Economic Soul/2 - From neo-Thomism to withstand the impact of the dominant culture to the ideas of Father Liberatore that paved the way for “Rerum novarum”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on January 18, 2026
«It is an anti-historical attitude par excellence to consider the problems, opinions, and feelings of the past in the same way as the feelings and convictions of a completely different era».
Arturo Carlo Jemolo, «Stato e Chiesa in Italia», p. 23-24
he history of the relationship between the Catholic Church and modern culture is one of missed encounters, mutual accusations and anathemas, which at times became a veritable pitched battle. It is a history that began at least with Luther and the Counter-Reformation and continued, at varying speeds, until Vatican II - and still continues today. The Catholic Church's reaction to the modern spirit was fear, and from this came counterattacks, closures, and condemnations of this disturbing guest. Modern man was therefore not perceived by the Catholic Church as a son, certainly rebellious but still a son; instead, he was perceived as an enemy, as the greatest enemy, the Gog and Magog who could have destroyed Christianitas. We will never know what Modernity and the Church could have become if the enemy had been treated as an adolescent son, if its threats had also been read as a development of the evangelical seeds of the Middle Ages, albeit matured in ways and on soils different from those imagined by the hierarchies and theologians. In the lives of individuals and peoples, the most difficult art to learn is to recognize salvation that comes where and how we would never have thought or wanted it to.
Even the process that led to Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum should be read within this failed encounter: "Leo XIII condemned modern thought, so bold in its judgment of religion and Catholicism, but he did not confront it: he judged it from the outside and from above, like his predecessor, he did not enter into it to analyze it, discern it, or break it down. The two stood facing each other all that time like two powerful armies, without coming into contact.“ These are the words of Romolo Murri, who continued: ”The pontificate of Leo XIII would have had a completely different character from what it had if the doctrinal documents were not what they are: rigid claims and systematic exposition, not a work of penetration into the modern world, of assimilation, of reintegration... Modern society has shown that it neither knows nor wants to persuade itself to abandon its ideas and ways in order to enter into those officially presented to it by the Church,“ because modern society ”wants to have its own experience" (Un papa, un secolo, e il cattolicesimo sociale, 1904, pp. 78-79). A modern experience that the Catholic Church did not understand and condemned, starting with freedom of conscience, its first ‘delusion’, as it was already defined by Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos, 1832), which led to the belief that ‘the faithful and the unbeliever, the orthodox and the heretic are all the same’. (M. Liberatore, La Chiesa e lo Stato, 1872, p. 48). A delusion, therefore, also called Liberalism. These ‘new things’ were not ‘good things’ for the Church, they were very bad; to these were soon added the great pressures of Socialism and Capitalism, and everything became complicated.
In this climate, Gioacchino Pecci, not yet Leo XIII, wrote in his letter for Lent in 1877: “A word that is so often misused by skeptics ... is the word ‘civilization’. This word has become a scourge” (Letters of Cardinal G. Pecci, 1880, pp. 119-120). And on the eve of Rerum Novarum, we read in La Civiltà Cattolica (an anonymous text, but probably by M. Liberatore): “There is no sensible man who does not foresee that, at this rate, Europe will overflow with the horrors of nihilism” (Year 1889, p. 257). Romolo Murri, on the other hand, hoped that the dawn of the 20th century would mark the beginning of something new, that ‘things’ would finally become ‘new’ and good. In other words, he hoped that Catholics would begin to “throw their ideas and their spirit into the forge of this experience of modern society, so that it might mature into a return to sanity, enlightened intentions, and a more intense religious life for humanity” (pp. 80-81). The path taken by Pius X, Leo XIII's successor, was not the one hoped for by Don Romolo Murri, as his personal biographical trajectory also testifies: two years after the publication of his book, Murri was suspended a divinis and then excommunicated in 1909. Pius X, beatified by Pius XII, exacerbated the anti-modernism already present in nineteenth-century Catholicism.
The genesis of Rerum Novarum is part of a very complex theological-social movement. After the Napoleonic period, the Catholic Church had begun, not without resistance, a partial theological and cultural renewal, centered on a return to St. Thomas and his theology. Rerum Novarum was not only the result of a return to the Thomist system and scholasticism, but we cannot understand it without Thomas and Thomism. Leo XIII began his pontificate by explicitly and ‘politically’ declaring his intention to return to Thomas. Aeterni Patris, of 1879, one of his first encyclicals (he wrote eighty-six), was in fact his theological and pastoral manifesto to “revive and restore to its original splendor the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas” (AP). Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci (Vincenzo was the name his mother called him) encountered and embraced Thomism as early as 1828, thanks to the lessons of Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio. In 1849, the Academy of Thomistic Philosophy was founded in Naples, and a few years later (1879), the magazine Divus Thomas was launched in Piacenza. Giuseppe Pecci, Gioacchino's brother, was also part of the Italian Thomist circle and founded the Academy of St. Thomas in Perugia (1859).
This theological elite realized that traditional, counter-reformist Catholic theology could not withstand the impact of modern thought. To try to face that cultural battle with some hope of not being annihilated, there was only one possibility: to stake everything on the best, most influential, and universally esteemed theologian: Thomas, the Doctor Angelicus, and therefore Aristotle. They were convinced that there was no better resource at their disposal. Thomas was already present in previous theological training (think of Spanish Scholasticism), but he was mixed with popular piety, the cult of saints, Augustine reinterpreted in a Platonic key, manuals for confessors, and the study of theology that was blocked by the reform of the Council of Trent. A relaunch was therefore needed, a systemic overview: “So that sacred theology may take on and assume the nature, form, and character of true science” (Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris). Neo-Thomism was thus born as a reform and innovation of the Church, as a reform of the training of priests. Thomism, however, did not interrupt that long modern season, which the Catholic Church experienced as an unbroken chain of errors from Luther onwards. Thomas did not become a means of dialogue between the Church and modernity, but an instrument of struggle.
When Cardinal Pecci became Leo XIII, he was already a Thomist. The presence of Thomas' philosophy in Rerum Novarum is therefore not attributable to the ideas of the professors who wrote the preparatory drafts. Leo chose them precisely because they were Thomists, as well as being the best in the Catholic world. One of these, certainly the most important and influential, was Father Matteo Liberatore. A native of Salerno like Antonio Genovesi (whom he ignored, although he certainly knew him), he was a Jesuit and one of the founders of Civiltà Cattolica (1850). He was a contemporary of Francesco Ferrara and Giacchino Pecci (a class of iron: all three died over the age of 80, Ferrara at 90 and Leo at 93). A brilliant writer and polemicist, he was one of the most brilliant thinkers of 19th-century Catholicism: “He was at the center of the most important moments in ecclesiastical life” (F. Francesco Dante, La civiltà cattolica e la Rerum Novarum, p. 49).
Towards the end of his life, in 1889, he wrote Principii di Economia Politica (Principles of Political Economy), a volume previewed in several articles published in La Civiltà Cattolica. Translated into English (1891) and French (1899), it had no impact on the economic science of the time. It was ignored by liberal economists. 1889 was also the year of the publication of Maffeo Pantaleoni's Principles of Pure Economics, the most influential textbook of that generation, written when the author was 32 years old: Liberatore was almost 80, another indicator of modernity. Liberatore was not an economist; his book is essentially a long economic homily, which left economic science exactly as he had found it, without even touching it. A treatise that perfectly symbolizes the different and divergent paths that Catholic social doctrine and modern economics had already taken. Reading the book, one realizes that it is a dialogue between the author and a few books—almost all of them at least fifty years old—in his study: Smith, Say, Minghetti, Bastiat, Malthus, Ricardo, Sismondi... There is no reference to Marx, who is hard to imagine in his library. The book is an excellent guide to understanding the approach of Rerum Novarum, where we find many of the ideas in this text by Liberatore. It is more useful to us today than it was to his contemporaries.
The tone of the book perfectly reflects that of the Church of his time: entirely defensive, and therefore polemical, aggressive, and nostalgic. The opening words are already strong and clear: “Modern liberalism is like a fly, which, wherever it alights, leaves a germ of corruption and stench” (p. 5). Liberalism does not coincide with economic liberalism - which Liberatore already calls capitalism - but, as B. Croce will explain later, the two are deeply related. The Catholic Church will hate cultural liberalism but will almost love economic liberalism.
The most interesting pages of the Treatise are those concerning private property, from which emerges the intention of the Church of the time to try to imagine the famous third way between socialism and capitalism. In reality, rather than a third way, it was an attempt to correct the first way, Capitalism, which in its basic social and philosophical structure was far preferred to Socialism, with a few adjustments (in employer-employee relations, in charity, and little else). The real enemy was therefore socialism, and capitalism appeared to be the lesser evil and perhaps even a good, especially because of its tenacious defense of private property and inequality among men as a natural and necessary condition—we will see this next Sunday. For now, let us just savor this sentence of his: "The most curious thing is that the advocates of equality boast of freedom. And they do not understand that freedom and equality are at odds with each other" (p. 163).
The third way inaugurated by Rerum Novarum thus became only the Catholic way to capitalism. Modernity, which was very frightening on a religious and social level (Liberalism and Socialism), was much less frightening in its capitalist guise. And today we see all the consequences.
