If one wants to be attacked, even by your own, just talk about something important and social, like religion or politics. The social encyclicals ventured into that shark-infested territory beginning with the encyclical Rerum Novaum (On the Conditions of Workers; 1891).
Pope Leo XIII knew that addressing the condition of workers would be a delicate subject. There were no simple answers to the complex modern problems workers were facing, but there were real concerns that need to be addressed. He sought a middle way between a revolutionary overhaul of whole society (fearing chaos) and a simplistic endorsement of unbridled exploitation of workers by not saying enough (and also leading to popular revolution…and chaos). Here is how it played out.
The Pope asserted that humans are social beings. We therefore work out life and salvation through our communion with one another.
The Pope posited that harmony is the key principal of social life, not dire competition or antagonism, like Marx conjectures. And if this is a truth, then the work of the Church is to promote social harmony. He does this by balancing rights with responsibilities:
(1) Persons have a right to private property, but this is not an absolute right;
(2) Owners have their property as a trust from God to whom all things belong;
(3) Profits are not intrinsically evil, but every person has the responsibility to share alms which is anything over and above what is needed for survival;
(4) Every family has the right and responsibility to be able to care for its physical needs and emotional well-being, including the time to worship;
(5) Every worker has the responsibility to give an honest day’s labor, but the right to receive just remuneration for their labor.
Two final proposals of the Pope include: (a) atheism and alienation—key tenets of Marxist Socialism—are just, plain wrong and (b) the value of social harmony prohibits worker/union strikes as a mechanism of forcing change (fear of social chaos).
In the end, the Pope hopes that owners, especially Catholic factory owners, will be just and generous to their workers. He depends on their personal charity to redress the condition of workers, not structural change. He exhorts workers not to be envious of owner’s wealth if it is obtained ‘legally.’ In the end, was this too little?
There surely were Catholics who were disappointed with the soft approach of the Pope’s direction. Charity and exhortation could not contend effectively with the well-financed elite who could ignore or make excuses for their advantage: “If it was not for us and our risk-taking for new products, this economy would collapse and the workers would have no jobs.” In the end, the Church is chided for being idealists who know nothing of the ‘real world.’ This is the mantra even of Church folks who are in business: the Church is not the place for preaching about economic matters; leave that to the laity. This is partially true, in as much as business folks know the complex dynamics of commerce, but the Church does have some things to say about justice, even about charity (e.g., alms), even if this is rejected or avoided.
Isn’t it amazing that the Progressivist movement of the United States instilled much-needed regulation of unbridled capitalism about the same time that the encyclical was promulgated. It corralled the Robber Barons (sort of) without revolution. The American (Protestant-oriented?) experiment probably mirrored the best expression of the ideals of Pope Leo’s encyclical without him (the Pope) ever knowing it. And, of course, the answer lay outside of the Church (religion).
