Human dignity affirmed

The weeks following the election of the American cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV have seen much commentary and speculation about the shape of his pontificate. Leo himself provided some important indications as he described the reasons for the choice of his name in an address to the College of Cardinals. One of the main motivations for choosing this name was the legacy of the previous pope to take the name Leo, Gioacchino Pecci, who reigned as pope Leo XIII from 1878 to 1903.

Leo XIII is credited as having inaugurated the body of doctrine known as modern Catholic Social Teaching with the promulgation of his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. This papal letter focuses on the challenges of technology and social disruption in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the ideologies of Marxism and materialism in the nineteenth century. His arguments drew a great deal of Protestant attention.

As Leo XIV describes the inspiration of his predecessor, “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 defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

The challenges we face today are indeed significant. We are awash in information. We cannot believe what we read, see, or hear. We are influenced by comprehensive anti-human ideologies. Transhumanism, futurism, and the advent of widespread artificial intelligence throw much of the future into doubt. We desperately need to recover a sound understanding of what it means to be human in the face of radically dehumanizing tyranny.

A promising place to start is the shared Augustinian anthropological foundations of the Western Christian tradition. Leo XIV’s roots in the Augustinian Order are promising in this regard, as is his intentional invocation of Leo XIII’s pontificate, which saw a revival of not only basic Augustinian insights but also a renewed focus on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. And while Catholic Social Teaching is grounded in particularly Roman Catholic understandings of authority and doctrine, it is self-consciously a tradition that seeks to articulate the truth for everyone, including Protestants and Orthodox Christians as well as people of good will more generally.

Abraham Kuyper, a leading Reformed theologian and politician in the Netherlands at the time of Leo XIII’s pontificate, recognized the ecumenical implications of Rerum Novarum. “We must admit, to our shame, that the Roman Catholics are far ahead of us in their study of the social question—very far in fact,” he observed in his own landmark speech of 1891. Leo’s encyclical, argued Kuyper, could be edifying for Reformed Christians because “it deals solely with those principles that all Christians hold in common and that we too share with our Roman Catholic fellow countrymen.”

There is much that Christians of different communions continue to disagree about, and no amount of dialogue will result in unanimity on this side of Christ’s return. But there is much that Christians do agree on and this is worth remembering, especially in this year that celebrates the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. We need to recover what it truly means to be human, the Biblical understanding of human beings created in the image and likeness of God. As Augustine put it so memorably: “There is nothing so social by nature as this race, no matter how discordant it has become through its fault.”

In an anxious age where everything seems debatable and debated, we must seek our foundations on the unchanging truth of Jesus Christ. “When a society is perishing,” wrote Leo XIII in 1891, “the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.” There is much in a biblical and Augustinian anthropology that is held in common for Christian social witness, and these are sound principles to rediscover and apply anew in our world today.