Rerum Novarum :: essays research papers

Rerum NovarumThe opening words and the title of the Encyclical issued by Leo XIII, 15 May, 1891, on the "Condition of Labour". Although the Encyclical follows the lines of the handed-down teaching concerning the rights and duties of property and the relations of employer and employee, it applies the old doctrines specifically to modern conditions. opening move with a description of the grievances of the working classes, it proceeds to refute the false theories of the Socialists, and to hold the right of private ownership. The true remedy, continues the pope, is to be found in the feature action of the Church, the State, the employer and the employed. The Church is properly interested in the sociable uncertainty because of its religious and moral aspects the State has the right and the duty to intervene on behalf of justice and individual and social well-being and employers and workers should organize into both tangled and separate associations for mutual protection and for self protection. All this is set frontward with fitting detail to reach the principal problems and relations of industrial and social life. Probably no other pronouncement on the social capitulum has had so m any readers or exercised such a wide influence. It has godly a vast Catholic social literature, while many non-Catholics befuddle acclaimed it as one of the most definite and reasonable productions ever compose on the subject. Sometimes criticized as vague, it is as specific as any document could be written for several countries in different stages of industrial development. On one point it is strikingly definite "Let it be taken for granted that workman and employer should, as a rule, make supernumerary agreements, and in particular should agree freely as to wages nevertheless, in that respect is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and antique than any bargain between man and man, that remuneration should be sufficient to maintain the wage-earner in r easonable and frugal comfort. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.