Flashback, February 1878: Leo XIII Begins Surprising Papacy

For years, Gioacchino Pecci, Cardinal Bishop of Perugia, had hardly seemed papabile (“pope-able”—i.e., a plausible candidate for Roman Catholic pontiff). 

He wasn’t a member of the Curia, the Vatican’s administrative unit; he had so botched an early diplomatic posting to Belgium that he had been withdrawn at the urging of that country’s royal family; he had run afoul of the powerful papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli. 

And now, after being elected pope on the third ballot on February 20, 1878, Pope Leo XIII appeared, in his frail, 67-year-old body, unlikely to be more than a caretaker for a venerable but embattled institution.

Instead, Pope Leo surprised everyone by lasting for 25 years, advancing scholarship within the Roman Catholic Church, soothing the Church’s troubled relationship with rulers and activists in the streets, and, most important, kick-starting the social-justice movement within the Church through a series of encyclicals.

As the College of Cardinals prepares to gather for another conclave to elect a pontiff in the wake of Benedict XVI’s unexpected resignation—the first pope to resign in six centuries—speculation has run rampant over possible candidates and whether the eventual winner might change the Church. 

Leo’s tenure offers one possible scenario of how an evolution can occur in an institution that, to the frustration of many, often reacts to events and new schools of thought at a snail’s pace.

Leo was hardly a radical; indeed, one doesn’t exist for years in the Church hierarchy without absorbing its basic assumptions. Moreover, a number of his positions were not out of step with those of his predecessor, Pius IX. 

All the way into his 90s, for instance, Leo believed that he would recover the Papal States, the territories under direct sovereign rule of the popes for an entire millennium before they were lost in the midcentury drive for Italy's unification. 

In addition, disturbed by continued anti-clericalism in Europe, he launched an unnecessary pre-emptive strike against the “Americanism heresy” of separation of church and state—a move that the most prominent American prelate of the late 19^th century, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, regarded as a slap at the faithful in the growing United States.

With that said, the reign of Leo represented a welcome change from that of Pius. Recently, columnist E.J. Dionne noted that Benedict XVI was “a kind of neo-conservative — not in his foreign-policy attitudes but in sociological terms,” a moderate progressive who ended up recoiling not just from the student rebellions of the late 1960s in his native Germany but also from nearly any deeper examination of Church theology. 

In a sense, Pius was the Church’s neocon prototype—only he turned away from what he perceived as the nationalist, secularist excesses of Europe in the late 1840s. 

By the end of his reactionary three-decade period as the Vicar of Christ, he had refused to accept his diminished temporal power (even to the point of becoming a rather farcical "prisoner of the Vatican") and pushed through the doctrine of papal infallibility. 

In the process, he encouraged Protestants who believed Catholicism was, by its nature, antithetical to any notions of democracy, republican government or, scientific, philosophical or even theological innovation. His was the longest pontificate in history, and it did some of the worst damage.

With a culture that stresses tradition, the Vatican is slow to change, even in those instances where it is clearly perceived, even at the time, that a mistake has been made. 

For one thing, the pope who made the initial move has already stacked the Church hierarchy with his own appointees; second, the work culture of the Vatican reflects the la dolce vita lifestyle of Italy as a whole (recall Pope John XXIII’s wisecrack when asked how many people work at the Vatican: “About half”); and third, an immediate admission of an error obviously calls into question papal infallibility.

For this reason, popes advance the Church incrementally, in ways often not immediately apparent to casual observers. 

Favorites of the last pontiff find themselves sidelined to less conspicuous positions; those previously in disfavor see their thinking and achievements recognized at last; canon law is tinkered with at the margins; rhetoric is recalibrated, to a notably less fevered pitch; and new initiatives are launched.

Leo was not about to undo everything Pius did; in fact, the centralizing tendencies of his predecessor would prove crucial in his attempt to steer the Church in a different direction. But his elevation to his new office unleashed an unanticipated burst of energy in the aging cardinal, so much so that within hours of his election he cried out, "I want to carry out a great policy!"

The papacy under Leo, then, offers a good example of the type of evolution we might expect to see in a pontiff of the near future with conservative, but not reactionary, instincts:

*Henry Cardinal Manning, who had used his position as an ally of Pius to undercut fellow Catholic convert John Henry Newman, saw his rival become a cardinal himself in 1879.

* “The new pope does not…curse, he does not threaten…The form is sweet,” editorialized the Italian journal Riforma—and Leo used that tone to re-set the Vatican’s disastrous relationship with Otto von Bismarck, who had used Pius’ promulgation of infallibility as an excuse to push his policy of Kulturkampf, or subordination to the new German state. Within a few years after Leo’s ascension, Bismarck began to rescind the worst of the anti-Catholic legislation.

*Many in the Vatican bureaucracy had resisted opening its archives to historians, who they felt were prejudiced in favor of Protestants, if not secular. Leo would have none of it. “There are some of you who, if you had lived in the time of Christ, would have wanted to suppress the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter,” he answered. In 1881, Leo opened the archives to historians, including Protestants—a boon to research about Europe’s past.

*In the greatest paradox of all, Leo—though of aristocratic birth—decided to confront the twin specters of unfettered capitalism and socialism with Rerum Novarum (1891), one of 85 encyclicals—the most of any pontiff. (By comparison, the energetic John Paul II, in the same length of time, issued only 14.)

Consider this line from the encyclical: “A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.” Mainstream thought in the current Republican Party would regard that as unmitigated class warfare. 

The impact in its own time was revolutionary. “Leo’s attack on unrestricted capitalism, his insistence on the duty of state intervention on behalf of the worker, his assertion of the right to a living wage and the rights of organized labor, changed the terms of all future Catholic discussion of social questions…” wrote Eamon Duffy in his history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners. “Without being either a democrat or a radical himself Leo opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy.”

Flashback, August 1935: FDR Signs Social Security Act

President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought into being one of his most enduring domestic domestic-policy achievements when he signed the Social Security Act. With a stroke of the pen on August 14, 1935, he established a floor beneath an American labor force that had been in free fall since the start of the Great Depression. 

The epochal legislation ensured old-age benefits for workers, benefits for victims of industrial accidents, as well as aid for dependent mothers and children, the blind, and the physically handicapped. 

If you want to identify the rise of the so-called “welfare state” at the federal level, this is about as good a starting point as you can get. 

Particularly over the last 30 years, it’s become more common to read about Social Security as a) giant ponzi scheme in which today’s young are taxed to subsidize the elderly, and b) an anachronistic scheme inexorably headed, because of major demographic changes, towards insolvency. 

At the time of its creation, none of the latter was necessarily inevitable. It was only after 1950 that increasingly generous modifications of the program were voted into law, allowing for the size of the Social Security system to exceed welfare benefits. 

Nevertheless, for all its problems, Social Security remains an almost politically untouchable program, and for a good reason: it’s impervious to the shocks that a private program, subject to the vagaries of a volatile stock market, would endure. 

The drubbing that George W. Bush suffered when he decided to expend his political capital after the 2004 election was a necessary corrective to a profoundly foolhardy idea. As horrifying as the Great Recession has been, matters would have been infinitely worse if Congress had voted in favor of Bush’s scheme for private investment accounts. (Imagine bailing out all of that.) 

It’s interesting to note a few other aspects of the passage of Social Security: 

* Social Security was not a Socialist scheme, but instead an attempt to ward off Socialism and other forms of “thunder on the left.” In this sense, FDR’s motives resembled those of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in Germany. Bismarck could hardly be called a radical, but his championing of old-age pensions, accident and health insurance took the steam out of much of the socialist movement in Germany in the 1880s. While not an authoritarian in the Bismarck mode, FDR needed to deal with similar leftist challenges at home by the middle of his first term. In particular, he wanted to co-opt a scheme then raging—the so-called Townsend Plan, calling for $200 per month to every citizen age 60 or older (at a time when the average monthly wage in 1935 was only about $100 per month)—with one he judged to be more economically and politically feasible.

* Social Security was not a carefully conceived plan from the beginning of the New Deal, but rather a reaction to events. In his first inaugural address, FDR had called for “bold, persistent experimentation,” a process of testing to see what worked and what did not. By the time of his fireside chat two years later calling for passage of the Social Security Act and the Works Progress Administration, however, he was defending these as part of a unified program. If this address contradicted a point he made in the most memorable fashion at the start of his term, however, it made another that couldn’t be more appealing to the younger unemployed: The program, he noted, would “help those who have reached the age of retirement to give up their jobs and thus give to the younger generation greater opportunities for work and to give to all a feeling of security as they look toward old age.”

* Social Security made a major dent in the often high poverty rate among the elderly. Before the Great Depression, poverty had been a steadily rising among those 60 and older. That concern has gradually ebbed with the passage of Social Security and its amendments over the years. 

 * Passage of the legislation featured a high percentage of bipartisan support. In contrast to Obamacare, which passed with skin-of-its-teeth margins, Social Security received affirmative “yea” votes from 81 House Republicans and 16 Senate Republicans.