The eighth encyclical of the Catholic Social Teachings of Pope Leo XIII is called Rerum Novarum - on New Things.
What’s new today? The news today is a series of updates on the factional warfare that is tearing apart our society. The class struggle of the Marxists has escaped the bounds of the material world, and is now driving new narratives of liberation. Yet theirs is not the only class at war with the Common Good.
From left and right, reality is distorted by powerful interests, mobilising vengeance and often erotic desire, to recruit millions into self destructive factions.
Today, politics is a matter of identification with one faction or another. Each offers an identity, a history, a narrative of struggle.
Most of these factions are simply the masks of evil.
Only one faction promotes the Common Good.
TOWARDS THE COMMON GOOD
Today, I will show how Rerum Novarum explains how this crisis was created, and how it can be solved.
The Catholic Social Teachings provide a politics of the Common Good to replace the normalised evil which has victimised our peoples into hatred and strife.
Rerum Novarum says there is no reason for class war. As we examine why the Church says there is no reason for capital to fight labour, we see the practical solutions offered by the Church to end the war between ruler and ruled.
I will argue that the class war popularised at the turn of the 20th century has itself been refined by technique.
The solution offered in the Catholic Social Teaching also applies to the post-marxist social revolution currently at war with the basis of reason and reality.
Now more than ever we urgently require a practical manifesto to restore our civilisation.
The Catholic Social Teachings provide a clear and simple path for Man to harmonise his mind and soul with the reality created by God. It teaches the State to maximise human flourishing in all dimensions of life.
The State we are in is a result of over a hundred years of corruption and lies, sold as progress towards the universal emancipation of humanity.
We have been liberated from God and from meaning, from sense into nonsense, and out of order into chaos by the machinery of mass society mobilised in the service of nihilism. We are ruled by a death cult and our people are going insane.
We do not have to live like this.
If we do not stop this machine it will consume us all.
Rerum Novarum is often subtitled “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”.
The previous post explored the nature of rights and their definition.
This one will consider how the remedy of the Church to resolve class conflict extends beyond the enmity of capital to labour, and vice versa.
The same practical wisdom can resolve the conflict in our society between the factions of social revolution who have moved beyond the demand to abolish private property - and now seek to abolish the basis of reality itself.
IS A BETTER LIFE IMPOSSIBLE?
How could this be done? Surely all the signs today are that our society is consumed by wickedness and insanity - and that the civil war that is rumoured is in fact already underway?
Rerum Novarum speaks of the duties of working people as well as those of the owner class.
Its every argument applies equally to the ruler and to the ruled.
Factions of grievance have dissolved our societies into tribes of passionate moral nihilism.
This is the continuation of the revolutionary idea beyond the material realm, and into that of imagination and desire and will.
What began with Marxist demands for the seizure of property, production and exchange has produced a revolution to overturn the basis of reality itself.
Rerum Novarum shows us how this pernicious mobilisation of grievance has been utilised by the factions of communism, socialism and consumer nihilism.
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