The Spirit of Pope Leo XIII

" ... Pope Leo XIII's encyclicals are valuable reminders that the triumph of secularism, materialism, & relativism, is by no means inevitable."

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Leo L. Clarke

Both instructive and persuasive, Pope Leo XIII”s encyclicals are valuable reminders that the triumph of secularism, materialism, relativism, is by no means inevitable.

Pope Leo XIII was a vibrant and courageous intellectual with a dedication to strengthening the Church in its relationships with the outside world. As his predecessor, Pope Pius IX, had hoped, Leo’s pontificate was characterized by a new spirit. The encyclicals in this volume demonstrate that spirit. Here are four examples:

(1) His first Encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei consilio, issued very soon after his coronation, set out a vision and a detailed program. The new Pope did not counsel changing the Church’s doctrine, and he left no room for equivocation. The letter denounced the weakening of the Church’s authority, the abandonment of Christian rules, and “the excesses of unbridled and perverted liberty.” He described modern “civilization,” with its immorality and atheism, as “[B]ut a phantom of civilization; the word stands for no reality.” Indeed, his description of the ideal Christian society presages John Paul II’s “civilization of love” by a century: “[T]he very notion of civilization is a fiction of the brain if it rest not on the abiding principles of truth and the unchanging laws of virtue and justice, and if unfeigned love knit not together the wills of men, and gently control the interchange and the character of their mutual service.”

(2) Leo also devoted several letters to the nature of government and its role in society. Quod apostolici muneris condemned socialism, communism, and nihilism/anarchy in words reminiscent of Pius IX. Diuturnum illud recognized the legitimacy of democracy in certain conditions but set out the limits of a democratic government’s role in religion. Immortale Dei defined the relative roles of civil government and the Church and demonstrated that all civil power comes from God alone. Libertas set out the limits of human liberty in the context of our responsibility to God and established that the Church is, and can be, the sole custodian of liberty. A thread running through all these letters is the Catholic’s duty to obey legitimate government as a power authorized by God. But that obedience has its limits as explicated in Sapientiae Christianae: “If, in administering public affairs, it [the government] is wont to put God aside and show no solicitude for the upholding of moral law, it deflects woefully from its right course and from the injunctions of nature; nor should such a gathering together of an association of men be accounted as a commonwealth, but only as a deceitful imitation and make-believe of civil organization.” In short, the duty of the Catholic citizen to obey laws extends only to those laws which do not conflict with God’s law.

(3) Leo XIII was the first pope to address the disparity of wealth and the plight of the working class resulting from the Industrial Revolution. His most famous encyclical, Rerum novarum, boldly set out the Church’s teaching on the relationship between labor and capital and their respective rights and responsibilities, including the rights of capitalists and laborers to private property. The Pope stressed the necessity of a just wage that permits the laborer to afford not just housing and food for his family, but education for his children and a margin for savings so that he could eventually become a property owner in his own right. Leo denounced liberal economics including its equating human labor with raw materials, and he held such liberalism responsible for the unjust misery of workers and for class conflict. In short, Rerum novarum deprived socialism’s sole claim to key arguments it was using for its own ends. For this encyclical alone, he deservedly became known as the “workers’ Pope.”

(4) Nor did Leo shy away from the threats to Catholics and the Church of private societies like the Freemasons and of the growth of secular democratic societies, especially in countries that were no longer, or had never been, essentially Catholic. Humanum genus stands as the most severe condemnation ever against Freemasonry, describing its members as “the real abettors of evil in our age.” Softer in tone, but just as clear and firm, was his denunciation in Longinqua oceani of a nascent heresy sometimes called “Americanism,” which claims that the Church should soften its teachings and “go along to get along” in predominantly Protestant or other non-Catholic countries. Longinqua and its subsequent Letter Testem benevolentiae nostrae quashed any such notion and made it clear that both the clergy and the laity had the duty to protect the Deposit of Faith and that a slide to indifferentism was a real threat that must be overcome.

Pope Leo’s teaching in these and other encyclicals did not present any new truths. His social teaching drew solely on Scripture, the Church Fathers, and Thomistic theology and philosophy. His contribution and his innovation were his recognition that Revelation and the doctrines and philosophy derived from them were timeless and always applicable to the Church, to Catholics, and to society at large. Thus, in Testem benevolentiae nostrae, Leo quoted the Letter to the Hebrews: “Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow” (13:8). In short, Leo’s genius was to apply his experiences and his studies to identify the fallacies presented by the enemies of the Truth. Each of the encyclicals in this volume shows Leo’s desire to go beyond just criticizing error and instead to provide solutions for his Venerable Brothers and the laity to protect their religion from becoming subservient to politics and economics.

More than a century later, the need for such solutions is no less pressing, for the problems we face remain no less troubling and destructive in our own age than they did in Leo’s time. In fact, in the decades since the papacy of Leo XIII, the problems that confront the individual, society, and the Church have neither disappeared nor diminished; instead, they have endured, increased, and assumed new and aggravated proportions: rampant materialism, unabashed consumerism, economic stagnation that overwhelmingly affects the working classes’ ability to accumulate assets and achieve financial security; abuse of political power that ignores subsidiarity and scorns the interests of religion; widespread antipathy for the sanctity of human life, typified by abortion, contraception, and pornography; endemic drug abuse and addiction; racial animus and marginalization; and the protraction of “forever” wars and internecine conflicts.

Time has neither abated the existence of these evils nor the need for effective solutions to them. The world may be different, but evil remains evil; yet so too do goodness, truth, and justice, because God remains God and man, man—the image and likeness of his Creator.

With clarity and force, Pope Leo XIII gives profound expression to those truths. Both instructive and persuasive, his encyclicals are valuable reminders that the triumph of secularism, materialism, relativism, is by no means inevitable. Instead, in the words of that great American contemporary of Leo XIII, Abraham Lincoln, “It is for us the living, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” That living, as Leo saw it, is not to be done in a state of religious indifference or unwitting reliance on secular humanism. Rather, that living is to be done with a clear-eyed recognition of God’s omnipotence and His infinite love for His creatures, coupled with the courageous readiness to reveal God in the events and encounters of everyday life.

To the question, then, of whether the words of Pope Leo XIII offer anything in the way of practical usefulness, the answer ought to be resoundingly and unequivocally in the affirmative. In substance and style alike, Pope Leo XIII extends the means to combat economic, social, and political evil and indifference. All that is needed is faith in Christ, hope in the face of indifference and animosity, and charity for the sake of our neighbors.

This essay is the Introduction to The Great Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII.