The Predecessors ofRerum NovarumWithin Catholicism

Abstract

Within Catholicism* By Paul Misner Marquette University The noted historian, E.J. Hobsbawm, has summed up the relation? ship between the Roman Catholic Church and modernity in a memorable phrase: Rome managed to hold the nineteenth century at bay with remarkable success.1 In fact, however, even the most traditionalist of Catholics and Catholic institutions underwent some modernization, sometimes deliberately and sometimes in spite of themselves, just when they were endeavoring most successfully to hold the nineteenth century at bay. The encyclical Rerum Novarum is perhaps the prime example of a conscious effort at updating ? what Pope John XXIII would dub aggiomamento ? in the whole history of the nineteenth-century papacy. For this reason, among others, it has continued to arouse keen interest in observers from many quarters. The question of its predecessors in nineteenth-century Catholicism has also attracted its share of attention, which is not to say that clarity or agreement has been achieved. The archives for the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (born 1810, elected pope 1878, died 1903) have just recently been made accessible to scholars; no one has yet carried out the extensive research that would be necessary to fully settle our question. With a view to raising the question properly, I shall first sketch a survey of the tendencies and figures in social Catholicism that preceded the papal document and that directly or indirectly prepared the soil and presented the questions that the pope had to address or finesse. A benchmark 1931 book by Alcide De Gasperi will be most helpful in this regard. A second item to take up will be the drafting process that preceded the issuance of Rerum Novarum. We are relatively well informed about this process through a 1957 edition of texts (drafts) by Giovanni Antonazzi. A key figure here, the person who wrote the first draft of the encyclical and who was also a predecessor in a substantive sense, was Matteo Liberatore, S.J. Liberatore constitutes a lead that can provide us with some insight into concrete influences that were actively received in the drafting of the encyclical.