230 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
in the modern sense. Has such a document then relevance to the
One Hundred Years of
Church Social Teaching,
New Problems, New Answers
John N. Schumacher, S.J.
 in no way inferior to the darkest moments of the first phase of
roclaimed by Pope John Paul II as the year of Church social
P teaching, 1991 has seen celebrations all over the world
commemorating the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s famous social
encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, as well as the publication of a
new papal encyclical, Centesimus Annus. It is pertinent, therefore, to
ask what the importance of Rerum Novarum is today, and how it is
related to the contemporary social teaching of the Church.
An Antiquated Document? At first sight, it may seem that it
has little to say to our world.Though Leo XIII indeed called for just
wages and decent working conditions, and emphasized the obligation
of the employer before God to treat his employees in accordance with
their human dignity, in many ways the encyclical seems out of date.
Leo’s model of society was a patriarchal, almost feudal one, where
everyone was assumed to have his own proper station in life; inequality
between social classes was taken for granted; and great emphasis was
placed on the inviolability of private property. So fearful was Leo of a
“socialist” revolution that in this encyclical on the condition of labor
no mention is made of workers’ right to strike against unjust wages
or conditions of work. Leo did indeed affirm the workers’ right to
organize to obtain their rights, but what he chiefly had in mind were
associations modeled on the medieval guilds, rather than labor unions
problems of social justice today, or is it simply a venerable monument
of early Church concern for the worker, deserving of celebration as
a timid beginning of Catholic social teaching, but no more?
Another View. Certain facts, however, should make one hesitate
so easily to dismiss Leo’s encyclical. First, Rerum Novarum did not
seem at all conservative to many of Leo’s contemporaries; indeed it
was denounced as “socialist” by some, and considered by not a few
not to be worth attention as being totally utopian, as Pius XI would
later complain.
Secondly, as John Paul II himself notes in Centesimus Annus, even
today, particularly in Third World nations where industrialization is
still in fairly early stages, there are “situations in which the rules of the
earliest period of capitalism still flourish in conditions of ‘ruthlessness’
industrialization” (32). Such situations are by no means lacking in
the Philippines.
Further, it should be noted that all recent popes have looked to
Rerum Novarum as the foundation of the Church’s social teaching, and
have seen themselves as further developing and updating that teaching
on the basis of the principles laid down by Leo XIII. Beginning with
Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno on the fortieth anniversary of
Rerum Novarum, subsequent popes have issued similar documents on
the social problem on the fiftieth, seventieth, eightieth, and ninetieth
anniversaries—a major radiomessage of Pius XII during the war in
1941, John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra in 1961, Paul VI’s Octogesima
Adveniens in 1971, and John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens in 1981, as
well as his encyclical Centesimus Annus for the hundredth anniversary
in May of this year. The fact is that the Church’s social teaching has
developed not only by offering new answers to new problems, but
by rethinking her older answers to achieve a deeper understanding
of how to safeguard in a changing world the key human values that
many of those first answers in Rerum Novarum embodied.
The Church Learns from the Worker. Indeed, in the process,
the Church is a learner as well as a teacher in her social doctrine,
as recent popes have emphasized. This was first made explicit in the
Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the
 Schumacher, S.J.,, One Hundred Years of Church Social Teaching … 231
Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (GS). Here the Council proclaimed
the duty of the Church to “scrutinize the signs of the times and to
interpret them in the light of the Gospel (4). Thus we discover in
the teachings of Paul VI and John Paul II continual reflection not
only on the new and old situations of injustice which call for new
responses, but also on such signs of the times” as the aspirations of men
and women everywhere for greater freedom, and for their right to
participate, not only in political affairs through democracy but also in
those matters connected with the work in which they are employed.
As intelligent human persons they desire—and as the recent popes say,
have a right to—a voice in their conditions of work and the formation
and execution of economic policy, as well as participation in the profits,
rather than to be treated merely as an instruments of production, or
as commodities forming part of the cost of production.
To these aspirations the Church has repeatedly responded that
such freedom and participation are demanded in today’s world as
the only valid contemporary expression of the dignity of the human
person. Though this may seem to be a far cry from the paternalistic
relationship of employer and worker that Leo XIII envisaged in Rerum
Novarum, it is in fact fully legitimate to see that this contemporary
teaching is founded precisely on that human dignity of the worker
that Leo wrote to vindicate in his own day. Though there is, and
must be, a development over time in the understanding of its fuller
implications, the fundamental truths and values on which Leo based
his social teaching continue to be operative in the teaching of the
contemporary Church.
Evolution of Church Teaching on Private Property. A
striking example of how the social teaching of the Church has radically
evolved over the past century in meeting the growing demands of
justice is her teaching on private ownership. The affirmation of the
right of private property as required by the natural law forms a major
theme of Leo XIII’s polemic against the socialists, with only the barest
indication that there are also limits to that right. Forty years later, Pius
XI reaffirmed private property to be a demand of any just economic
system; nonetheless, he complemented this by noting that private
property is not merely for the good of the individual but is a means
by which the goods of the earth given by God for the whole human
232 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
race may serve that social purpose. Leo no doubt would not have
denied this, but he had not made it very clear, given his preoccupation
with the socialists.
John XXIII in Mater et Magistra again affirmed private property
to be part of the natural law, but clearly subordinated this right to
the common good. Still further, in Pacem in Terris John made clear
that private property may be said to belong to the natural law only
because it is a suitable means to safeguard the dignity of the human
person, not because of any alleged sacredness in private property
itself. Vatican II further developed John’s teaching by insisting that
the primary normative principle regarding ownership is the universal
purpose of created goods, and therefore, private property, though still
of importance, is subordinate to that primary norm. Hence, if private
property is being unused or misused, it may be expropriated by the
state, though suitable compensation should be paid. Paul VI further
reaffirmed both these principles, though he made no mention of
compensation, most probably leaving it to depend on the degree to
which the original owner had misused his property.
Private Ownership in John Paul II. In the face of the
widespread landlessness and even homelessness in many parts of the
world today, John Paul II has applied these principles even more strictly.
Already in Laborem Exercens he had affirmed that the right to private
property cannot be considered as “absolute and untouchable” but must
be understood “within the broader context of the right common to
all to use the goods of the whole of creation” (14). This was said in
particular about the ownership of the means of production. Later in
the same encyclical, treating of agricultural property, especially in
developing countries, the pope condemned as unjust the situation in
which “millions of people are forced to cultivate the land belonging
to others and are exploited by the big landowners, without any hope
of ever being able to gain possession of even a small piece of land of
their own” (21).
Here it is not just a question of land illegitimately acquired or left
unused, but it is the plight of the tenant farmer as such that calls for
land reform in which the right of private property must cede to the
greater needs of others. In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul sums all
this up, asserting:“Private property, in fact, is under a ‘social mortgage’
which means that it has an intrinsically social function based upon
 Schumacher, S.J.,, One Hundred Years of Church Social Teaching …
and justified precisely by the principle of the universal destination of
goods” (42). To put it in simpler terms, the Pope teaches that there
is no absolute right of ownership of land whereby some can own
more than they need for themselves and their family while others
have none of their own to work on.
The Church Today and Private Ownership. A careful
look at the evolution which has taken place in a century of the
Church’s teaching shows that, today, as in the time of Leo XIII, the
Church defends the right of private property against every type of
collectivism in which the individual person is subjected to the state,
as in Communism. It also shows, however, the increasing emphasis,
never totally absent from the beginning, on the destination of the
goods of the earth for the good of all as a principle of even higher
importance, and one to which the principle of private property must
yield whenever one person’s private ownership is such as to prevent
others from having property of their own.
In the end, the reason for the Church’s support for the right of
private property as well as for her insistence on its limitation by the
destination of the goods of the earth for the benefit of all is not so
much an academic one, though the economic collapse of Communist
regimes all over Eastern Europe, as well as the economic backwardness
of those noncommunist countries where land reform has failed to be
effectively implemented (like the Philippines), has verified abundantly
even the economic wisdom of both her principles. Sound morality and
sound economics are not in opposition to each other. The principal
reason of the Church, however, has been a moral one—the role of
private ownership in safeguarding the dignity of the individual person.
On this, all the popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II have agreed,
though it is only gradually that all the implications of safeguarding
that human dignity have been more fully perceived.
The Core of Catholic Social Teaching. If one, then, is to
look for the core of Catholic social teaching, it is to be found in two
complementary principles, both in fact part of Rerum Novarum: the
inviolable dignity of each human person and the essentially social
nature of humankind. Though these are reaffirmed repeatedly in all
Church social teaching of the past hundred years, it was especially
in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, in
the latter’s further explicitation in the writings of Paul VI, and even
233 234 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
more in those of John Paul II, that the implications of these principles
have been developed. Leo XIII stood for the dignity of the worker
against any attempt to treat him as a mere commodity or factor of
production. Because of the worker’s human dignity Leo insisted,
among other things, that not even a contractual agreement could
bind him to accept what was not a living wage. Because of the social
nature of each human person, Leo insisted also that he must be free
to form associations to defend his rights.
John Paul II on the Human Person. With John Paul II,
the implications both of human dignity and of the social nature of
the human person are far richer. In his first encyclical, Redemptor
Hominis, the pope insisted that the human person “is the primary
and fundamental way that the Church must travel in fulfilling her
mission... the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads
invariably through the mystery of the incarnation and the redemption”
(14). Repeating this assertion in Centesimus Annus, he insists that “this,
and this alone, is the principle which inspires the Church’s social
doctrine” (53).
In accordance with this orientation, the major theme of his
encyclical on work, Laborem Exercens, is that “work is for the person,
not the person for work” (6). It is because work is done by a human
person that it has its real value, not just because of the economic
product. From the dignity of the human person likewise flows the
worker’s right of participation; as a free and intelligent being, the
worker has the right to a part in the decisions which affect his working
conditions and his wages, as well as the right to share in the profits
due to his work.
It is likewise with the dignity of the human person in mind that
in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis the Pope defines true development. He refers
back to Paul VI’s assertion in Populorum Progressio that development
must fulfill the human aspiration “to do more, know more and have
more in order to be more” (6). True development cannot be merely
economic and material, says John Paul, but must fulfill “the moral,
cultural, and spiritual requirements based on the dignity of the
person,” as well. To be “really worthy of the person” it must “respect
and promote human rights—personal and social, economic and
political, including the rights of nations and of peoples” (33). The
language and breadth of understanding of the modern popes go far
 Schumacher, S.J.,, One Hundred Years of Church Social Teaching … 235 236 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision

beyond the limited horizons of Leo XIII, but the same concern for Novarum fully justify “the assertion of continuity among the popes in
the transcendent dignity of the human person is at the root of it all. their teaching. But precisely because it is a living body of doctrine,
Solidarity. The other principle pervading all the encyclicals of dealing with constantly changing social and economic realities, the
John Paul II, though it had also received much attention from Paul Church is constantly prodded to reformulate that teaching, as, faithful
VI, is that of solidarity. Leo XIII had emphasized the social nature of to her Divine Master, she “scrutinizes the signs of the times and
the human person against the individualism of liberal capitalism, and interprets them in the light of the Gospel.”
the role of individual and state in procuring the common good of
all the members of society. This, too, has been a key principle in the
teaching of all subsequent popes. Indeed it is the fuller realization of
the implications of the common good flowing from that social nature
that has led the Church to explain the right of private property ever
more clearly within the context of the primarily social character
of ownership, as we have outlined above. This concern for others
and the common good is termed by John Paul II solidarity, “one
of the fundamental principles of the Christian view of social and
political organization,” and one whose substance he points out in his
predecessors. “This principle is frequently stated by Pope Leo XIII,
who uses the term friendship... Pope Pius XI refers to it with the
equally meaningful term social charity. Pope Paul VI, expanding the
concept to cover the many modern aspects of the social question,
speaks of a civilization of love” (10).
In Laborem Exercens, Pope John Paul had called for “solidarity
of the workers and with the workers” and for the solidarity of the
Church with the poor as the means for attaining justice (8). As the
interdependence of persons, not only within their community or
nation but on the worldwide scale, has become more and more
evident, John Paul II has taken up the theme of solidarity of peoples
from PaulVI and made it a key element in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, where
he defines it as a “firm and persevering determination to commit
oneself to the common good, that is to say, to the good of all and of
each individual, because we are really responsible for all” (38). Such
solidarity must exist not only among individuals of a nation, but
among nations as well. It is finally on this solidarity that the Pope bases
“the preferential option for the poor,” both individuals and nations.
These few examples, which could be multiplied many times over
were there space, show quite clearly that the social teaching of the
Church is neither something old nor something new, but rather it
is both. Its roots in the fundamental human values asserted in Rerum