As it turns out, the critics of Pope Francis could have lifted their talking points from any gathering of Gilded Age robber barons 122 years ago. When Pope Leo XIII issued his influential Rerum Novarum in 1891, the defenders of unfettered and unburdened capitalism denounced the Holy Father using much of the same language.Rerum novarum is Latin — the pontifical letters are always written in Latin — the meaning of which is literally "of new things." It is the genitive of res novae, the colloquial classical meaning of which was "revolution." Here the meaning conveyed by res novae is not literally "new things" but "different things." surely that would not have been lost on classically educated readers, and all the "educated people" (read upper class) of Leo's day were classically educated, having learned classical Latin and Greek in high school.
So Rerum Novrum was more "revolutionary" then than Evangelii Gaudium today.
Perrspectives
Pope Francis' Rerun Novarum
John Perr
1 comment:
Interestingly, Georgists believe the Rerun was a subtle attack on the land reform movements then gaining ground. It's easy to denounce injustice in one breath and then undermine the basis of substantial reform in the next. Pope Leo was, as popes often are, a well-educated and politically subtle man. It would seem wise to temper one's enthusiasm when they venture into politics:
"GEORGE HAD MADE MUCH of everyone’s right of access to land. Rerum subtly twists this around: the “right to property” means that everyone has a right to buy some else’s property — with nothing said about “just price.” “Worker savings” were urged, to enable workers to buy land, and “thus to canonize the concept of private property” (Molony, p.96). Yet, at the same time, the authors of Rerum decided that a “just wage” was one just high enough for the subsistence of the worker alone; the so-called “family wage” was too generous (Molony, p.120). It was not explained how the workers might form good Catholic families."
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