Faith Works 5-16-2025
Jeff Gill
Pope Bob from Dalton makes me smile
___
Habemus papam: we have a pope!
I'm from northwest Indiana and my father spent his last two decades working in Hegewisch, a Chicago neighborhood that's about as far south as you can get, with Dalton the next one over. So there's a whole bunch about Robert Prevost's upbringing which I can relate to, even if he's six years older than I am.
His mother was the Cubs fan; he's a White Sox fan, which is a comfort to many on the South Side, I'm sure.
A short point, and a longer observation: first, there are some complaints on social media about all the attention to a Catholic pope "because not everyone belongs to his church." True, but as a non-Catholic myself, what a pope says is worth hearing. I may not agree with all his doctrine, but the papacy is a leadership office in the world which in its own way is as consequential as, say, the president of Russia or the premier of China.
My longer comment has to do with choosing to be the fourteenth Leo of the 267 popes since St. Peter. The new pope has clearly said it's meant as a nod to Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, born in 1810.
Leo XIII wrote a papal encyclical titled: "Rerum novarum." In English, "Rights and duties" or "Rerum novarum" in Latin, short for "the rights and duties of capital and labor."
"Rerum novarum" is significant far beyond the Roman Catholic Church in that coming out in 1891 this was one of the earliest comprehensive social, theological, and political responses to Karl Marx's "Das Kapital."
Both works were meant as responses to what was known in the Nineteenth Century as "the Social question." In brief, this is the challenge presented to Western societies in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Rural life could be poor, but endurable, in a medieval culture where the people of the land might have no money or wealth, but their garden plots and market exchange provided a relatively decent standard of living.
The late 1700s and early 1800s saw a shift to mechanization, a move to urbanization, and a working class developing living in cities on a wage-earning basis . . . and for many in this new industrial working class, poverty of a different sort than came from drought or pestilence and crop failure in the country.
The Social question asked what was to be done about industrial scale poverty; two hundred years after the development of nation-states, in 1848 there were popular revolutions all across Europe, centered in urban areas, forcing an accounting of how a government should respond to poverty. One was the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which was developed into a broader theory of capital and class consciousness and ultimately revolution by Marx in 1867.
Meanwhile, in places like Great Britain were debates between people like Gladstone and Disraeli who were united in saying "constitutional democracy will sort this out" with a social safety net of sorts; northern Europe tended towards more of what we call today a "welfare state." In the U.S. of this period, our response was to say "Go West, young man" and solve such socio-economic tensions with the frontier and homesteading.
Leo XIII said "there's another way." That's what "Rerum novarum" is, basically. An attempt with an eye towards eternity to talk about current tensions between labor and capital that is neither weighted towards revolution nor is it a faith in a welfare state to create a safety net. Without getting into further detail on Leo XIII's other way, what we've heard from Leo XIV is that in 2025, it's time for the Catholic Church and Christians in general to look at the lives of working class people in light of emerging technology once again, and look for "other ways."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got social questions aplenty. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
Jeff Gill
Pope Bob from Dalton makes me smile
___
Habemus papam: we have a pope!
I'm from northwest Indiana and my father spent his last two decades working in Hegewisch, a Chicago neighborhood that's about as far south as you can get, with Dalton the next one over. So there's a whole bunch about Robert Prevost's upbringing which I can relate to, even if he's six years older than I am.
His mother was the Cubs fan; he's a White Sox fan, which is a comfort to many on the South Side, I'm sure.
A short point, and a longer observation: first, there are some complaints on social media about all the attention to a Catholic pope "because not everyone belongs to his church." True, but as a non-Catholic myself, what a pope says is worth hearing. I may not agree with all his doctrine, but the papacy is a leadership office in the world which in its own way is as consequential as, say, the president of Russia or the premier of China.
My longer comment has to do with choosing to be the fourteenth Leo of the 267 popes since St. Peter. The new pope has clearly said it's meant as a nod to Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, born in 1810.
Leo XIII wrote a papal encyclical titled: "Rerum novarum." In English, "Rights and duties" or "Rerum novarum" in Latin, short for "the rights and duties of capital and labor."
"Rerum novarum" is significant far beyond the Roman Catholic Church in that coming out in 1891 this was one of the earliest comprehensive social, theological, and political responses to Karl Marx's "Das Kapital."
Both works were meant as responses to what was known in the Nineteenth Century as "the Social question." In brief, this is the challenge presented to Western societies in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Rural life could be poor, but endurable, in a medieval culture where the people of the land might have no money or wealth, but their garden plots and market exchange provided a relatively decent standard of living.
The late 1700s and early 1800s saw a shift to mechanization, a move to urbanization, and a working class developing living in cities on a wage-earning basis . . . and for many in this new industrial working class, poverty of a different sort than came from drought or pestilence and crop failure in the country.
The Social question asked what was to be done about industrial scale poverty; two hundred years after the development of nation-states, in 1848 there were popular revolutions all across Europe, centered in urban areas, forcing an accounting of how a government should respond to poverty. One was the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which was developed into a broader theory of capital and class consciousness and ultimately revolution by Marx in 1867.
Meanwhile, in places like Great Britain were debates between people like Gladstone and Disraeli who were united in saying "constitutional democracy will sort this out" with a social safety net of sorts; northern Europe tended towards more of what we call today a "welfare state." In the U.S. of this period, our response was to say "Go West, young man" and solve such socio-economic tensions with the frontier and homesteading.
Leo XIII said "there's another way." That's what "Rerum novarum" is, basically. An attempt with an eye towards eternity to talk about current tensions between labor and capital that is neither weighted towards revolution nor is it a faith in a welfare state to create a safety net. Without getting into further detail on Leo XIII's other way, what we've heard from Leo XIV is that in 2025, it's time for the Catholic Church and Christians in general to look at the lives of working class people in light of emerging technology once again, and look for "other ways."
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got social questions aplenty. Tell him what yours are at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.
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