Economic Soul/5 - The impact of “Rerum Novarum” and “Quadragesimo Anno” exceeded initial expectations. Leo XIII and Pius XI proposed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism as a form of restoration, giving rise to cooperatives, schools, rural credit unions, and mutual aid societies.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on February 8, 2026
The history of the impact of the first season of the Church's Social Doctrine is a long and important episode of heterogenesis of ends, that is, of effects very different from those intended by those who had wanted and guided it. Leo XIII and Pius XI, in fact, wrote about the ‘social question’ because they were concerned about the growth of the socialist movement and its promises to eliminate private property. They thus proposed to Catholics a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, understood as a return to and restoration of the medieval social order and its ‘guilds (Gremi) of arts and crafts’. Those were the intentions of the writers; what happened, however, was the explosion of a great movement of social change that contributed decisively to preparing modern Italy and Europe, reducing inequalities, and overcoming the old regime. Reality surpassed the idea. The years between Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) saw the birth of thousands of social, economic, and political initiatives by Catholics, who did not seek the promised land by looking back: they achieved it by looking ahead to the horizon. Instead, it was fascism that took up the invitation to reconstitute the ancient medieval guilds, an effect that was not intended by either the popes or the fascists.
In reality, there were profound differences between Catholic and fascist corporatism. For example, fascist corporatism arose from revolutionary syndicalism and Hegelian thought, and was radically statist and anti-subsidiary. But the similarities and concordances were also significant and equally real. The fascist guild was an ideological vision built on forced concord and imposed harmony between the interests of capitalists and those of workers. This harmony began in the workplace: “Finally, a new sense of human dignity was needed, one that would establish the moral and social premise of a legal system that places work at the center of the economy and, while recognizing individual interests, coordinates them in accordance with other, increasingly general interests” (F.M. Pacces, Introduzione agli studi di aziendaria, 1935). Corporatism therefore presented itself as a defense of work, wages, and workers—a theme very dear to the Church.
Giuseppe Bottai, one of its main architects, saw the corporation as “the institution through which the collaboration of different classes and categories is realized. Employers and workers and professionals, artists and craftsmen, and even public employees can march together in unity and harmony without lingering in the treacherous shadow of democratic tradition” (La Carta del lavoro, 1927). Years earlier, Giuseppe Toniolo had proposed “a corporate ideal, in which both elements currently in conflict, capitalist owners on the one hand and workers with no assets on the other, would be represented, and in which the interests of employers and workers would find harmonious agreement” (Indirizzi e concetti sociali, 1900). Throughout his life, Toniolo never tired of praising medieval guilds with a view to proposing their restoration: “Here we see the establishment of intermediate bodies between individuals and the universal, that is, between individuals and the state, whose development, defense, and growth were a singular merit of the Church... Intermediate forces that prevented the clash between the two extremes” (1893). The guilds, therefore, would have brought about the harmonious cooperation of all classes for the common good, the longed-for social order, clearly pyramidal and perfect - these were the years in which the Church once again defined itself as ‘societas perfecta’ (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei).
If we carefully study the call for a return to the medieval guild launched by Catholic social doctrine, we realize that it is an expression of something much deeper than just economics. It is part of the Catholic Church's complicated relationship with the modern world, and therefore of the restoration of medieval Christianity. The ‘reconstruction of the social order’ is also the subtitle of Quadragesimo Anno, but it had been advocated decades earlier by Toniolo: ‘The program of 'restoration’ of the social order remains designated as the therapy for the diagnosis' of modern disease. Therefore, “it is urgent today to restore the Christian social order that the Church had admirably developed and matured over the centuries through titanic struggles: a social origin that the Reformation has transfigured and broken down step by step to the point of today's atomism.” And so, as the best way forward, “it is advisable to reconnect with the traditions of the Middle Ages, which have been obscured, opposed, and severed since the day of the Reformation” (1893). The return to the Middle Ages was the means, the end was restoration. For Toniolo and his school (Fanfani), the root of the decline of the social order predates the Reformation: “Luther's heresy demonstrates its filiation from Humanism” because, quoting Erasmus, Luther opened “the egg that had already been laid long ago”: the egg of the centrality of man and his “free will,” where the origin of all the evils of modernity, which led to Liberalism and Socialism, would be found.
And here we should open a serious reflection on this bizarre Catholic reading of history and Humanism. In this regard, on June 8, 1944, Dietrich Boenheffer wrote to his friend Eberhard from the Berlin prison of Tegel, a few months before being shot by the Nazis: "I consider the attacks of Christian apologetics on the adult world: first, absurd; second, poor; third, unchristian. Absurd: because they seem to me to be an attempt to bring an individual who has now become a man back to puberty, that is, to bring him back to dependence on things from which he has in fact become independent, to drive him back to problems that, in fact, are no longer problems for him" (Resistance and Surrender, edited by I. Mancini). And on July 17, in another letter, he continued the dialogue: “God as a moral, political, and scientific working hypothesis has been eliminated and superseded; but also as a philosophical and religious working hypothesis... And where, at this point, is the space for God? ask timid spirits; and not knowing how to find an answer, they condemn en masse the evolution that has put them in this calamitous situation.” So they seek “possible emergency exits from this space that has become too cramped,” among them “a death-defying leap backward into the Middle Ages.” But "returning to it can only be a gesture of desperation, accomplished only at the price of intellectual honesty. It is a pipe dream: ‘oh, if only I knew where the road back was, the long road to the land of children’. This road does not exist - in any case, it does not pass through the arbitrary renunciation of inner honesty." These attempts are therefore absurd, poor, and above all unchristian, at least not consistent with the spirit of the Gospel (Christianity has never been only the Gospel).
The Catholic Church, in its institutions, failed, at least until Vatican II (and beyond), to read the process of adulthood in men and women that began at the end of the Middle Ages as a process intrinsic to the very logic of the Gospel, like a tree growing from the very seed of Revelation. It was very afraid of that child who had become a man, and for many centuries did everything it could to bring him back to the infantile stage, within that hierarchical order where everything was simpler, not least because at the top there were bishops, monks, and popes, almost always an essential and integral part of that hierarchical and unequal order. So, instead of looking at the growth of a child as the happiest event in all of existence, the post-medieval Church did not recognize in that adult face the same face of the beloved child. And so it perpetrated a sort of incest, trying to prevent that child from growing up, becoming autonomous and free. For at least half a millennium, it dreamed of a world that no longer existed. Dreams that, from time to time, became nightmares.
But—and here is the really good news—the Church is not only that which is marked and defined by documents, books, and magisterial directives. The Kingdom of Heaven is vaster, deeper, and higher than that of temples and palaces. And so, while Leo XIII and Pius XI wrote that inequality was unavoidable in society (“It is impossible to remove social inequalities from the world”: Rerum Novarum, §14), thousands of Catholics, lay people, religious, nuns, and parish priests gave life to cooperatives, rural credit unions, and mutual aid societies. The cooperative movement between the 19th and 20th centuries was a great tool for reducing inequalities, a true and serious ‘third way’, because it questioned property rights and profits. And when property rights change in a company, we are already beyond capitalism. What followed Rerum Novarum was truly a season of authentic economic prophecy, which, in the Catholic sphere, remains unsurpassed.
But there is more. Countless ‘works’ generated by the founders and foundresses of religious congregations invented the education of poor boys and girls and created the most beautiful ‘playground’ for poor children: the school. This was an extraordinary and wonderful achievement in Italy, Europe, and the missions, because the countries that today have the lowest levels of inequality are those that yesterday invested most in public and universal education (Thomas Piketty).
The economic and social miracle of the 20th century was also the result of poor children who, thanks to charisma, were able to study, also thanks to the impetus given by the first social encyclicals. Perhaps those popes wanted something else, but, without meaning to, they gave rise to something fantastic, for the Church, for the poor, for everyone. The heterogenesis of ends is also another name for Providence.
