Merton, Cardijn, Rerum Novarum, and the New Things of Our Time: Magnifica Humanitas

this is long for a post but important

Merton, Cardijn, Rerum Novarum, and the New Things of Our Time: Magnifica Humanitas

In ten days, we celebrate the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. More than a century ago, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum—”On the New Things”—to address the social upheaval of industrial capitalism. His central message—labor is not a commodity, workers deserve dignity, and justice is essential—remains as urgent today as ever. This text argues that revisiting the core lessons of Rerum Novarum, through the voices of Leo XIII, Cardijn, and Merton, can provide a guiding framework for responding to the challenges of work, technology, and justice in our own time.

Three figures help us hear that message today: Thomas Merton, the monk who paid close attention to the world; Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who lost his father to harsh labor and never forgot it; and Leo XIII, who wrote boldly for dignity. Their perspectives bring Rerum Novarum’s challenge into the present.

Together, they offer something we need urgently right now: a way of seeing what is actually happening around us, a way of judging it honestly in light of the Gospel, and a way of acting that is neither naive nor despairing. That, in essence, is what Joseph Cardijn called the See-Judge-Act method. And it turns out to be a remarkably good framework for navigating the “new things” of our own time.

Joseph Cardijn: The Man Who Started with a Coffin

Before exploring the method, it is important to understand the individual behind it.

Joseph Cardijn was born in 1882 outside Brussels to a working-class Catholic family. His father, Henri, was a coal gas worker — the kind of man Rerum Novarum was written about but who rarely got to read it. Henri Cardijn died young, from an illness directly connected to his labor. His son never got over it and never intended to.

Cardijn became a priest and threw himself into the lives of young workers — factory hands, shop girls, apprentices, domestic servants ~ people who left school at thirteen or fourteen and disappeared into an industrial economy that showed little interest in their souls. He founded the Young Christian Workers movement (known in French as the Jocistes, or JOC — Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne) in 1925, and it spread to over a hundred countries.

His well-known declaration continues to resonate: “Every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

Cardijn was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the evening before the close of the Second Vatican Council, where his influence on Gaudium et Spes and Catholic social thought had already been profound. He died in 1967. His cause for beatification is open. Whether or not he is eventually canonized, his method has already shaped the Church more than most people realize.

See: Looking at What Is Actually There

The first movement of See-Judge-Act is deceptively simple. Before you can judge anything, you have to look at it clearly and honestly. Not the version of it that is comfortable. Not the abstract version. The actual reality in front of you.

Cardijn was insistent about this. He trained young workers to observe their own lives — their working conditions, wages, relationships, and fears — with open eyes and without flinching. He believed that most injustice survives not because people approve of it, but because they have stopped noticing it. Familiarity is a great anesthetic.

Thomas Merton understood the same thing from a very different vantage point. From his monastery in Kentucky, Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface — distracted, fragmented, and cut off from our own deepest selves. When that happens, we start accepting a counterfeit version of progress: faster is better, bigger is better, and more efficient is better. We stop asking whether any of it is actually good. We stop seeing.

This is why contemplation, for Merton, was not a retreat from the world. It was the practice of seeing it as it actually is, without the filters of habit, comfort, or self-interest. A contemplative person is not less engaged with the world. They see it more clearly.

When we examine the modern workplace with openness, what do we find? We see algorithmic management — software that decides your schedule, monitors your pace, scores your performance, and sometimes ends your employment, all without a human being making a judgment call. We see automation quietly eliminating jobs that people depended on for decades, while the productivity gains flow almost entirely to shareholders. We see precarious, gig-based work that strips away the stability that once allowed a family to plan for the future. We see surveillance — tracking software on the work laptop, cameras on the warehouse floor — that treats employees less like people and more like variables to be optimized.

Many people today — maybe some of you reading this — feel invisible in their work. Others carry a low-grade anxiety that they could be replaced tomorrow by a machine, a cheaper contractor, or an algorithm that doesn’t need health insurance. Those in their 50s have a particular vantage point on all of this: you have watched the workforce transform over the course of a single career. You remember what it felt like before. That memory is not nostalgia. It is evidence. And Cardijn would tell you it is the beginning of wisdom.

Judge: Measuring What We See Against the Gospel

Seeing clearly is the beginning. The second movement — Judge — asks us to evaluate what we have seen in the light of something deeper than economic logic or market efficiency. For Cardijn, that light was the Gospel. For Leo XIII, it was the natural law and the dignity of the human person. They are, in the end, pointing at the same thing.

This is precisely where Rerum Novarum remains prophetic. Leo XIII defended the right to private property, but he insisted that property carries a social purpose — it is not simply yours to do with as you please if others are harmed. He defended the dignity of labor and insisted that workers are owed just wages and humane treatment. He rejected both ruthless capitalism and socialism, because both — in their different ways — can end up treating persons as means rather than ends. At the heart of the encyclical is a truth that should be embarrassingly obvious but apparently needs repeating in every generation: the economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.

Merton brings a crucial complement to this judgment. He reminds us that clear moral reasoning requires inner freedom — the kind that comes from honest self-examination and silence. A person who has never questioned their culture’s assumptions cannot judge it. A community that mistakes busyness for virtue cannot ask whether its busyness is actually good. Before we can judge our economic arrangements rightly, we need some interior space in which to do the judging. That is not a weakness. That is basic moral hygiene.

Cardijn’s judgment was characteristically direct. He looked at the young workers of his day and said: The system is treating you as less than human, and that is a sin — not just a policy failure, but a sin. He insisted that workers were not passive recipients of the Church’s charity. They were people of dignity, capable of understanding their own situation, capable of acting on it, and called by their baptism to do so. The laity are not helpers in the Church’s mission. They are the Church’s presence in the world.

That insight plays out differently when applied to artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and automated systems. These are not inherently evil. They can be remarkable tools. But when they are used to deepen inequality, to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, or to make it easier to sort, score, monitor, and discard human beings at scale — that is a moral failure, not merely a technical one. The Church does not need to oppose technology to critique its misuse. It only needs to keep saying what should never need saying: a human being is never just data. Never just output. Never just a productive unit.

Judging our moment honestly means sitting with that statement long enough to feel its weight — and then asking where, in our own lives and workplaces, we are still treating people as productive units.

Act: Doing Something About It, Here and Now

This is where Cardijn pushes us hardest, and where Catholic social reflection most often gets stuck.

Seeing and judging are just beginnings. Acting—taking real, sometimes costly steps to change things—is where intentions often stall. Cardijn insisted faith must lead to action. See-Judge-Act is a way of life, practiced continually among ordinary people.

What does Act look like for adults who are now in their 40s,50s, 60s + — people with influence, experience, organizational knowledge, and often genuine power to shape the environments they inhabit?

It might look like a manager who decides that the algorithmic performance review system their company uses is stripping people of their dignity — and says so in the meeting where everyone else is nodding along. It might look like a consumer who starts asking inconvenient questions about the supply chains behind the prices they enjoy. It might look like a parishioner who brings the language of Rerum Novarum into a conversation about their city’s affordable housing crisis, or a mentor who takes the time actually to see a younger worker who feels invisible.

Cardijn’s “like by like” principle is worth remembering here. He believed that workers were best reached by other workers — not by clergy or academics arriving from outside with answers, but by people who knew the reality from the inside. The same logic applies today. The person best positioned to humanize a workplace is usually someone who works there. You.

Here, Merton and Cardijn come together surprisingly. Merton insisted that authentic action flows from a contemplative foundation — that if we skip the seeing and rush straight to the doing, we often reproduce the very problems we were trying to solve, just under new management. Cardijn would agree. His small group method — what we now call the “cell” or inquiry group — was explicitly designed to slow people down before speeding them up: observe, reflect, then move. The action that follows genuine seeing and honest judging is qualitatively different from that of a simple reaction.

For Our Moment: Leo XIV and the Questions That Remain

As we enter the early years of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, this three-voice conversation feels more timely than ever. Whether his forthcoming social teaching is formally titled Magnifica Humanitas or something else, the direction is clear: the Church must speak again, and speak plainly, about human dignity in a moment of profound disruption.

The challenge today is not only how to protect workers. It is about protecting what it means to be human in a world of systems we barely understand and do not fully control. That is a profoundly Catholic question — and it is exactly the kind of question that Cardijn’s method was built for. See what is actually happening. Judge it against the dignity of the human person. Act, concretely and together, to change what needs to be changed.

Leo XIII gave us the moral framework. Merton gave us the inner life to sustain it. Cardijn gave us the method to put it to work.

In the end, the “new things” of every age are not just new machines or new markets. They are new tests of whether we will still recognize one another as brothers and sisters — whether the people we work alongside, compete with, or never see at all still register to us as fully human.

Merton helps us see that. Rerum Novarum helps us judge it. Cardijn sends us back into the world to do something about it. The Gospel gives us the reason to try.

And that reason is simple to name, though genuinely hard to live: dignity, justice, solidarity, and love.

Questions to Sit With

These are not quiz questions. They are invitations for honest reflection — the kind worth turning over slowly, perhaps in conversation with someone you trust, or in a small group willing to go somewhere real together. They follow the shape of Cardijn’s own method.

See

1. Look at your actual working life right now — or the one you recently left. What do you observe about how people are treated? Not the official version, but what you genuinely see day to day. Who feels seen? Who doesn’t? What has changed in the past decade that nobody talks about openly?

2. Technology has reshaped nearly every workplace in the past thirty years. What has genuinely improved because of it? What has quietly been lost — and have we grieved that loss, or moved on without noticing?

Judge

1. Cardijn insisted that every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world. Do the systems around you — economic, organizational, political — actually operate as if that were true? Where do they fall short, and what justifications do we use to make peace with the gap?

2. Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface, too busy and distracted to see clearly. Where in your own life do you actually slow down? Is it enough? And if not, what has filled the space that used to belong to reflection?

Act

1. Cardijn believed that the laity — ordinary people in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and families — are not helpers of the Church’s mission, but the Church’s presence in those spaces. What would it mean for you to take that seriously this week? Not in a grand sense, but in one specific, concrete situation you are already in.

2. See-Judge-Act is not meant to be done alone. Cardijn’s method works in small groups — people who know the same reality from the inside and can hold each other accountable. Do you have a community like that? A small group, a trusted circle, a parish team willing to go beyond pleasantries? If not, what would it take to build one?

3. We are at a crossroads with artificial intelligence that feels, in some ways, like the industrial revolution felt to Leo XIII’s contemporaries. What “new thing” worries you most about the world your children and grandchildren are inheriting? And what is the one action — however small — that is actually within your reach to take in response?

Rumor has it that in ten days Pope Leo XIV will issue his first Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). When the document is released, read it using the See - Judge - Act method of understanding. Get together with your small groups, parish, and social friends to discuss what the document means in today’s world. Do what Cardijn and Merton would do, and, most especially, plan how you will act and then act on what you plan.