From the Lion’s Mouth

Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, and the One Head of the True Church

The Roar of the Age

When Pope Leo XIII opened his encyclical Rerum Novarum on May 15, 1891, the world was trembling under two competing idols. One was the golden calf of laissez-faire capitalism, gilded by the myth that freedom alone, ungoverned by virtue, would yield justice. The other was the red specter of socialism, clothed in the language of equality but animated by envy and covetousness. Between these false altars—Mammon and Envy—stood the working man, bowed beneath the yoke of industrial kings and ideological prophets alike.

Leo saw it clearly. He wrote, “It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels for gain and to value them only so far as they serve their own use” (RN 20). Yet he also declared, “The main tenet of socialism—community of goods—must be utterly rejected; it would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community” (RN 15). The lion’s mouth opened not to flatter the powerful nor to feed the mob, but to roar the Word of balance, the Word of Logos—Christ’s justice made visible in the temporal order.

The Church spoke as mother and judge, recalling men to the truth that “the law of justice demands that each receive that which is his own” (RN 34). This was not Roman absolutism; it was apostolic realism. It is the same realism confessed in the Unaltered Augsburg Confession I: “That there is one Divine Essence which is called and is God … yet there are three Persons of the same essence and power.” For under that Triune order, every human vocation finds its law. Christ, not Caesar, not the market, not the collective, is the Head (Eph 1:22).

The Human Person and the Dignity of Labor

At the heart of Leo’s encyclical lies a biblical anthropology. Man is not a machine part; he is a creature bearing the image of God (Gen 1:27). To labor is to imitate the Creator, whose first act was to shape and to bless the work of His hands (Gen 2:15). Leo thus writes: “That labor which God has imposed on man … is a duty which unites man to God and to his fellow-men” (RN 27).

Here the Logos-root flashes: labor is liturgy—the work of man under heaven’s order. In Christ, the carpenter’s bench becomes an altar; the field becomes a psalm. The Reformation, when faithful, saw this truth: vocation is sacred, not profane. “All our works are sanctified through faith,” says the Apology of the Augsburg Confession XXVII, “because they are done in obedience to God.” Thus Leo’s Catholic vision and the evangelical confession converge: to work is to serve Christ, and injustice toward the worker is blasphemy against the Creator.

Therefore, when Leo insists that wages must be “enough to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner” (RN 45), he is not proposing a political policy but proclaiming a moral axiom: that economic measure must obey divine measure. “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord” (Prov 11:1).

Private Property and the Stewardship of Creation

Against the socialist claim that property breeds oppression, Leo affirms a natural right grounded in Genesis itself: “It is precisely in man’s power to make his own what God has given to all” (RN 9). To possess is not to steal from the community but to accept personal stewardship before God. As the psalmist sings, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (Ps 24:1). Ownership is never absolute; it is a delegated dominion, charged with justice and mercy.

Leo’s reasoning is profoundly Logos-centered. If man bears God’s image, then he must imitate God’s freedom in ordering matter. To deny private property is to deny human creativity. Yet to hoard property is to forget the Cross. Christ Himself, who “had nowhere to lay His head” (Luke 9:58), sanctified poverty not as destitution but as freedom from idolatry. Hence Leo’s warning to the rich: “When the rich man supports the poor out of his abundance, he does not bestow his own property upon him; he gives him what is his due” (RN 22).

This is stewardship, not sentiment. It is the law of the Kingdom: “Freely ye have received, freely give” (Matt 10:8). Property becomes sacred only when consecrated by charity.

The Family as the First Society

Before State or union, before wage or tax, there is the household—the domus from which all dominion flows. Leo speaks with fatherly gravity: “The domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community” (RN 12). The modern world forgets this; it worships the State as savior and the corporation as god. But the true civilization stands on the covenant between man and woman, echoing the greater covenant between Christ and His Church (Eph 5:25-32).

The family is the micro-church, the altar of daily bread and forgiveness. Therefore the assault on the family—whether through exploitation of labor, corruption of morals, or redefinition of marriage—is the deepest wound of modernity. Both socialism and unrestrained capitalism conspire against it: one by seizing the household into bureaucracy, the other by dissolving it in the market. Against both, Leo thunders: “The children are something of the father and … are to be regarded as a kind of extension of the father’s personality” (RN 13). To steal the child from the home is to amputate the image of God in society.

In the UAC XXIII, the confessors echo this: “Marriage is a lawful state … instituted by God for mutual help, that one may help another to bear the cross.” The Church, true and undivided, thus defends family not as sentiment but as sacrament of order—where the hierarchy of love mirrors the divine economy itself.

The State and the Common Good

The lion does not call for anarchy. Leo’s vision of authority is rooted in Romans 13: “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Yet he also warns that the State exists for man, not man for the State. “The State must not absorb the individual or the family; both should be allowed free and untrammeled action as far as is consistent with the common good” (RN 35). This is the principle of subsidiarity, later named by Pius XI but conceived here in Leo’s moral grammar.

The magistrate is to guard, not to replace, natural bonds. He wields the sword to defend justice, not to engineer utopias. When government usurps the father, it becomes Pharaoh; when it neglects the widow and orphan, it becomes Cain. Leo’s balance recalls Deuteronomy 16:20: “Justice, and only justice, shalt thou follow.”

Thus the Church does not seek to dominate the State, nor to retreat from it, but to leaven it. Her clergy teach conscience; her laity enact righteousness in trade, law, and labor. In this way the two kingdoms—spiritual and temporal—are not enemies but chords in one harmony, tuned to Christ the Logos who orders both sword and altar.

The Harmony of Classes

In a century drunk on class war, Leo spoke the older wisdom of St. Paul: “The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Cor 12:21). Society is a body, not a battlefield. “The rich need the poor, and the poor the rich; they assist each other to obtain their respective ends” (RN 19). Envy and pride alike tear the flesh of the commonwealth. Only charity can heal it.

Here Leo’s teaching converges with Luther’s twofold ethic: the strong must serve, the weak must trust, both under the same Cross. When Christ washed His disciples’ feet, He abolished every pretext for tyranny and resentment (John 13:14). The employer must see the worker as a brother; the worker must render service as to the Lord, not to men (Eph 6:5-9). In this mutual reverence lies the peace of nations.

The Church as Teacher and Mother

Against the secularists of his age, Leo reasserted that the Church alone holds the competence to teach moral truth in public affairs. “She does not intrude into the province of the State,” he says, “but she strives to bind together wealth and labor in friendly alliance” (RN 40). This is not domination but diaconate: the Church serves society by illuminating conscience.

Her head is not a mere pontiff but Christ Himself. As the UAC VII proclaims, “It is enough for the true unity of the Church that the Gospel be preached purely and the Sacraments rightly administered.” Here is the true reconciliation of Leo’s Roman heart and the evangelical confession: the visible unity of the Church is ordered not by jurisdiction alone but by fidelity to the living Word. The Pope may roar, but the roar must echo the Lion of Judah, not the voice of empire.

Toward the One Head

The heart of Rerum Novarum beats with the same rhythm as Paul’s confession: “He is before all things, and by Him all things consist” (Col 1:17). Christ is the cosmic Logos in whom justice and mercy meet. When Leo calls for “the Church’s beneficent influence” (RN 16), he calls not for power but for presence—the sacramental witness that order itself proceeds from the Word made flesh (John 1:14).

The Unaltered Augsburg Confession stands here as a mirror, purified by Reformation but unbroken in essence. It points to the same Head, the same Body, the same law of grace. Thus, beyond the anti-Reformation polemics and the papal absolutisms of later centuries, Rerum Novarum may be read as the Lion’s own appeal to the nations: return to order by returning to Christ.

Toward Renewal

The age of Leo 12 was industrial; ours is digital. Yet the sickness is the same—a forgetfulness of personhood. The machine has grown larger; the soul smaller. We are again tempted to bow to the algorithms of Mammon or the collectivism of ideology. The lion’s roar still resounds: “Neither envy nor greed shall save you; only justice rooted in charity.”

To the modern worker, Christ says, “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). To the modern capitalist, He says, “Lay not up treasures upon earth” (Matt 6:19). To the modern socialist, He says, “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matt 4:4). And to the Church He says, “Feed My sheep” (John 21:17).

Conclusion: The Lion and the Lamb

Rerum Novarum was the roar of reason baptized by revelation. It condemned both the avarice of the few and the envy of the many, not in the name of compromise but of Christ. Leo spoke as father; Christ still speaks as King. Under one Head, the Church—visible and invisible, East and West, Catholic and Evangelical—must now rise as the true labor union of saints, “endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3).

For the earth is not divided between capital and labor, left and right, Rome and Wittenberg, but between those who bow to Christ and those who will not. And the Lion of Judah, whose roar shook Sinai and whose blood bought Zion, still calls to every workshop, field, and home:

“Behold, I make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

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