Pope Leo XIV took his name to signal his closeness to Leo XIII, and yet in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Dilexi te, his statements sometimes seem at odds with his predecessor: on the root of social evils, the remediation of poverty, and private property.
For Leo XIV, the root of social ills is inequality. Reaffirming Francis, he says: “I can only state once more that inequality ‘is the root of social ills.’” (n. 94) But for Leo XIII, in his first encyclical, “On the Evils of Society” (Inscrutabili Dei consilio), the root of social ills is rather the rejection of Christianity by civil powers: “the source of [social] evils lies chiefly, We are convinced, in this, that the holy and venerable authority of the Church, which in God’s name rules mankind, upholding and defending all lawful authority, has been despised and set aside.” (n. 3)
The difference is not small, because if Christianity is not necessary, then, to eliminate social evils, it would suffice for civil powers to eradicate “structures of sin,” that is, structures of inequality. But if Christianity is necessary, then clearly the most important policy for a civil power would be for it to encourage, or at least provide the good conditions for, Christian belief and practice (for example, in making it easy, not difficult, for parents to send their children to religious schools).
In Rerum novarum, Leo XIII taught that the quest for equality is an unreal dream of socialism: “the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition.” (n. 17)
If one were to say, in response, that the inequality meant by Leo XIV, following Francis, is not that of outcome and possessions, but of standing before the law and of respect for human dignity, then the nature of “poverty” changes radically, and immediately the poorest members of our societies are the unborn, because it is they whose equal human dignity is most pervasively denied, around the world. It would follow that the Church’s “preferential option for the poor” must take the form of making the pro-life cause pre-eminent.
As regards the remediation of poverty, remember that Leo XIII was well-briefed on contemporary economic science through his assistant, Fr. Matteo Liberatore, S.J.
The work of Adam Smith begins exactly with the observation that some countries are working their way out of poverty, and others are not, and what explains the difference?
Economics classes today will often begin with a presentation of the “hockey stick” graph of astounding economic growth worldwide in the last 300 years and pose the question, what explains it? The answer, accepted by both Fr. Liberatore and Pope Leo, is upholding of the right to private property by the civil power, and its recognition that individuals in their economic activity, and families, are prior to the State – that is to say, a free market and free society. The State has a role to correct abuses such as oppressively long work hours, but, in general, a sound administration of the State should be sufficient. (nn. 32-33)
But Leo XIV’s position seems to deny the importance of that hockey stick graph: “The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities,”(n. 13) Poverty must be defined, he insists, not absolutely, but relative to the standard of living of a particular nation.
But if market processes for wealth creation have not diminished poverty (in that understanding), it follows that any confidence that they could continue to do so, in the future, must be the product of sheer “ideologies.” And these are described in a straw-man fashion, so that they correspond to no position held by a responsible person today: such as “defense of the absolute autonomy of the market” (92), and the view that “economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything.” (ibid.)
This apparent closing off to the free market is all the more puzzling because near the end of his exhortation, where Leo gives a plea for almsgiving, he first says that, of course, it is better to find a job for a poor person than to give him alms. (n. 115) Obviously, however, we cannot find jobs for the poor unless someone first makes them. Thus, apparently, even better than almsgiving, for serving the poor, would be the spirit of investment and entrepreneurship, at work in a well-regulated market.
Then Leo has the appearance of differing from Leo, also, on the centrality of the natural right to private property. Leo XIII believed that the poor as well as the rich were beset by greed, and that, for the poor, greed often assumed the form of wanting simply to take from the wealthy, to meet their needs, rather than working so as to have something to trade.
Leo XIV’s Dilexi te, in contrast, contains the following: “Therefore, everyone has the right to possess a sufficient amount of the earth’s goods for themselves and their family. . . .Persons in extreme necessity are entitled to take what they need from the riches of others.”(ellipsis in the original)
The second sentence is a quotation from Gaudium et spes (n. 69), where a footnote provides all the necessary qualifications, and a reference to Aquinas, in order to guard against mischievous interpretations. No such footnote is given here. Also, the language of the Council Fathers is subtle (sibi procuret) and does not quite mean, baldly, “to take.”
But now combine this statement, unqualified, with the idea that there is no absolute standard of poverty, and therefore no absolute standard of extreme necessity – and the upshot is troubling to say the least.
On social evils, poverty, and property – would that the Leos roared in unison!
