The Other Pope Leo

The Other Pope Leo by Bill Droel

Pope Leo XIV, originally of Chicago, chose his papal name to recall Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903), particularly his critique of the industrial revolution, titled On the Condition of Labor. The current Pope Leo is likewise interested in today’s social questions, including the looming effects of AI. “In our own day,” says Leo XIV, “the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The downside of the industrial revolution was increasingly evident during the 19^th century. For example, there was in the early 1800s a movement among textile workers in Great Britian, called Luddites, who rebelled against specific machines that threatened their wages and the quality of their craft. Their protest sometimes included destruction of machines. Soon enough, however, factory owners and law enforcement put an end to the movement.

Social critics Karl Mark (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) advocated for a different economic system, famously in their 1848 Communist Manifesto.  Meanwhile, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) portrayed the terrible negatives of the industrial revolution in his popular novels. Pope Leo XIII added Catholicism’s voice in his May 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of Labor.

Although Leo XIII is credited as the pioneer of modern Catholic social thought, he was not the first. For example, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811-1877) of Mainz was an outstanding social, political and spiritual leader of the 19^th century. In highlighting concepts like the common good, like employees as stakeholders and like solidarity, he laid the groundwork for a mature Catholic reflection on modernity.

The same year as the Communist Manifesto (1848) von Ketteler gave his analysis in six Advent sermons on poverty and inequality. These were refined in an 1864 book, The Laborer Question and Christianity.

Von Ketteler, member of an aristocratic family, opposed materialistic communism but was deeply troubled by the harsh effects of industrial capitalism. Von Ketteler thought some state regulation plus action by labor and charitable groups could temper extreme capitalism. Thus, von Ketteler advocated for the end of child labor, for limiting hours in a factory, for Sunday as a true day of rest, for disability insurance and temporary unemployment insurance, for state health and safety inspectors and for more cooperative enterprises. The key to a better capitalism was to break the belief that an individual is “the absolute master of things that he [or she] owns,” he preached.

Catholicism says private property is a right. But drawing upon St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), von Ketteler explained that only God has “full and genuine property rights… When making use of his [or her] property a person has the duty to bow to the God-given order of things.” It “is a perpetual sin against nature [to hold] the false doctrine that property confers strict rights.” Catholicism “protects property,” von Ketteler said, “but wealth must be distributed…for the sake of the general welfare.”

Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892), the second Catholic archbishop of Westminster, was long interested in family life, education, church-state relations, the working class and more. He was ordained as an Anglican in 1833 and later that year married Caroline Sargent (1812-1837). He was only 27-years old when she died. Manning became disillusioned with the Anglican Church in part because it was oblivious to the working poor. In 1850 Manning was received as a Roman Catholic.

Marx and Engels published their Manifesto in 1848. Von Kettler gave his Advent sermons in 1848. And in 1848 Manning added his objections to the industrial economy. He said that Christians need to be with the “poor of Christ, the multitude which have been this long time with us and now faint by the way…in mines and factories.” Manning, like von Ketteler, anticipated Leo XIII.

Manning was sympathetic to the situation among dockworkers. He mediated during the famous 1889 strike at the Port of London, stating that the employers’ refusal to negotiate was not a private matter but a “public evil.” Union members considered the outcome of their job action a grand victory, which in turn gave momentum to the British labor movement and particularly to organizing lower-wage workers. Manning’s impact on the Catholic social conscience was not limited to the union members. Many Catholics in the middle-class and upper-class of that time became attentive to urban/industrial poverty because of Manning.

Von Ketteler and Manning were spiritual ghostwriters for Leo XIII’s On the Condition of Labor. They and others may provide the same service to Leo XIV when, I predict, he soon issues a major document about the condition of post-industrial workers.

Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). It distributes a new edition of On the Condition of Labor by Pope Leo XIII; $8 includes postage.