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by throw0101a10 hours ago |
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upvoteby dhosek8 hours ago|
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Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
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upvoteby bombcar1 hours ago|
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Peter II also indicates something.
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upvoteby bigstrat20037 hours ago|
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Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.
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upvoteby toyg6 hours ago|
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It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.

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upvoteby stbede5 hours ago|
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A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
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upvoteby throw0101a1 hours ago|
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> […] it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

The care for workers was a thing long before Marx. Rerum novarum (¶20) quotes scripture on the topic:

> To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. "Behold, the hire of the laborers... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."(6)

Jesus himself was a tradesman, often translated as "carpenter":

* https://uscatholic.org/articles/202205/was-jesus-a-carpenter...

Marx's caring for the downtrodden and weak is itself a Christian concept; in contrast, Nietzsche hated weakness and Christianity for its support of those that are (he was not a fan of the Sermon on the Mount).

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