"Rerum novarum": Écriture, contenu et réception d'une encyclique

Abstract

novarum: Ecriture, contenu et reception d'une encyclique. Actes du colloque international organise par l'Ecole francaise de Rome et le Greco n deg 2 du CNRS (Rome, 18-20 avril 1991). [Collection de l'Ecole francaise de Rome, Volume 232.] (Rome: Ecole franiaise de Rome. 1997. Pp. 711.) These papers, some slightly updated from their original presentation, are grouped according to a scheme that attends centrally to the very text of Rerum Novarum in three respects: its formation or composition (nine essays), its content or how it was understood by its first readers (nine more), and its reception or realizations over a single, first, generation. French and Italian settings are privileged, though not to the exclusion of Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, French Canada, the Anglo-Saxon world, and Belgium,1 each of which is the object of at least one brief contribution. Two essays are in English, two in Spanish, one in German, and the rest in French and Italian. Most essays are rich with bibliographical information otherwise likely to be known only to regional specialists. The volume has a full index of persons and authors and handy resumes of the single contributions in index-card format. Andrea Riccardi describes the mythic proportions which Rerum Novarum has assumed. beginning with Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. Pius XI called it a Magna Charta and also applied to it (in QA 22) an image from Is.11:21,an ensign raised among the nations: Giuseppe Maria Viscardi (p. 617) suggests that a scene in Bernanos Diary of a Country Priest (1936), where an older priest reminisces about the galvanizing effect Rerum Novarum had on him when it appeared. insinuated itself into the minds of historians as a sort of working hypothesis. This could result in a judgment of particular pastoral inadequacy where one's sources did not live up to such expectations. The detailed studies in the third part of this collection concerning the diverse receptions accorded the encyclical quickly dispose of any such general hypothesis, but they nevertheless make the cumulative case that Rerum Novarum is unique among papal encyclicals in opening a new vein of papal teaching, in its immediate reception, and in the breadth of its effects. In Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy Rerum Novarum was hailed by a grateful bishop here and there but otherwise seemed to be stillborn . . . until ten years later, when secretariats and rural credit unions came into being that would not have seen the light of day without it even then. Leo XIII's late encyclical on Christian Democracy, Graves de communi re of 1901, which was meant to restrain the impetuous in northern Italy, had the ironic effect in the agrarian South of stimulating efforts to overcome clientelistic resistance to social Catholicism. …