"A Leonine Revival"

Today, as it happens, is the anniversary of Rerum novarum, and as readers of this blog no doubt know, its author, Pope Leo XIII probably wrote as much as any post-French Revolution pope on matters relating to Church, State and Society.  (Check out Russ Hittinger's "The Three Necessary Societies", from a few years back.)  Here is a new essay, in First Things, called "A Leonine Revival", which I thought was outstanding.  It's by my friend Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (a super smart Thomist-guy), and here's a taste:

Pope Leo XIII published his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, only twenty-five years before the outbreak of the 1917 Communist Revolution that would mark the modern world irrevocably. In that document, he sought to indicate a middle way between two extremes. On the one side, Leo was responding to the new and revolutionary changes emerging from the creation of industrialist capitalism. Against the exploitative practices of elite industrialists, Leo sought to underscore the rights of workers to reasonable working hours, a just wage, self-organization, and access to a range of human goods that should be protected and advanced in some way by the state. Here we can think of goods such as the just rule of law, education, health care, political freedom of expression, and freedom of religion, all goods that the magisterium has underscored in the hundred and fifty years since the time of Rerum Novarum. On the other side, Leo was responding to the emergence of secular “socialism,” as he called it, which would seek to deny the rights of private property, abolish the role of religion in public life, and claim authority to redefine the natural human family (especially by new divorce laws, which de facto suggested that the Church cannot publicly identify or define what either natural or sacramental marriage is). Here he was essentially seeking to confront the theoretical absolutization of the state as an ultimate authority in all human matters. 

Needless to say, these are timely considerations.