What urged Pope Leo XIII to issue the encyclical “Rerum Novarum”?
It does have an english version, as do all the encyclicals. Here it is: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xi… In 1891, Pope Leo XIII released his encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labour). This was the first of the great social encyclicals of the Catholic Church. It was written in an era of immense social change in Europe, distinguished by the awakening of democracy and the popular appeal of communism to the working class. It was an era of far-reaching social transformation and it called forth a response from the Pope. Essentially, Leo XIII had two concerns. Firstly, he opposed the atheistic philosophy of communism but recognised its appeal to workers. Communism offered workers a socio-economic and political alternative to the self-interested alliance between aristocratic privilege and capital-industrial interests. In short, it was a
Difficult to say for certain. I suspect it was at least partly a reaction to communism. Working people were looking to various groups on the left to help them improve the pretty dire working conditions of the time. Some of these groups were quite virulently anti-church seeing it, mistakenly IMHO, as an arm of the repressive state. The Pope issued “Rerum Novarum” as an antidote to that view – to show that Christian teachings do not support an exploitative ruling class, but neither do they support the complete overthrow of the existing social order.
