by Father Raymond J. de Souza

But first a note from Robert Royal: Father de Souza takes us through some of the richness of Modern Catholic Social Teaching today, which is doubtless going to inform the current papacy and spur it to new developments. We're going to be here at TCT to guide you through the ups and downs of those developments. And we'll be trying to shape how various figures here and in Rome respond to the many challenges we face in the Church and the world. It's an exciting - if also perilous - time to be a Catholic. Become part of it all. We've got just a few days until the end of this fundraising campaign, which makes it possible for us to continue on for the rest of the year. So, please, make your contribution to this crucial work.

Now for today's column.

The pope's name is Leo, it's a jubilee year, and the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was observed this week. It must be time to re-read Annum Sacrum.

In May 1899, looking ahead to the Jubilee year of 1900 - the annum sacrum of the title - Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, calling for pastors everywhere to join him in consecrating the whole world to the Sacred Heart.

Leo XIII was an epistolatory pope extraordinaire, writing some eighty-five encyclicals, most of them mercifully brief, including Annum Sacrum. The style then was to get more involved in practical problems, and so one finds Leo addressing himself to the spread of Asiatic cholera in Italy (Superiore Anno, 1884), dueling in the Germanic countries (Pastoralis Officii, 1891), and the government regulation of Catholic schools in Manitoba (Affari Vos, 1897).

Annum Sacrum was emphatically universal. Leo favoured popular piety throughout his long pontificate, writing eleven (!) encyclicals on the Rosary alone. Devotion to the Sacred Heart was growing more fervent in the late 19th century, and Leo encouraged that. At the same time, there was a political point to be made.

The Sacred Heart was the favoured devotion of those who rejected the secularizing ideologies regnant in northern Europe, especially France. In 1875, the cornerstone was laid for the basilica Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, adorning the high point of Paris with a defiant demonstration that France, even when given over to harlotry, remained the eldest daughter of the Church. And Sacré-Coeur has been faithful, marking this summer 140 years of continual Eucharistic adoration, more than 51,000 days, 24/7.

St. John Paul the Great, elected exactly 100 years after Leo's election, followed Leo in many ways. He prepared for the Great Jubilee 2000 by entrusting the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, another pious act touched with political significance.

After Our Lady appeared at Fatima - and with renewed intensity after the assassination attempt against John Paul on her feast day in 1981 - the Immaculate Heart became the favoured devotion of anti-communists.

Leo XIII's most famous encyclical is on the social order, Rerum Novarum (1891), and deservedly so. It should be read in conjunction with Libertas praestantissimum (1888) in which Leo pronounces liberty the "greatest of natural endowments." Leo XIII, after the mid-19th-century suspicion of political liberties, was a great pope of human liberty. The Sacred Heart pours out love freely in superabundance; it calls for a reciprocally free response.

Annum Sacrum can be read as briefly summarizing, in a devotional key, Leo's extended teaching on society and the state, the Church and free people, and politics and economics. In three important encyclicals on the state (Inscrutabili, 1878; Diuturnum, 1881; Immortale Dei, 1885), he took dead aim at the totalitarian impulse, insisting that all civil power was limited and that no human power could usurp all authority in a society.

He defended the libertas Ecclesiae to be sure, but also insisted upon a necessary zone of social and personal freedom. It was there that the wide array of social groups fulfills their miss...