Recovering the Origins of Catholic Social Teaching, Part One

Editor’s note: The following piece is the first part of a two-part essay. 

I

In 1846, John Henry Newman traveled to Rome to see if he could arrange to undertake seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood. He had converted a year earlier, and now, at 45 years old, he wished to be ordained a Catholic priest. He was, as we say nowadays, a “late vocation”—but one like no other. He had already published several books: Arians of the Fourth Century, Parochial and Plain Sermons in eight volumes, and his Oxford University Sermons, which he regarded as the “best, not the most perfect” of his books. Moreover, he had just completed a draft of what would become one of his own and, indeed, the Church’s most innovative pieces of theology, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Yes, this was no ordinary seminarian.

Newman brought to Rome a desire to study Thomas Aquinas. But after many inquiries, he found that Thomas was not being taught. Naturally, the new convert was asking serious questions about how he should prepare for the priesthood; he was asking, in particular, whether such preparation should include the study of Aristotle and Thomas. In a letter written from Rome to his friend John Dalgairns, a convert and recently ordained Catholic priest, Newman relates a conversation he had in Rome about this very thing.

He tells Fr. Dalgairns that their mutual friend James Hope, the wealthy railway attorney and future convert, had told him before he left England that “we should find very little theology here.” Then once Newman had arrived in the city, a Jesuit priest told him: “we shall find little philosophy.” In recounting his conversation with the Jesuit, Newman explained why theological and philosophical instruction had become so threadbare in the Eternal City.

It arose from our talking of the Greek studies of the Propaganda [now known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith] asking whether the youths learned Aristotle. ‘O no—he said—Aristotle is in no favor here—no, not in Rome:—nor St Tho[ma]s. I have read Aristotle and St Tho[ma]s, and owe a great deal to them, but they are out of favor here and throughout Italy. St Tho[ma]s is a great saint—people don’t dare to speak against him—they profess to reverence him, but put him aside.’ I asked what philosophy they did adopt. He said none. ‘Odds and ends—whatever seems to them best—like St Clement’s Stromata. They have no philosophy. Facts are the great things, and nothing else. Exegesis, but not doctrine.’ He went on to say that many privately were sorry for this, many Jesuits, he said; but no one dared oppose the fashion. When I said I thought that there was a latent power in Rome which would stop the evil, and that the Pope introduced Aristotle and St Thomas into the Church, and the Pope was bound to maintain them, he shrugged his shoulders and said the Pope could do nothing if people would not obey him, and that ‘the Romans were a giddy people, not like the English.’ (Letters and Diaries, 11:279)

They have no philosophy. For a philosophical soul like Newman, discovering such an omission must have been disconcerting. Yet he also recognized that the Pope had the power to set matters right, even though Newman’s Jesuit interlocutor clearly doubted whether any papal intervention would succeed, given the Romans’ un-English “giddy” character. What is striking about Newman’s experience in Rome in 1846 is how much light it sheds not only on Leo XIII’s first encyclical, Aeterni Patris, but on what would become his influential views on the Church’s social teaching in later encyclicals as well.

Why? First, it reveals the philosophical and theological health of the Church in Rome in the mid-19th century—which, to put it mildly, was not a happy diagnosis. In fact, during his visit to Rome, Newman gained very little from the seminary instruction he received, and he even began to cut classes. (Remember, saints are to be venerated, not necessarily imitated!) Second, a retrospective glance at Newman’s time in Rome shows that the dismaying intellectual climate he found in 1846 would change very little 32 years later when, in 1878, a nearly 68-year-old Gioacchino Pecci became pope and took the name “Leo XIII.” Yes, politically speaking, those intervening 32 years had seen significant changes. In particular, in 1870, the Church, under Pius IX had lost the Papal States. And, yes, this resulted in the loss of some political influence, but it was also a tremendous blessing for Pius’s successor.

Certainly, it was one that the new pope was shrewd enough to grasp. With the Papal States no longer in tow, Leo XIII was free to address the “social question” perplexing so much of Europe and America. It gave him the bandwidth he needed to teach on matters related to political issues, but not limited to them. In other words, he could address the social, not merely the political dimension of human life, and thus appeal directly to the consciences of all men and women, especially those of the Christian faithful. After all, while it is true that the faithful by nature exist as social and political animals, it is also true that, within that political arena, they require guidance for the salvation of their souls.

If one reads Aeterni Patris with these realities in mind, one can readily see how the pope prioritized the forming of consciences to take advantage of this new freedom. In fine, he wrote the encyclical to help the Catholic faithful to exercise the virtue necessary to turn their freedom within that political sphere to some salvific account—a very Thomistic tenet — by reacquainting them with the great works of the Angelic Doctor. Of course, in Aeterni Patris, Leo XIII called Thomas Aquinas off the bench and into the game to help reshape the intellectual life of the Church at a time, as Newman so clearly showed, when it desperately needed reshaping. And, yes, Leo included several bold recommendations for reinvigorating the intellectual formation of seminarians. Yet the intellectual formation of future priests was not his only priority: he also had his solicitous eye on reinvigorating the life of the faithful laity.

Here, to make these priorities clear, I will focus on three features of Aeterni Patris that can help us to recognize how it was Leo’s first encyclical, not Rerum Noverum, in which he initiated what would become his signature Catholic social teaching.

II

The first feature has to do with the intellectual context in which Aeterni Patris is written, which I depicted above in broad strokes by recounting Newman’s experience. When Leo was elected Pope, the Roman schools were clearly flailing both philosophically and theologically. And some of this was attributable to the schools reeling from a good deal of the new rationalist learning afoot, undermining her ancient teachings—ever ancient but ever new teachings. Indeed, the Roman schools could be seen to have lost sight of St. Paul’s useful warning to the Colossians: “See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” (2:8, RSVCE).

To be sure, believers always face such intellectual temptations, to be swept along or confused by the Zeitgeist. Yet Leo, like Newman, knew that the Church of his time was facing this temptation in a distinctive way in the wake of the rationalist philosophical and political thought that had arisen from both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

A second feature is the timing of Aeterni Patris within Leo’s pontificate. He published it on August 4, 1879, about a year-and-a-half into what ended up being a pontificate of over 25 years. It was his third encyclical, following on the heels of two that were diagnostic in character: Inscrutabili Dei consilio (on the evils of society) and Quod apostolici muneris (on socialism). By pointing a way forward after this initial diagnosis, Aeterni Patris serves as the positive principium, i.e., an affirmative beginning and governing source, of Leo’s magisterial answer to the social question.

Stemming from this second feature is a third, namely, that Aeterni Patris is, in fact, a social encyclical. Recognizing this is eye-opening. Leo urges the faithful to rediscover the teachings of Thomas Aquinas as a means of apprehending not only the situation of the Christian faithful in contemporary society, especially in a Europe scarred by the French Revolution and its spreading errors, but to see their way clear to steering clear of such errors. These baleful circumstances impel the Church to look to Thomas for guidance. In calling us to turn to Thomas, Leo’s chief concern, like that of a good pastor, lay in the moral, political, and social conditions that had arisen out of the upheavals, both intellectual and social, within which believers found themselves. “If anyone turns his mind to the bitterness of our times,” Leo writes,

and grasps in thought the basis of the things that are taking place both publicly and privately, he will certainly discover that the productive cause of these evils, both those that press upon us and those we have come to fear, consists in the fact that distorted teaching about realities both divine and human, having arisen for some time now from the schools of philosophers, has insinuated itself into all orders of civil society, having been received by the general approval of the many. (§2)

This social climate constitutes “the philosophy and empty deceit … [that are] not according to Christ” against which St. Paul had warned so long ago. Leo wishes the Church to take up Thomas so that through his teaching the Church can adopt a more profound, holistic, sapiential approach to the social question, an approach rooted in sound philosophy suffused with the light of faith (especially in the Scriptures) and driven by the love of Christ.

Leo thus exercises his papal power to rectify those philosophical and theological “odds and ends” that Newman had deplored in Rome three decades earlier. In their place, Leo upholds Thomas’s teaching, which embodies Leo’s own prevailing desire to see truth, and not the errors of rationalists, prevail in the lives of men and women. The encyclical, then, is not simply a plug for the perennial teachings of Aquinas; it is, rather, a thoroughly practical response to all the partial, distortive, disintegrating accounts of human nature and human society that bedevil modern thought and politics.

In order to understand Leo’s approach to the social question, then, it is crucial to recognize the context, timing, and character of Aeterni Patris. As I am suggesting, this crucial encyclical constitutes the magisterial fountainhead, as it were, of Catholic social teaching. It does so by presenting Thomas as having a robust and comprehensive enough philosophical and theological teaching—especially philosophical—to address adequately the problems to which modern thinking and modern politics give rise.

III

If Aeterni Patris constitutes the fountainhead of Leo’s magisterial social teaching, what is the first burst of water that comes forth from it and, in effect, creates the initial channel for what follows? On February 10, 1880, only six months after Leo published Aeterni Patris, he released Arcanum Divinae, which is de matrimonio Christiano, “on Christian matrimony.”

Is this not Leo’s way of telling us that the Church’s teaching on Christian matrimony constitutes the firstfruits of her social teaching? Or, to use a different analogy, does not Leo tell us, at least implicitly, that the Church’s teaching on matrimony and the family (i.e., the first society that grows directly out of matrimony) serves as the lens through which her approach to the social question is refracted?

After all, the Church’s “social wisdom” arises directly from her teaching on matrimony and the family, based on what has been entrusted to her in the Scriptures and Tradition, as expressed by the Magisterium, as well as what right reason can help us to see by its clarifying light. And it is precisely because of this lineage, this noble lineage, that the truth and mercy of the Church’s social teaching always points back to matrimony and the family, revealing (among other things) their central place in the social order, both pedagogically and in reality.

We can make this same point thus: In matrimony and the family we find the primary school of Catholic social teaching—that primordial and indispensable community in which the Christian faithful learn by both experience and instruction the underlying principles of that vital teaching: the personal dignity of the human being and the moral reality of the common good, as well as the call to put solidarity, subsidiarity, and participation into practice.

Each of the three necessary societies—family, nation, Church—should seek to embody and be governed by these principles, but it is in and through matrimony and the family that these principles shape the heart and inform the conscience in a truly authentic manner. In living out these principles, we become the actors we were always meant to be in God’s providential drama. We bear fruit in the world, both as living members of the Church, on the one hand, and effective citizens of a nation, on the other. It is through these human experiences, clarified philosophically and illumined by Revelation, that the rest of the Church’s social teaching unfolds.

Of course, when we think of Leo XIII’s magisterial approach to the social question, we often point to Rerum Novarum as central to it. Yet, we have to remember that Rerum Novarum was not published until May 15, 1891, more than eleven years after Arcanum Divinae. I say this not to diminish the importance of Rerum Novarum, a great and insightful encyclical in its own right. I say it only to suggest that Rerum Novarum is downstream from eastern Patris and Arcanum Divinae, dealing as it does with the condition of the worker in the civitas, the civil community, which is posterior both metaphysically and pedagogically to matrimony and the family, rightly understood philosophically and theologically.

We will unpack this further in Part Two of this essay.