Today in History: May 15, 2013

This day in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the first ever social encyclical of the Catholic Church, the Rerum Novarum (On the Conditions of Labor). This also brings me to my prior schema of this topic. Back when I was in my sophomore year in high school, my CLE (Christian Living Education) teacher told us that Pope Leo XIII released this encyclical because the philosophy of communism, conceptualized by Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels, was about to engulf many parts of Europe. Of course, through the Pope’s letter to his brethren, this economic theory was rejected and capitalism was accepted. Rerum Novarum inspired the future popes to write encyclicals on social justice. This became the benchmark and it was supplemented by the succeeding encyclicals written by our modern popes like Pope Paul VI and Blessed Pope John Paul II.