Weekly Reflection 072003AD

Sunday July 20, 2003AD

16^th Sunday in Greentime

Pope Leo XIII

One hundred years this weekend, July 20, 1903, Pope Leo XIII died. This Pope is remembered for his inauguration of modern Catholic social teaching in response to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. He issued his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, (About Revolutionary Events) on May 15, 1891. Some refer to Catholic social teaching as our best-kept secret.

A cursory perusal of the encyclical, only 14 pages of text on the Vatican Website, reveals nothing that we would consider radical these days. In fact, it is something that most Catholics take for granted.

Pope Leo mentioned that since Jesus was a carpenter (“artisan” might be a more accurate translation), He spent about 90% of His life as a worker. How could our Church not be concerned with the plight of workers?

Pope Leo appealed to the compassion and basic humanity of entrepreneurs to deal justly with their employees, whose horror stories in factories and mines were well known.

First, he stressed that, indeed, it is a basic human right to hold property and to secure wealth for one’s family. However, he wrote that this basic human right had always to take into account the needs of one’s neighbors.

Second, he spoke of the natural right of workers to unite to address grievances since the human person is basically, by nature, social-political.

However, in addition, there were other little known contributions that Leo made to social thought. He spoke of the fact that the family, the basic society, is antecedent to the the state. When families (note the lack of stress on the individual monad) unite to form commonwealths, it is the obligation of the commonwealth to maintain the welfare of the family.

He stressed that it was the basic right of the church to express concern about the total (not just spiritual) welfare of the family. Indeed, the Church has been doing so since our Inception. The modern state is a later development than the Catholic Church. He invited the state to join the Church in common cause.

(A caveat to remember is that when Leo speaks of ‘socialists”, he is referring to those whom we would call “Marxists”. In later Catholic writings, an acceptance of a modified socialism that is characteristic of much of Europe now is taken for granted.)

In addition, when Pope John Paul II published Centissimus Annus, 1991, to mark the centennial of Rerum Novarum as well as the fall of Marxism in Eastern Europe, he cautioned his readers not to gloat about capitalism’s besting Marxism. Both ideologies, he wrote, saw workers as units of production, not as people. Don’t boast!

As Jesus fed the crowd in the wilderness, He taught them and pitied them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. In 30 AD, 1891, 1991 and 2003 AD, may Jesus continue to teach and to pity us!! 072003 AD jfq