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Rerum Novarum
Sign in to saveAlso known as Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor
encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on May 15, 1891
Key facts
- Signature date
- 15 May 1891
- Subject
- On capital and labor
- Number
- 38 of 88 of the pontificate
- Text
- In Latin In English
via Wikipedia infobox
Full text
Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891)
vatican.va →Link to the full text · 40,000 chars · not written by Vinony
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- encyclical
- Author
- Leo XIII
- Followed by
- Pastoralis Vigilantiae
- Follows
- In Ipso
- Main subject
- Catholic social teaching
- Image
- Léon XIII - Encyclique Rerum Novarum, Sur la condition des ouvriers - 1920.djvu
Show 8 more facts
- publication date
- 1891-05-15
- title
- Rerum Novarum
- work available at URL
- www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/pt/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
- copyright status
- public domain
- language of work or name
- Portuguese
- place of publication
- Vatican City
- Commons category
- Rerum Novarum
- Stack Exchange tag
- christianity.stackexchange.com/tags/rerum-novarum
via Wikidata · CC0
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Encyclopedic overview
Pope Leo XIII, c. 1898 Rerum novarum is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It is an open letter passed to all Catholic bishops addressing the condition of the working class. It discusses the relationships and mutual duties between labor and capital, as well as between government and its citizens. Of primary concern is the need to alleviate the poverty of the working class. The encyclical attempts to strike a just balance among the rights of workers, owners, and the state, supporting the rights of labor to form trade unions and earn a living wage, balanced with the right to private property, while rejecting the extremes of state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.
A foundational text of modern Catholic social teaching, many of the positions in Rerum novarum are supplemented by later encyclicals, in particular Pius XI's Quadragesimo anno (1931), John XXIII's Mater et magistra (1961), Paul VI's Octogesima adveniens (1971), John Paul II's Centesimus annus (1991), and Leo XIV's Magnifica humanitas (2026), each commemorating an anniversary of Rerum novarum.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Rerum Novarum” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.