Sandy Curnow Reflection

Why the Pope chose the name Leo

Image: M0003525: Newspaper cutting of the landscape of potteries amongst factories. In copyright. Source: Wellcome Collection. 

Now nobody remembers the terrible cost of the Industrial Revolution.

It was over 200 years ago, and the great factories with machines belching filth made some manufacturers very rich indeed, while ordinary children, women and men worked desperately hard for pittance wages.  True, a new age was born, but its birth was cruel.  Millions died young, others lived lives of ceaseless work.  To confront such oppression of the poor, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, one of the most important church documents of the last several Centuries.  In a parallel way, the new Pope Leo XIV has said he took Leo’s name because he was profoundly concerned that AI‘s new Industrial Revolution may again benefit the few at a cost to the many.  “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”

Today most historians think of the 19^th Century as the great age of invention, increased productivity and ultimately prosperity.  True, of course.  It began with villages and ended with cities and cars and planes; it began with candles and ended with power at the touch of a switch.  Its discoveries produced our wealthy, first world countries.  However, the narrative forgets the human cost and the bitter conflicts between the extremes of the ‘free trade/do what you like’ economies of capitalism on one hand, to the arguments for socialism and the revolutions of communism on the other.  The new Leo, looking back to the past, is thinking ahead of the total implementation of Artificial Intelligence, hoping to forestall the suffering of many who have lost their jobs and struggle to survive while the new rich succeed.

Out of the new wealth a new class was born.  No longer the labourers or the aristocracy, intelligent, speculative men – now called the middle class – thought inventively and built factories and needed labour for the new machines.  And so, population moved into what became great cities like Manchester or Birmingham in England.  With the new power from steam driven engines, men worked in steel mills from first shifts till late, and girls laboured for 12-hours a day over cotton spinning machines.

Antique photograph of the British Empire: Lancashire cotton mill

It was better to employ women; they earned a third of men’s wages and children aged 9-13 were cheaper again.  That made economic sense.  The machines produced steel and spun cloth and printed books and newspapers, and built furniture far more cheaply, but in order to save money the machines were ‘unprotected’ – no safety coverings – and often exhausted workers tipped forward and were fatally injured.  Or a child lost a hand or foot.  Britain passed an 1802 law to prevent children under 9 years from working in factories, but a 1908 photograph in America shows children in overcoats clutching small food boxes waiting at the door to go into a 12-hour nightshift of unspecified factory work.

Image: Labor rights. Wikipedia.org

Coal miners’ work was worse.  In some pits in Cornwall one man in three was killed ‘down mine’ – underground – and life expectancy in local villages, such as the one my family forebears came from, averaged around 27 years.  Which is why they came to Australia.  At times in London only one child in four made it to 5 years old.  And one family in three had no breadwinner.  Because of the water-borne diseases in London, and its lack of sewage, life expectancy in London was 40 years old in 1850.  A hundred and a bit years later it had doubled to just over 80.  Society had developed a social conscience with replanned sewerage, unemployment benefits and a national health system.

Political systems have changed.  From all sided of politics, in Australia at least, there is a conscious concern for the whole community.  Minimum wages and maximum work hours are health and safety issues and are legislated.

So where is the Pope in all this?

He was a very important force for the social reforms that swept Europe in the early part of last century.

Image: Pope Leo XIII, Wikipedia.org

Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) witnessed in his lifetime this change.  When he was born most of Europe was agricultural; labourers worked as families in villages and while conditions were hard, they had at least the odd plot of soil for vegetables.  Most landowners felt some responsibility for their workers.  Until of course mechanised harvesters and ploughs made farm-labourers superfluous.  Why pay workers when you had no need of them?  (Who kept a horse after they’d bought a car?)

Leo’s family was a titled one; his fine-featured face and elegant hands belong to a man of privilege from birth, and in this portrait, he wears his papal robes as easily as if he were born to them.  He was certainly a born intellectual and he worked in his very long reign to define the modern church’s relationship to contemporary philosophies and thought.  He argued that the Church had a right and duty to take a position in the world of politics.  (For example, Pope Francis’ letter to the American bishops condemning Trump’s deportation of immigrants.)  He was also a skilled diplomat negotiating an improved relationship between Church and State in a world that had been torn by revolutions.

Seeing the range of harms caused by unrestrained Capitalism exploiting a workforce, to the wrongs espoused by Marx and atheistic Communism, his great Encyclical “Of New Things” moved into the less familiar area of social justice.  Rerum Novarum argued above all for the dignity of labour, and thus for the right of the worker to a fair wage.  From this came the moral obligation of the employer to pay such a wage ie. payment must be sufficient for the wage earner to support a family living modestly.  Mindful of the dangers of some workplaces the encyclical argued for safe working conditions which included limited work hours.  It condemned some forms of socialism and asserted the rights of private property and private enterprise, which pleased the conservatives.  However, it surprised many when he asserted that workers had the right to form unions and, more shockingly, the right to strike.  In effect, he brought the workplace out of the world of conflict and into the realm of ethics.  Social Justice was a moral issue.

In today’s world of corporate surveillance and digital dehumanisation, the principles of Rerum Novarum must still apply.

By Sandy Curnow

Pope Leo XIIIs encyclical Rerum Novarum is often referred to as the ‘encyclical of new things’.