Great Encyclical Letters (incl. Aeterni Patris, Providentissimus Deus, etc.)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~240,000 words · 1,132 passages
Cite this work
- APALeo XIII. (n.d.). Great Encyclical Letters (incl. Aeterni Patris, Providentissimus Deus, etc.). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-xiii/great-encyclical-letters-incl-aeterni-patris-providentissimus-deus-etc
- MLALeo XIII. "Great Encyclical Letters (incl. Aeterni Patris, Providentissimus Deus, etc.)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-xiii/great-encyclical-letters-incl-aeterni-patris-providentissimus-deus-etc.
- ChicagoLeo XIII. Great Encyclical Letters (incl. Aeterni Patris, Providentissimus Deus, etc.). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-xiii/great-encyclical-letters-incl-aeterni-patris-providentissimus-deus-etc.
What it is about
Leo XIII's major encyclicals, among them Aeterni Patris on philosophy, Providentissimus Deus on the study of Scripture, and Rerum novarum on the condition of workers.
Context and history
Two of these settled things that have lasted. Aeterni Patris, of 1879, restored Aquinas as the basis of Catholic teaching, which is why Thomism became a living philosophy again in the twentieth century. Rerum novarum, of 1891, is where the Church takes a position on the labour question: it defends the just wage, rest, and the right of association, and at the same time private property, rejecting both laissez-faire and socialism. All later Catholic social doctrine begins here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The popular demand for the Encyclicals and Apostolical Letters of a Roman Pontiff is something so novel as to constitute of itself a proof of the esteem in which he is held. It would seem that whatever is written of Leo XIII. in books or newspapers, instead of satisfying the universal desire for a knowledge of him, only inspires the wish to know more, and the conviction that the writings of a man of such powers and world-wide sympathies must contain messages of interest and benefit to all humanity. It is precisely the merit of the Letters of the late Pope that no matter when they were written, or to whom they were addressed, they are of actual and universal interest, as intelligible to the layman and illiterate as to the theologian and scholar, as urgent in their appeals to those who are not within the fold of which he was chief pastor as to the children of the household. His arguments could not but command attention, drawn as they were from history, experience, and reason, as well as from Scripture and tradition; and his sincere interest in the civil and social improvements of every nation, whether Catholic or not, made all hearken to his plea for religion as the chief factor of true progress.