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
