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Robert Francis Prevost, the newly elected pope of the 1.4 billion-member Roman Catholic Church, identified artificial intelligence as one of the main issues facing humanity. Cardinal Prevost took the pontifical name of Leo XIV, suggesting he holds special deference to the social and economic teachings of Pope Leo XIII, who held the office from 1878-1903.
Pope Leo XIII affirmed the inviolability of private property rights, the requirement for decent wages, and several other principles in his encyclical “Rerum Novarum (Of New Things),” published May 15, 1891. The 11,000-word document outlined and refined the church’s social teachings on the rights and duties of workers and owners of capital to one another and the larger society, specifically focusing on improving the material conditions of the working classes. The encyclical defies simple ideological classification. It refrains from specific policy advice. Instead, it outlines general principles.
Pope Leo affirmed that “every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.” He also recognized that the government had an essential role in property regulation that cannot be set in stone. “The limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man’s own industry, and by the laws of individual races,” he wrote.
He grounds private property rights in natural law as distinct from divine command: “With reason, then, the common opinion of mankind … has consecrated the principle of private ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature.” He goes on to conclude: “The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”
On wages and working conditions: “Let the working man and the employer make free agreements … [but] that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner.” How this principle comports with contemporary notions of “fair” or “living” wages is not clear, but the pope was unequivocal: “If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accepts harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”
Pope Leo XIII’s views were neither Karl Marx nor Ayn Rand, neither communism nor anarchistic capitalism. We will be very interested to see how Leo XIV builds on Leo XIII’s insights from 134 years ago to consider the economic, social, moral and spiritual challenges of contemporary technological innovations such as artificial intelligence.•
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Bohanon and Horowitz are professors of economics at Ball State University. Send comments to [email protected].
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