Rerum Novarum - Impact and Legacy

Impact and Legacy

• Rerum Novarum has been interpreted as a primer of the Roman Catholic response to the exploitation of workers.
• The encyclical also contains a proposal for a living wage, though not called by that name in the text itself (“Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.”) The American theologian John A. Ryan, also trained as an economist, developed this idea in his book A Living Wage (1906).
• In Belgium, it is commemorated annually on the Catholic liturgical feast of the Ascension (also a public Holiday there) by the Christian Labour Movement (which has a traditional link with the Christian Democrat parties, all substantively Roman Catholic), as a kind of counterpart to the socialist Labour Day (also a public holiday in Belgium) on May 1.
• The positions expressed by the fictional Bishop Morehouse in the beginning of Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” (s:The Iron Heel/Chapter II) are clearly derived from the Rerum Novarum.
• The Catholic Encyclopedia, written in 1911, speaking in clearly laudatory terms, states that the document “has inspired a vast Catholic social literature, while many non-Catholics have acclaimed it as one of the most definite and reasonable productions ever written on the subject.”