The relationship between private good and common good, the nature of business and capitalism: in choosing the name Leo, the Church recognizes the need to engage with major economic issues
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/05/2025
Pope Francis' first programmatic document was the choice of his name. The first reference of the name chosen by Leo XIV is to his predecessor, the author, among other things, of Rerum Novarum, although we, friends of Francis, also like to think of “Fra Leone.” What does it mean to reconnect with a tradition or an encyclical? Fidelity to the tradition of Church doctrine, particularly social doctrine, is a good fidelity if it is fidelity to the questions, which directly implies a betrayal of the concrete historical answers. For a tradition that wanted to be faithful to yesterday's answers would immediately end up betraying the questions that those answers had generated.
Leo XIII (1810-1903) was a long-lived man and pope. His pontificate took place between 1878 and 1903, one of the longest in the history of the Church. It was the era of non-expedit and the First Vatican Council. It was also the years of the development of Darwinism, the emergence of the socialist and Marxist movements, and the affirmation of early capitalism in the Western economy. Industrialization was creating new imbalances and conflicts, with feudal inequalities being replaced by industrial ones. The nascent capitalism had created a new class, that of the proletarian workers, where the socialist movement took root with particular speed and success. It was the birth of the famous “social question” or labor question (Rerum Novarum, 1). These challenges were all linked by the great theme—which began with the Counter-Reformation—of the difficult relationship between the Catholic Church and modernity, which would culminate, not surprisingly, in the final battle against the modernist movement, initiated by Leo XIII and radicalized by Pius X.
To understand Leo XIII, it is necessary to be familiar with at least two of his many encyclicals: Aeterni Patris (1889) and Rerum Novarum (1891), the latter considered the founding text of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church in the modern age (NB: the Church has always had a social doctrine, beginning with that contained in the Gospel, continuing with the Fathers and then with Scholasticism in the Middle Ages). Aeterni Patris is nevertheless very important, because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to read Rerum Novarum without Aeterni Patris, which is a theological and pastoral manifesto “to revive and restore to its original splendor the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas” (AP). It was a decisive return to the doctor angelicus and therefore to Scholasticism and the Middle Ages, which so influenced the thought and action of the Catholic world, including economists such as Giuseppe Toniolo and personalities such as Agostino Gemelli, who wrote on the first page of the first issue of the magazine Vita e Pensiero: “We are medievalists. We feel deeply distant, indeed enemies, of so-called 'modern culture'” (1914).
Neo-Thomism and criticism of the modern world can also be found in Rerum Novarum. At a time of great fear of socialism on the part of the Church, Rerum Novarum was a condemnation of socialist solutions and a defense of the liberal tradition of private property, defined as a “natural right” (RN, 5), on which there would be “the seal of divine law” (RN, 8). The socialists were wrong because “by stirring up hatred among the poor against the rich, they demand that property be abolished” (RN, 3) - forgetting, among other things, that Thomas subordinated private property to the right of “universal destination of goods,” as would be affirmed by the Second Vatican Council and subsequent popes.
Rerum Novarum is not only this, there are also warnings and recommendations to owners to recognize fair wages, and it speaks a lot about the importance of work. We also find the claim of the right of association, of Catholics in the first place and of their “congresses,” the thesis of harmony between social classes that was to replace the Marxist class struggle; then a vision of the enterprise as a “body” where all members are united (RN 15), the doctrine of Catholic corporatism, which through the re-establishment of the medieval “guilds of arts and crafts” (RN 36) would represent a third way between socialism and liberal individualism. We also find a criticism of “entrepreneurs” (RN is one of the first places where the word “entrepreneur” appears) if they do not pay workers a fair wage (RN 17). Furthermore, Leo XIII stated that “it is impossible to remove social inequalities from the world” (14). The rich remain rich, the proletariat poor, but all in harmony, within the same enterprises-corporations, which would have fostered the “fraternity” mentioned in the encyclical. The rich and the proletariat must “agree among themselves,” a static harmony in which each accepts the social condition in which Providence has placed him.
History and the Church itself have long since overcome almost all the ideas and proposals of Rerum Novarum, including those just mentioned. What, then, is the point of reconnecting today with Leo XIII and his Rerum Novarum? I will tentatively offer my own interpretation.
The reference to that first modern socio-economic encyclical is very important. But it is important because of the questions it raised, not because of the answers it gave, which were deeply and inevitably conditioned and determined by the challenges and urgencies of its time, and as such were soon overtaken by new challenges and urgencies. The return to the Middle Ages and Thomism was a response to an important question of identity for the Catholic Church in the time of Leo XIII. That question of the identity of the Catholic Church in 2025 remains important (if well posed), but the right answer will come from betraying the old answers of the late 19th century, because Christians will not find a good identity unless they make peace with the modern world, which is the child, not the enemy, of Christianity.
At the same time, every pope, every generation of Christians, must decide which ancient questions to answer creatively, which questions of yesterday to forget, and which new questions to ask the Church and the world. Leo XIII identified the main enemy in the socialist danger and its erroneous responses to the new challenges of work.
The great message that we can see in Leo's name and in the reference to Rerum Novarum is therefore loud and clear: return to the questions of the Church's social doctrine, to those concerning work, fair wages, the relationship between private good and the common good, the nature of business, the nature of capitalism, the vocation of the entrepreneur, peace, and many others already known and yet to arise from the Church and from history. A new issue, inaugurated by Francis, is the environment, on which much of the quality of the social teaching that is about to begin will depend.
But the real issue at the heart of Rerum Novarum, and therefore of Leo XIV's decision to put it back at the center today, is the necessity for the Church to engage with the economic and social issues of its time. Here, I believe, lies the heart of the choice of this name and its symbolic code. The economy, justice, capital, work, peace, and business are not foreign to the thought and teaching of the Church; they are things that concern the heart of the proclamation of the good news of the Gospel in the world. There is no Church without social doctrine, there is no Gospel that does not also speak the language of economics. Because it has been so from the beginning. Jesus spoke about economics; the Gospels are full of coins, merchants, wages, workers, and taxes. There is no Gospel, there is no Church, that does not enter into economic matters. The economy is not a matter for experts: the economy concerns life, and therefore concerns the Church, all Christians. It concerns justice, wealth and poverty, peace, the quality of our relationships and our dreams, the present and future of young people, and therefore concerns, must concern the Church, its thinking, its action, its intelligence. And it concerns it in the concrete answers that those questions demand in today's history, which will change tomorrow. Today, the Res Novae are called work and artificial intelligence, the immense issues of ecological transition, ecological and financial debts and credits, and again and always the poverty of all, the poverty and hunger of children. This is the great message hidden in this beautiful name with an ancient flavor.
Finally, Rerum Novarum identified socialism as the great danger threatening the economic and social life of Christianity. For at least a century, socialism and communism were the Gog and Magog of Catholic social thought, the first great enemies always present on the horizon of social encyclicals. Today, looking at what the globalized world has become, we must recognize that while the Church fought the enemy identified by Rerum Novarum, capitalism grew almost unchallenged, and in our distraction it entered the walls of Christianitas thanks to the Trojan horse of its proclaimed “Christian spirit.” And when, at the end of the 20th century, the center of capitalism shifted from the factory to finance and from work to consumption, the spirit of business invaded the world and conquered souls. If today the Church struggles to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus and make it understood, a profound reason also lies in the desertification of souls produced by the nihilism of commodities. Twenty-first-century capitalism has become a true religion that is replacing Christianity, with its great dogmas of meritocracy and leadership. The Gospel's critique of “new things” in the economy and society today cannot but be an explicit and direct critique of the new capitalism that has become a religion. Good luck, Pope Leo!
