By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.

On May 8 the pastor and I gathered in the living room of our rectory to await the announcement of a new pope. After what seemed like forever, the cardinal protodeacon announced the words we had been waiting for:

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Robertum Franciscum, Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Prevost, qui sibi nomen imposuit Leonem Decimum Quartum.

My reaction was twofold. First, I had no clue who Cardinal Prevost was. I was, however, excited that the new Pope was named Leo, for it was the words of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII that I used to argue against lockdowns in April of 2020:

"The preservation of life is the bounden duty of one and all, and to be wanting therein is a crime. It necessarily follows that each one has a natural right to procure what is required in order to live, and the poor can procure that in no other way than by what they can earn through their work" (Rerum Novarum 44).

Under the guise of executive powers reserved for short-term disasters such as hurricanes, leaders across the West have done the previously unthinkable: they have FORBIDDEN entire segments of the population from working. Using a nonsensical distinction between essential and non-essential (as if providing for one's family is ever non-essential) our entire workforce has been divided into three groups: 1.) The upper class with jobs that can be performed in their pajamas at home, 2.) Laborers lucky enough to still be able to go to work, and 3.) Those intentionally rendered unemployed.

Just two days later, Pope Leo XIV referenced the encyclical Rerum Novarum is his address to the College of Cardinals:

Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. 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.

I've been pondering the phrase "rerum novarum" a lot in recent days, which literally means "new things." At the recent Brownstone Polyface Farm event, I was having a dinner conversation with Bret Weinstein where he mentioned the urgent need to address the problem of new things such as artificial intelligence. I responded that "new things" in Latin has an extremely negative connotation, and that these words, when translated into English in Leo XIII's encyclical, are rendered as "revolutionary change."

This prompted me to go back and reread the opening paragraph of the 1891 encyclical:

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it - actually there is no question which has taken a deeper hold on the public mind.

I was astounded by how these words, written over 130 years ago, sound as if they could have been written today, especially after the...