As the director of the Diocese’s Office of Catholic Advocacy & Social Doctrine, I felt a special thrill when I learned that our new Holy Father had taken the papal name “Leo.” Consequently, I wondered if the former Cardinal Robert Prevost’s new name proceeded from an interest in one of the hallmarks of the papacy of his predecessor, Leo XIII: the inauguration of the Church’s Social Doctrine with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.
I didn’t have to wonder for very long.
In an address to the College of Cardinals on May 10, just two days after his election, Pope Leo observed, “I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”
Pope Leo has put his marker down: Catholic Social Doctrine would play a central role in his papacy.
I was thrilled again.
A big part of my office’s work is to help both Catholics and non-Catholics better understand Catholic Social Doctrine, also referred to as Catholic Social Teaching. Accordingly, I was very happy that the Holy Father has called special attention to this aspect of the Church’s teaching.
Briefly, the Church’s social doctrine responds to the social and economic problems that have accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century: the exploitation of workers; the confusion of happiness with individual autonomy, wealth, consumer goods; the devaluation of the family, especially children; the treatment of both humanity and the rest of creation as things to be used for whatever ends the civil law allows the reduction of public policy to questions of economic growth. Informed by the fullness of the Church’s moral, anthropological, and soteriological teaching, Catholic Social Doctrine offers an alternative to the materialism of capitalism and its opposite number socialism.
I should make clear that, contrary to what some of its more vocal proponents claim, in most instances Catholic Social Doctrine is not a detailed social or economic program and usually does not provide detailed solutions to the social problems capitalism has brought with it. This is not, however, to say that Catholic Social Doctrine is formless. Instead, it provides us with four principles to guide us as we think about social and economic policies and problems and formulate productive responses. These four principles, briefly, are: the dignity of every human person, the furtherance of the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity. All four of those principles require explanation, and the work of future columns will be both to provide that explanation and to apply these principles to the problems that confront us in our time.
Part of the work of this column will be to provide a deeper account of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching and to discuss Church teachings that proceed from those principles; for example, the imperative of employers to pay their workers a living wage and the promotion of integral human development instead of mere economic development. I also expect that from time to time I’ll address what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about pressing public policy issues.
It will also be the work of future columns to bring into further relief an uncomfortable truth: There are deep and ultimately irreconcilable contradictions between the capitalist system and Church teaching, contradictions that have only grown more pronounced since Pope Leo XIII wrote. Although much has certainly changed since the late 19th century, the problems and injustices spawned by capitalism and its logic of individualism have in most ways only grown worse since the end of the end of the 19th century. Consider:
The danger of war among the great powers remains with us, as they compete with each other for resources and status, but wars now carry with them the exponentially greater threat of spiraling out of control and into the unthinkable;
an attitude and ideology that encourages us to regard others as economic inputs, or means of satisfying our desires, or obstacles to realizing our dreams of unchecked autonomy;
the treatment of children, the poor, the sick and the elderly as nothing more than after-thoughts to be ignored and neglected or, through abortion and euthanasia, killed outright;
the devaluation and dissolution of the family as a site of love, instruction and flourishing;
the continuing march of machines, which now approach — or have they already crossed? — the frontiers of human invention and creativity, with every step depriving humanity of dignity-enhancing labor; and
the devastation that capitalism’s great idol, economic growth, continues to visit upon human well-being, our fellow creatures, and our common home.
This is the world we confront in our moment. Like the late 19th century, it is a world that threatens to reduce all of us to, at best, consumers and producers, and at worst mere inputs in the machine of ever-accumulating capital.
Every pope since Leo XIII has built upon his initial teachings and now, in taking the name “Leo,” our new Holy Father promises to make the Church’s confrontation with the dehumanizing logic of capitalism a centerpiece of his papacy. Even more, I hope that he will call on us as Catholics to do the hard work of developing more just, more loving and more fully human forms of social life.
As Catholics, we know that the materialism and individualism of our age is a lie, one that stands revealed as such by the Church’s witness to the truth of a loving God and call to help build His Kingdom.
If some of what I’ve said here makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone. It makes me uncomfortable. I love comfort and what I’ve often taken to be the natural inevitability of our existing order. I’ve grudgingly come to recognize, however, that the way we’re doing things today is not natural to humanity, and is actually destructive to our spiritual, emotional and physical well-being. With that, I’ll leave you with a question: Our society is more prosperous and comfortable across a broader range of the population than any society in human history. Do people today, however, seem happy with this paradise we’ve built at the end of history?
If you, like me, shook your head and answered, “no,” I hope I’ll see you here again. And, if you answered, “yes,” I hope to see you here again, too. There’s much to discuss, and I’d very much like to have that discussion with you.