perhaps the most important development given to Leo’s thought concerns the order of special providence. In Annum sacrum, the Jubilee encyclical on Christological kingship, Leo taught the pilgrims that the divine sign would not be a new Constantine but the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In Ubi arcano (1922), Pius XI dedicated his pontificate to the Regnum Christi. In a series of encyclicals on Leo’s Annum sacrum—Quas Primas (1925), Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928), Rappresentanti in terra (1929), Caritate Christi (1932), and Divini Redemptoris (1937)—Pius began to explicate the analogies between Christ’s kingly office and munera of baptized Christians. Although scholars rightly pay attention to the theme of natural law in papal social thought, Catholic political theology has tilted quietly but persistently toward the Christological principle in which the notion of “participation” has much richer content. The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium (1964), gave special importance to participated kingship according to Christ’s threefold office of priest, prophet, and king. John Paul II contended that the reinvigorated Christological center is a truly “novel” element of the council, and when he promulgated the 1983 Code of Canon Law, he remarked: “In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, at the beginning of my pastoral ministry, my aim was to emphasize forcefully the priestly, prophetic and kingly dignity of the entire People of God.” This Christ-centered understanding of the principatus (ruling power) indicates how the Leonine project of scouting and marking the sacred perimeter continues apace, now with more emphasis on the laity. Leo’s chief legacy is to have prompted the papal magisterium to think, and to think at levels deeper than diplomacy and public policy.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law (The Catholic University of America Press, 2024). All rights reserved.