Five-minute digest
Rerum Novarum
Summary
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes. It was the first papal encyclical devoted entirely to the questions raised by industrial capitalism, and it is usually treated as the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching. The library text is the anonymous English translation printed in The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (Benziger Brothers, 1903), with its footnote references removed. Leo begins by describing the crisis: the growth of industry, the changed relations between masters and workmen, enormous fortunes beside general poverty, and the abolition of the old guilds, which has left working men isolated and exposed to the hard-heartedness of employers and to unchecked competition. A small number of very rich men, he says, have laid on the laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery. He then rejects the socialist remedy of abolishing private property. A wage-earner works in order to own; his savings invested in land are his wages in another form, so community of goods would injure the very workers it claims to help. Property is a natural right, because man, unlike the animals, provides for the future by reason, and because a father must provide for his family. The family is a society prior to the State, and the State may help it in grave need but may not absorb it. Communism would bring envy, discord and a levelling down of all to misery. The remedy lies first with the Church. Inequality of capacity is natural, labor carries the penalty of the Fall, and the notion that class is naturally hostile to class is false: capital and labor need each other. Religion teaches workers to keep fair agreements and avoid violence, and employers to respect each worker's dignity, not to overburden him, and to pay a just wage. Wealth is to be held as a stewardship, and what remains after one's needs and station are met is owed to the poor in charity. The State must also act, for the good of the whole and with particular care for the poor. It should protect property and keep the peace in strikes, but also guard workers' souls and bodies: Sunday rest, hours suited to the strength of each kind of work (shorter in mines and quarries), protection of children and women, and a wage sufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved worker. Laws should help as many as possible to become owners. Finally Leo praises workingmen's associations, natural societies the State must not forbid, and urges Catholics to form unions guided by religion, ending with a call to charity, the queen of the virtues.
Top Lessons
Property serves the worker and the family
Leo argues that private ownership is not the possession of the rich alone but the natural goal of the worker's labor and the means by which a father provides for his children. He therefore wants laws that make as many people as possible owners rather than abolishing ownership.
Ownership and right use are different questions
The right to own does not settle how one should use what one owns. Following Aquinas, Leo teaches that goods are held for others too, and that what remains after one's needs and station have been met is owed to the poor by charity, a duty beyond what human law enforces.
A wage is more than a bargain
Leo grants that wages are agreed freely, but holds that a deeper law of natural justice requires a wage sufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved worker. A man who accepts less because he has no alternative is a victim of force, not a free party to a fair contract.
Concord between classes, not war
Leo rejects the idea that rich and poor are natural enemies. Like the members of one body, capital and labor need each other, and religion gives each a set of duties toward the other. The State, the Church and voluntary associations all have parts to play.
Verified Quotes
“a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”
“For every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.”
“Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body.”
“The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the workingmen are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.”
“Those who work in mines and quarries, and extract coal, stone, and metals from the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health.”
“remuneration ought to be sufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.”
“The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the humbler class to become owners.”
“charity, the mistress and the queen of virtues.”
Medical Lens
The encyclical is a document in the history of occupational health as much as of economics. In its section on the State's duties Leo argues that hours must be measured by the worker's health and strength, that miners and quarrymen should work shorter hours because their labor is more trying to health, that the season of the year matters, and that children should not enter workshops and factories until body and mind are sufficiently developed. He compares premature toil to rough weather that destroys the buds of spring. These positions belong to the 19th-century campaigns for factory and mine legislation (for example the British Factory Acts) and to Catholic social thought; Leo frames them as duties of justice owed to the body as well as the soul. The just-wage passage ties wages to the worker's subsistence and that of his family.
- The duties of the State, on hours of labor
Hours to be fitted to the worker's strength, the nature of the work and the season; shorter hours for those in mines and quarries.
- The duties of the State, on children and women
Children not to be put to factory work before their bodies and minds are developed; work to be suited to sex and age.
- The duties of the State, on wages
Wages must be enough for the worker's support; the duty of preserving life makes labor necessary as well as personal.