Word: novarum
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Last week U.S. Catholics celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first great labor encyclical, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum ("Concerning New Things"), and the tenth anniversary of its sequel, Pius XI's Quadragesima Anno ("Forty Years After"). In these two documents the Roman Catholic Church said its say about social reform, and with its age-old flexibility took steps to adapt itself to 20th-century social change as it had to feudalism in the Middle Ages and to capitalism after the Reformation...
Revolutionary for its times was Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. Only five years previously the Holy See had itself forbidden Canada's Catholics to join the Knights of Labor (forerunner of the A.F. of L.), and it took the prompt and vigorous intervention of the late great James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore to keep the Vatican from extending the ban to U.S. Catholics. In 1887 Dr. Edward McGlynn, pastor of Manhattan's biggest Catholic parish, had been excommunicated for supporting Henry George's single-tax proposals.* And ten years after Rerum Novamm's publication...
...fearing world of 1891, Leo's encyclical accepted the necessity of labor unions and the occasional justification of strikes, urged decent wage standards. State regulation of industry, more equal distribution of wealth, broader ownership of property, and much else that was "radical" then. Forty years later, calling Rerum Novarum "the Magna Charta of all Catholic activity in the social sphere," Pius XI confirmed, developed and enlarged it in Quadragesimo Anno...
...Stettler v. O'Hara when the law was tested and upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1931 he was the only American bishop present when Pius XI delivered Quadragesimo Anno, and spoke for the U.S. as delegates from each Christian nation reported the effects of Rerum Novarum. "I often think," he says, "of the contrast between that pilgrimage of representatives of free labor and of today when free labor organizations practically have disappeared in Europe." Chief instrument in U.S. Catholicism's attempt to put the labor encyclical into practice is the Social Action Department of the National...
...mass, was faced with the prospect, unless he recanted, of ending his days without the ministrations of the Church. But a substantial body of Catholics, clergy as well as laity, remained on Dr. McGlynn's side. And in 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued a great social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which aligned the Church on the side of the underprivileged...