Leo XIII in the encyclical Rerum Novarum on class hatred and labour

The Encyclical Rerum Novarum: An Open Letter from Pope Leo XIII on the Relations between Government, Business, Workers and the Church.

The letter was made public less than 50 years after Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, which declares and justifies the aims, tasks and methods of struggle of the nascent communist organisations and parties.

Leo XIII writes that the idea of the inevitability of class hatred, set out by Marx and Engels, is «so irrational and so false that the exact opposite is true».

«Just as the symmetry of the human body results from the mutual concord of its various parts and members, so too in the State nature itself ordains that the classes composing it should live together in harmony and accord, so that the State may be stable and in equilibrium».

«Yet wealthy owners and all employers must remember: to oppress the poor and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to profit from the need of others, is impermissible by the laws of God and of man. To deprive a workman of a part of the wages due to him is a great crime, which cries to Heaven for vengeance. "Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cry of them which have reaped is entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth" (Epistle of James, 5:4)».

Rerum Novarum laid the foundations of Catholic social teaching on labour. Later popes have built on the doctrine set out in the encyclical, among them Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, marking the 40th anniversary of Leo's work, and John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens, marking its 90th.