Modern Catholic social thought is typically dated back to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor). It’s not that Catholicism had never dealt with social ethics before, of course, but the pope’s discussion marked a new level of reflection that considered particular ethical questions in the context of larger changes in social structures. The particular issue Pope Leo XIII spoke to was the “worker question”: the effects of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution that sparked the rise of socialism in Europe.

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