Rerum Novarum

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…

{ 62 comments }

The Long War Against the Family (Part I)

by Ryan N. S. Topping

The progressive cultural elite has long perpetuated prejudices against the family that, unchallenged, lead to its ruin. Among several I cite three: (1) the assertion that marriage makes men and women less free; (2) the assumption that children are a…

The Modern State Causes the Problems it Pretends to Fix

by Anthony Esolen

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…

Liberalism Brings Slavery When It Confuses License with Liberty

by Anthony Esolen

In my latest essays I’ve noted that there cannot be a “social teaching” unless we know what a society is. Pope Leo XIII, in his many social encyclicals, expresses the constant wisdom of the Church when he affirms the reality…

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. …

Is Feminism a Heresy?

by Donna Steichen

The following essay first appeared in Disorientation: How to Go to College Without Losing Your Mind, ed., John Zmirak. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher. You might be surprised to hear feminism described as a “heresy.” Like…

Dawson’s Usura Canto

It gives me no pleasure addressing Christopher Dawson’s views on economics. I learned much from Dawson in my formative years, reading The Sundering of Christendom and The Crisis of Western Education back in high school, and many of his other…

Cooperation: A Free Market Benefits Everyone

by Jeffrey Tucker

The following will explain the most important idea in the history of social analysis. The notion (actually, it’s a description of reality that is all around us but rarely noticed) has been around for many centuries. It was first discovered…

No Family, No Society

by Anthony Esolen

I begin by asserting a principle that, if one troubles to read Scripture, the encyclicals of the popes, and the decrees of ecumenical councils, is simply unassailable. It is this: There is an inner identity between Catholic teaching on sex…

Private Charity Versus Government Welfare

by Rev. C. J. McCloskey III

Less than three years has passed since the publication of Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical, Charity in Truth. As some readers may remember, the encyclical caused quite a stir both in secular and religious circles — as have many of…

The Church and the Unions

by George Weigel

Judging by the impassioned commentary from some Catholic quarters during recent confrontations between unionized public-sector workers and state governments, you’d think we were back in 1919, with the Church defending the rights of wage slaves laboring in sweat shops under…

How Catholics Commit Political Suicide

by Ryan Barilleaux

Anti-Catholicism has always been a problem in America, although today it is nothing like what existed in an earlier era. Catholics are part of the nation’s economic, political, and cultural establishment, no longer the lesser citizens of a society that…

Jesus Loves You; Caesar and Mammon, Not So Much

by Mark P. Shea

Here are some recent scenes from American Christianity waiting on the rich and powerful in the hope of catching some table scraps. You got your Christian representatives of the Thing that Used to Be Liberalism in bed with millionaires bent…

The Church, Yesterday and Today

by Joanna Bogle

In the 1970s, I inhabited a world where the Second Vatican Council was seen as an unmitigated disaster. Nuns stopped wearing their old habits — or simply left their convents altogether. Priests left their ministry. There was trite music at…

Can the Theological Virtues Eat the Natural Ones?

Like many tradition-loving Catholics, I feel terrible for Darío Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos — now the second-most hated cardinal in the Church, after Bernard Cardinal Law. As John Allen observed, Cardinal Castrillón once “was widely considered a serious contender to become…

Green Asceticism

by Jennifer Roche

From the earliest days of religious communities, monks and nuns have practiced sustainable living. Environmental awareness is nothing new among religious, since many congregations ran farms, raised chickens, tended kitchen gardens, and carefully stored winter supplies of potatoes, apples, squash,…

Practical Distributism: Looking at the Community Reinvestment Act

by Joe Hargrave

Those of us who have argued for alternatives to individualistic capitalism and the bureaucratic welfare state are often told that we are good at pointing out problems but come up short on solutions — it’s a charge distributists hear often….

← Previous Entries