“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare has Juliet ask in his play Romeo and Juliet. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
The great bard can be possibly challenged in the case of Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost. The new pope, the first to come from the United States, is not only following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pope Francis, but also Pope Leo XIII, a late 19th century cleric who essentially established modern-day Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (The Condition of Labor).
Workers have the right to receive a fair wage and to organize into workers’ associations such as unions, Pope Leo XIII wrote. Employers must assure an environment at the workplace that respects worker dignity.
Pope Leo XIII “saw the need for the Church to speak for the workingman, and he inspired Catholics to make the laborer’s cause their own,” non-Catholic historian Richard L. Camp once wrote. “Had he done nothing else his place in history as a great pope would still have been secure.”
(To the right, Pope Leo XIII)
Thus, what the papacy of Leo XIV portends is potential friction between the church and not only neoliberal rule in Europe and elsewhere in the West but also with right-wing populist Donald Trump’s administration in the United States.
Neoliberalism is a philosophy that extols free trade,
restrictions on labor unions, top-down rule at the workplace, and minimal government involvement in the lives
of people unless it is to promote the ruling elite. The European Union constitution "enshrines neoliberal economics," union activist and journalist Enrico Tortolano wrote in openDemocracyUK. "The European Union is a corporatist, pro-capitalist establishment" that is "anti-worker and anti-democratic."
Witness the EU's relentless push for “austerity”
measures in economically troubled countries like Greece, forcing strictures on
the social safety net for millions, while its non-popularly elected leaders do
all they can to assure anti-EU politicians don’t get elected in member
countries.
For all his blue-collar support in the last election, Trump has shown little or no empathy for workers, gutting the National Labor Relations Board and buddying up to union busters like Elon Musk.
Trump fired NLRB Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox and General Counsel Jennifer
Abruzzo. A federal judge has ruled that Wilcox’s removal from the
board was illegal. Trump wants to replace Abruzzo with Crystal Carey of the
union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis.
The long tradition of Catholic social justice inspired by Rerum Novarum includes labor priests like Monsignor George Higgins in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and Father Charles Owen Rice in Pittsburgh and social activists and writers like Dorothy Day. Rice, a native of Ireland, lamented how so many Irish and other Catholic immigrants to the United States, once loyal to the Democratic Party, have switched to the Republican Party. He called it "another cross in my old age."
Of course, today's Democratic Party, like the labor parties of Europe, is no longer a pro-union bastion. Ever since Jimmy Carter and especially Bill Clinton, it has been as neoliberal as the Republican Party. In fact, rebellions in both parties over the past decades--from the Tea Party to Bernie Sanders' campaigns--have been prompted at least in part by growing disgust with neoliberalism.
The spirit of Rerum Novarum continues to enlighten church social teaching. For example, the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church called labor unions “a positive influence for social order and solidarity, and are therefore an indispensable element of social life.” Unions carry a strong responsibility in “the whole task of economic and social development and in the attainment of the universal common good.”
Pope Leo XIV, who served many years as a bishop in Peru, has now the opportunity to be a powerful force for human rights and, as his name implies, worker rights. How he interacts with a world often hostile to such issues will be interesting to watch.
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