In the winter of 1887, a machinist from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, waited anxiously to learn if his Church would cast countless fellow workers beyond the reach of the sacraments.
He started as a railroad worker, became a machinist, then rose to mayor of Scranton. A Catholic, he also led the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an organization that, by 1886, counted 730,000 members and reached nearly a million at its height. His name was Terence Vincent Powderly.
The trouble started in Quebec. In 1884, Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau brought back the Church’s old ban on secret societies, which was first meant for the Freemasons, and applied it to the Knights. Catholics in Canada who stayed in the Order risked being denied absolution. The Knights had oaths, passwords, and rituals, which made them seem like a lodge to a Quebec church leader. But to a worker in Scranton, the Knights seemed like their only protection.
Pressure to spread the condemnation to the United States came quickly, and the consequences were very real. Many, if not most, Knights were Catholic. If the Church condemned the Order, it would force hundreds of thousands of its poorest members to choose between their faith and their union.
On 28 October 1886, the American archbishops met in Baltimore to decide what to advise Rome. They did not agree. Only two, Peter Richard Kenrick of St. Louis and Jean-Baptiste Salpointe of Santa Fe, wanted the condemnation. Because the vote was not unanimous, the question went to Rome anyway.
James Gibbons, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, took the issue to Rome. On 20 February 1887, he sent a memorial in French to Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, Prefect of Propaganda Fide. He wrote it with help from Bishop John Keane of Richmond, Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, and Denis O’Connell of the North American College. The memorial argued that the Knights’ constitution was not that of a secret society, that American conditions were different from those in Europe, and that workers had a right to what Gibbons called legitimate resistance.
After that came the argument that would outlast every other word in the document.
To lose the heart of the people would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.
On 16 August 1888, the Holy Office ruled that the Knights of Labor tolerari potest, it may be tolerated, subject to some tidying of the statutes. Gibbons told Ireland privately that he attached little or no importance to the conditions. Three years later, on 15 May 1891, LeGibbons was not defending socialism. He was standing up for something older and harder to define: the belief that a workers’ association has moral value the Church must recognize. When the Church sides with the powerful instead of the poor, it loses more than a policy debate—it risks losing its true purpose. But it’s its very reason for being.
This is the real question behind every comparison of Catholic social teaching and Christian socialism.
The main issue is not who owns the factories, but who the economy should serve.
What the economy is for
Catholic social teaching begins with the human person and radiates outward. It judges economic systems by whether they allow people to flourish, not by how much they produce.
The Christian socialist tradition began in London in 1848, when F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow started publishing under that name after the Chartist demonstration. Their main objection to capitalism was not about numbers. They believed a system that treats people as commodities, consumers, and units of labor would eventually make people see themselves that way.
Both traditions, then, reject the idea that whatever creates the most wealth is automatically good. That shared refusal underpins nearly all their points of convergence.
Yours, but not only yours
This is where the two traditions overlap most, and where misunderstandings often happen: private property. Both agree that the goods of creation are meant for everyone. Ownership is real, but it comes with conditions. You can own something, but that does not erase your responsibility to others.
Thomas Aquinas put the sharp edge on it in the Summa Theologiae(II-II, q. 66, a. 7). In a case of urgent and evident necessity, taking what one needs to survive is not, properly speaking, theft, because in that necessity the goods of creation revert to their common purpose. John Paul II gave the same idea its modern phrasing in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), where he wrote that private property carries a social mortgage.
Leo XIV restated it in May of this year, in language nobody can soften: “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable” (Magnifica Humanitas, 66).
The Catholic view is not that “property is theft” or that “what is mine is mine, and soci
ety has no claim on it.” Instead, it sees a chain: property leads to responsibility, which leads to the common good. This echoes the Christian socialist idea that property brings social duties. The real debate is not about abolishing property, but about what happens in the space between ownership and responsibility.
Reading from the bottom
Catholic social teaching often insists, even when it is uncomfortable, that society should be judged from the perspective of those at the bottom. The Christian socialist tradition says something similar: judge the system by what happens to workers, the poor, and those without power.
Both trace their lineage to the prophetic tradition. Isaiah and Amos, then Jesus, then the community described in Acts, then the Fathers, then the modern Christian social movements that ran from Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler of Mainz, whose Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum appeared in 1864, through Cardinal Manning in London, through Gibbons in Baltimore.
The question changes from “how much did society produce?” to “who benefited, who paid, and who made the decisions?”
That is a socialist question—and, just as clearly, a Catholic one.
Labor is not a commodity.
Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (1981) all refuse to reduce work to a price. Laborem Exercens states the principle most bluntly: labor has priority over capital. The worker is not an input.
Leo XIV extends it: “Work is not considered simply as a problem to be dealt with or a means of generating income, but a fundamental good for the person” (Magnifica Humanitas, 37). And he supplies the test. A fair wage is how you find out whether a company regards its workers as persons or as production costs.
This echoes the Christian socialist criticism of treating labor as a commodity. Both traditions reach the same conclusion.
Solidarity, and the sentence it refuses
In Catholic teaching, solidarity is more than just politeness. It is a statement about human nature: we are connected, depend on each other, and are responsible for one another, whether we choose to be or not.
The Christian socialist tradition refuses the same sentence Catholic teaching refuses. I earned mine; you look after yourself.
This is why Catholic social teaching can criticize laissez-faire capitalism, collectivism, nationalism, and radical individualism all at the same time, without contradiction. It is not trying to find a middle ground; instead, it uses one view of human nature to point out the problems in each approach.
The common good is larger than equality.
Here, Catholic thought moves away from socialism and takes a different path. It does not focus mainly on making everyone’s holdings equal. Instead, it asks what kind of society helps everyone thrive. The common good includes food, housing, work, health care, education, family, culture, participation, worship, friendship, and freedom. Leo XIV says the common good “cannot be reduced to a mere list of conditions or institutions” (Magnifica Humanitas, 60).
When we see the person more broadly, we also see the need for a wider solution. Distribution is important, but it is only one part of the answer.
Subsidiarity, and the workshop floor
Catholic teaching has grown steadily more interested in unions, cooperatives, worker ownership, and participation in the decisions that shape a job. Leo XIII defended workers’ associations; Pius XI affirmed the right to associate even more strongly.
Pius XI also gave the tradition its most politically awkward principle. In Quadragesimo Anno (79), he stated subsidiarity: it is an injustice to assign to a larger and higher body what smaller and lower bodies can do for themselves. Decisions belong as close as reasonably possible to the people who live with them.
Subsidiarity challenges both centralized state socialism and modern corporations, where people affected by decisions often learn last. If we take subsidiarity seriously, it suggests we need more democratic and participatory ownership, not just the old solutions from the last century.
The texts nobody wants to preach on
The strongest link between the two traditions may finally be exegetical rather than economic.
You cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24). Blessed are you who are poor (Luke 6:20). Woe to you who are rich (Luke 6:24). Sell what you own and give the money to the poor (Mark 10:21). Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me (Matthew 25:40).
Christian socialism sees these as economic statements. Catholic teaching does not turn them into laws, which is understandable. But it also refuses to treat them as only private spiritual advice, and that is the harder and more honest choice. When you do this, the economic life of society becomes a moral and spiritual issue, and stays that way.
The case against the comparison, stated at full strength.
Anyone making this argument should present the other side’s strongest case. Here it is.
The magisterium has condemned what we call communism, explicitly and more than once. Leo XIII did so in Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878), before he wrote a word about the workers’ condition. Rerum Novarum calls the socialist remedy of abolishing private property emphatically unjust and says it would harm the very workers it claims to help. Pius XI, having spent most of Quadragesimo Anno dismantling liberal capitalism, wrote at paragraph 120 that no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist. John Paul II, who had watched the experiment from inside it, located socialism’s fundamental error in its anthropology: it treats the person as a molecule of the social organism (Centesimus Annus, 13).
Nor does Catholic teaching accept class struggle as history’s engine. It reads conflict between capital and labor as a disorder to be resolved, not as the motor of progress. And it will not concede the state ownership of productive property.
What Catholic social teaching does instead is hold six pairs in tension, refusing to let go of either half:
That is why Catholic social teaching doesn’t fit neatly on a left-right spectrum. Both American political parties quote it when it suits them, but neither fully embraces it.
Why this lands hardest in the United States
Workers built the American Church—and nearly told them to walk away.
That is the important part of Gibbons’s story. He wasn’t merely being generous; he was honest about who made up the American Church: Irish, German, Polish, and Italian workers in mills, mines, and rail yards, who had little except each other and the sacraments.
The design repeated. On 12 February 1919, the National Catholic War Council issued the Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction, written by Monsignor John A. Ryan of the Catholic University of America. It called for a legal minimum wage, insurance against unemployment, illness, and old age, public housing, the abolition of child labor, and worker participation in management. Ryan argued for a living wage as early as 1906, in A Living Wage (Macmillan). He was called a socialist for it, for decades. He lived to see most of the program become the New Deal and was nicknamed Monsignor New Deal. He gave the benediction at Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration in January 1945.
Then Dorothy Day sold the first copies of The Catholic Worker in Union Square on 1 May 1933, for a penny, on May Day, to a crowd which had come to hear communists.
None of that history corresponds to the current American Catholic political scene, where party loyalty often comes before tradition, if tradition is considered at all. Today, Catholics tend to vote like everyone else. Very little in either party’s platform would be familiar to Gibbons, and each party only claims the parts of tradition that do not require sacrifice. This has made things awkward.
First, democratic socialism has become an ordinary feature of US electoral politics again, rather than an exotic one. Zohran Mamdani governs New York City. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Francesca Hong came close in Wisconsin. Milwaukee, which elected three socialist mayors in the last century, would find none of this surprising.
Second, the new pope hails from Chicago.
Robert Prevost was elected on 8 May 2025 and took the name Leo, which is not a neutral choice and was not meant to be. On 15 May 2026, 135 years to the day after Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, he signed Magnifica Humanitas and released it ten days later. It addresses artificial intelligence, work, and what it means to be human. Now, American Catholics are being given their own social tradition, in their own language, by one of their own, just when their politics has almost no place for it.
The algorithm at the dock gate
Leo XIII wrote about the factory. Leo XIV wrote about the model.
The technology has changed less than it might seem. In 1891, the question was what happens when a machine a person does not own, cannot inspect, and did not choose controls work. In 2026, the question is what happens when a system a person does not own, cannot inspect, and did not choose shapes work.
Three lines from Magnifica Humanitas do most of the work.
Technology “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” (9). That is Marshall McLuhan’s point with a moral obligation attached.
The universal destination of goods now reaches immaterial goods: patents, algorithms, platforms, and data (67). Concentrate those in a few hands, and you have recreated, in a new substance, the imbalance the principle exists to prevent.
The encyclical also clearly identifies the main players: “major economic and technological actors that exercise de factopower over the conditions.” The Catholic question about AI is not only about how much productivity it brings. It is the old Gibbons question, updated for today: Does this system expand human participation and freedom, or does it reduce people to inputs controlled by concentrated economic and technological power?
And this is where Matt Bruenig leads the People’s Policy Project and argues from a social-democratic economics perspective. Elizabeth Bruenig writes for The Atlantic and draws from Catholic theology. Again and again, they reach the same moral conclusions about economic life, even though they take different paths. They also met on their high school debate team, which I find meaningful because I have spent years coaching students to argue both sides of a topic and have seen what happens when they finally have to choose. must finally choose.
The real question is not whether Catholicism is socialism or communism. It is not, and the encyclicals make that unmistakably clear.
A better question is why two traditions that disagree about ownership, the state, and even history keep looking at the same economy and coming to the same conclusion.
The answer is that both traditions share a view of humanity: the person comes before the system. Everything else is just a debate about how to put this into practice.
Five tests, short enough for an index card
Who here is treated as an end, and who is treated as an input?
Does ownership in this arrangement still carry obligations, or has it been made absolute?
Read it from the position of the person with the least power. Does it hold?
Who participates in the decision, and how far are they from its consequences?
What does it do to work — does it make the worker more of a person, or less of one?
Gibbons wrote his memorial in French to a Roman cardinal, about a fraternal order that was already falling apart. The Knights disappeared within a generation. He likely knew this would happen, even then.
The sentence survived, even though it was never really about the Knights. It would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.
It is worth asking who is writing that kind of letter today, and to whom, and whether anyone in Rome, Washington, or Menlo Park is listening.
Questions to sit with
Gibbons argued that condemning the Knights would cost the Church the workers. If the same calculation were made today, which group would the American Church be most afraid of losing, and what does the answer reveal?
Catholic teaching says property is real but not absolute. Where, concretely, would you draw that line — for a house, for farmland, for a patent, for a trained model?
Subsidiarity says decisions belong near the people who live with them. Name one decision at your own work that violates this. Who would have to give something up to fix it?
Ryan was called a socialist in 1919 for proposing unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. What is being called socialist now that will look ordinary in fifty years — and what is being called ordinary now that will look indefensible?
If technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, and regulate it, what characteristics are currently being built into the systems you use every day, and who chose them?
Rerum Novarum asked what industrial work was doing to the human person. Ask it of your own week. Is the work you do making you more of a person or less of one — and are you able to tell?
Sources
Gibbons’ Memorial to Rome, 1887, and the 1886 archbishops’ meeting: The Catholic University of America Libraries, “Catholics and Labor Unionization”
Rome’s 1888 decision (tolerari potest): John Tracy Ellis, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, ch. 5, text at LacusCurtius
Henry J. Browne, The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949)
Knights of Labor membership and the Quebec condemnation: Knights of Labor, Wikipedia; Terence V. Powderly
Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026: full text, Vatican. va
Leo XIV on AI and the industrial revolution: National Catholic Reporter
Socialism and Catholic social teaching in current US politics: “Socialism is back in style,” America, 18 August 2026
The 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction: The Catholic University of America Libraries; John A. Ryan
Elizabeth Bruenig and Matt Bruenig: Elizabeth Bruenig, Wikipedia; People’s Policy Project
Encyclicals cited: Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878) and Rerum Novarum (1891); Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931); John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), Centesimus Annus (1991); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 66, a. 7
A Note on my blogs
Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.
The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.
As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.
I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads. And that is Wisdom Speaking. — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.😎