Catholic Social Teaching

Pope Leo’s Ideal Was Not State Control

Pope Leo XIII affirms that a well governed State will promote the material and moral prosperity of its citizens, will honor private property and free association, and will protect the poor from abuse or depredation by the rich. How to…

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Leo’s Guilds a Far Cry from Today’s Unions

by Anthony Esolen

We have seen that Pope Leo XIII defends the right of a workingman to receive wages sufficient to support his family, in a becoming manner, if he but practices the virtues of diligence and frugality in an ordinary way. We…

Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil

by Anthony Esolen

It is generally held that Catholic Social Teaching begins with Pope Leo XIII’s masterly encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891). That, as I’ve tried to show, is a dreadful mistake. Pope Leo considered it his duty to apply to current concerns the…

The State Exists to Serve, Not Usurp, the Family

by Anthony Esolen

We are approaching, in this series, Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum, on the condition of the working classes. I’ve been maintaining that it is impossible to discuss Catholic Social Teaching without specifying what Catholics understand as a society. …

Leo XIII: “Without Faith, Liberty Degenerates into License”

by Anthony Esolen

The good and wise Pope Leo XIII never condemned an error without commending a truth. In this series on Catholic Social Teaching, then, I believe I should follow the Holy Father’s example. It’s easy to inveigh against what Leo condemns;…

Leo XIII: “Taxing the Rich Does Not Help the Poor”

by Anthony Esolen

In Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878), Pope Leo XIII deplores those who “under the motley and all but barbarous terms and titles of Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists, are spread abroad throughout the world,” striving in alliance for “the purpose long resolved…

Toward a New Political Paradigm: A Call for Catholics to Reform the Republican Party

by Stephen M. Krason

The late European scholar Dr. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said that politics in Western countries typically features a “Santa Claus party” and a “belt-tightening party.” We are in the midst of an American political campaign where we are witnessing just that….

Subsidy or Subsidiarity

by Gerald J. Russello

Individualism and community are the opposite halves of the American character. For every myth of the self-made man, there is the image of the closely knit New England small town. For every lone cowboy on the frontier, there are the…

The Love that Moves the Sun

by Michael Novak

In one of the two greatest lines of world poetry, Dante bows gently toward “The Love that moves the sun and all the stars.” Many moralists speak of love as the one fundamental and universal moral principle, the golden…

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