Pope Pius XII Pentecost 1941 Radio Message
Pope Pius XII’s Pentecost 1941 Radio
Message
This is the full text of Pope Pius XII’s Radio Message of
June 1, 1941, on the 50th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Encyclical letter Rerum
Novarum. The message is published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS) 33 (1941). The
allocution is there in three languages: the original Italian is on pages
195-205; the French version is on pages 205-216; the English version is on
pages 216-227. This message is quoted Pope Pius XII’s 1952 Apostolic Constitution
Exsul Familia Nazarethana. Pope John XXIII refers to it in his 1961 encyclical Mater
et Magistra, on the 60th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, in his
summary of the development of the development of Pope Leo XIII’s teaching. Pope John Paul II refers to it in his 1991 encyclical
Centesimus Annus, on the 100th anniversary, in his summary.
Discourse
of His Holiness Pius XII to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Encyclical Rerum
Novarum of Pope Leo XIII on the Social Question. - Feast of Pentecost, June
1, 1941.
The
feast of Pentecost, that glorious birthday of the Church of Christ, is to Our
mind, dear children of the whole world, a welcome and auspicious occasion and
one full of high import, on which to address to you, in the midst of the
difficulties and strife of the present hour, a message of love, encouragement
and comfort. We speak to you at a moment when every energy and force, physical and
intellectual, of an ever-increasing section of mankind is being strained, to a
degree and intensity never before known, beneath the iron, inexorable law of
war; and when from other radio stations are going forth words full of passion,
bitterness, division and strife.
But
the radio station of the Vatican Hill, of that ground dedicated to be the
uncontaminated source of the Good Tidings and of their beneficent diffusion
throughout the world from the place of martyrdom and tomb of the first Peter,
can transmit only words animated with the consoling spirit of that preaching
with which on the first Pentecost Day as it came from the lips of St. Peter,
Jerusalem resounded and was stirred. It is a spirit of burning apostolic love,
a spirit which is conscious of no more vivid desire, no holier joy than that of
bringing all, friends and enemies, to the feet of the Crucified One of Calvary,
to the tomb of the Glorified Son of God and Redeemer of the human race, to
convince all that only in Him, and in the truth taught by Him, and in the love
which He, doing good to all and healing all, taught by His example even to
sacrificing Himself for the life of the world, can there be found true
salvation and lasting happiness for individuals and for peoples.
One
soul
In
this hour, pregnant with events that are known only to the divine counsels
which rule the story of nations and watch over the Church, it is for us,
beloved children, a source of sincere joy and gratification in letting you hear
the voice of your Common Father, to call you together, so to speak, in a
Worldwide Catholic meeting, so that you may experience and enjoy in the bond of
peace that one heart and one soul which held together under the impulse of the
Holy Spirit, the faithful of Jerusalem on Pentecost Day. As the circumstances
created by the war make direct, living contact between the Supreme Pastor and
His flock in many cases difficult, We greet with all the more gratitude this
most expedite bridge which the inventive genius of our age throws across the
ether in a flash, to unite across mountains, seas and continents every corner
of the earth. And thus what for many is a weapon of war becomes for Us a heaven-sent
means of patient, peaceful apostolate which realizes and gives new significance
to the words of Holy Scripture: “Their sound hath gone forth unto all the
earth; and their words unto the ends of the world.” Thus does it seem as if
were renewed the miracle of Pentecost, when the different peoples who had
assembled in Jerusalem from regions speaking various languages, heard the voice
of Peter and the Apostles in their own tongue.
With
genuine delight We today make use of so wonderful an instrument, in order to call
to the attention of the Catholic world a memory worthy of being written in
letters of gold on the Calendar of the Church: the fiftieth anniversary of the
publication, on May 15, 1891, of the epoch-making social Encyclical of Leo XIII
Rerum Novarum.
It
was in the profound conviction that the Church has not only the right but even
the duty to make an authoritative pronouncement on the social question, that
Leo XIII addressed his message to the world. He had no intention of laying down
guiding principles on the purely practical, we might say technical side of the
social structure; for he was well aware of the fact—as Our immediate
predecessor of saintly memory Pius XI pointed out ten years ago in his
commemorative Encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno—that the Church does not
claim such a mission. In the general framework of labor, to stimulate the sane
and responsible development of all the energies physical and spiritual of individuals
and their free organization, there opens up a wide field of action where the
public authority comes in with its integrating and coordinating activity
exercised first through the local and professional corporations, and finally in
the activity of the State itself, whose higher moderating social authority has
the important duty of forestalling the dislocations of economic balance arising
from plurality and divergence of clashing interests individual and collective.
It
is, on the other hand, the indisputable competence of the Church, on that side
of the social order where it meets and enters into contact with the moral
order, to decide whether the bases of a given social system are in accord with
the unchangeable order which God our Creator and Redeemer has shown us through
the Natural Law and Revelation, that two-fold manifestation to which Leo XIII
appeals in his Encyclical. And with reason: for the dictates of the Natural Law
and the truths of Revelation spring forth in a different manner, like two
streams of water that do not flow against one another but together, from the
same divine source; and the Church, guardian of the supernatural Christian
order in which nature and grace converge, must form the consciences even of
those who are called upon to find solutions for the problems and the duties
imposed by social life. From the form given to Society, whether conforming or
not to the divine law, depends and emerges the good or ill of souls, depends,
that is, the decision whether men, all called to be revived by the grace of
Christ, do actually in the detailed course of their life breathe the healthy
vivifying atmosphere of truth and moral virtue or the disease-laden and often
fatal air of error and corruption. Before such a thought and such an
anticipation, how could the Church, loving Mother that she is, solicitous for
the welfare of her children, remain an indifferent onlooker in their danger, remain
silent or feign not to see or take cognizance of social conditions which,
whether one wills it or not, make difficult or practically impossible a
Christian life, in conformity with the precepts of the Divine Lawgiver?
Conscious
of such a grave responsibility, Leo XIII addressing his Encyclical to the world
pointed out to the conscience of Christians the errors and danger of the materialist
Socialism conception, the fatal consequences of economic Liberalism so often unaware,
or forgetful, or contemptuous of social duties; and exposed with masterly
clarity and wonderful precision the principles that were necessary and suitable
for improving—gradually and peacefully— the material and spiritual lot of the
worker.
If,
beloved children, you ask Us today, after fifty years from the date of
publication of the Encyclical, to what extent the efficacy of his message
corresponded to its noble intentions, to its thoughts so full of truth, to the
beneficent directions understood and suggested by its wise author, We feel that
We must answer thus: It is precisely to render to Almighty God from the bottom
of Our heart, Our humble thanks for the gift which, fifty years ago, He
bestowed on the Church in that Encyclical of His Vicar on earth, and to praise
Him for the lifegiving breath of the Spirit which through it, in ever growing
measure from that time on, has blown on all mankind, that We on this feast of
Pentecost, have decided to address you.
Our
Predecessor Pius XI has already exalted, in the first part of his commemorative
Encyclical, the splendid crop of good to which Rerum Novarum like a
fertile sowing had given rise. From it sprang forth a Catholic social teaching
which gave to the children of the Church, priests and laymen, an orientation
and method for social reconstruction which was overflowing with good effects;
for through it there arose in the Catholic field numerous and diverse
beneficent institutions that were flourishing centers of reciprocal help for
themselves and others. What an amount of wellbeing, material and natural, what
spiritual and supernatural profit has come to the workers and their families
from the Catholic unions! How efficacious and suited to the need has been the help
afforded by the Syndicates and Associations in favor of the agricultural and
middle class to relieve their wants, defend them from injustice, and in this
way, by soothing passion, to save social peace from disorder!
Nor
was this the whole benefit. The Encyclical Rerum Novarum, coming down to
the people and greeting them with esteem and love, went deep into the hearts
and esteem of the working class, and inspired it with a sense of Christian
sentiment and civil dignity; indeed its powerful influence came, with the
passage of the years, to expand and spread to such an extent that its norms
became almost the common property of all men. And, while the State in the
nineteenth Century, through excessive exaltation of liberty, considered as its
exclusive scope the safeguarding of liberty by the law, Leo XIII admonished it
that it had also the duty to interest itself in social welfare, taking care of the
entire people and of all its members, especially the weak and the dispossessed,
through a generous social program and the creation of a labor code. His call
evoked a powerful response; and it is a clear duty of justice to recognize the
progress which has been achieved in the lot of workers through the pains taken
by civil authorities in many lands. Hence was it well said that Rerum Novarum
became the Magna Carta of Christian social endeavor.
Meanwhile
there was passing a half Century which has left deep furrows, and grievous
disturbance in the domain of nations and society. The questions which social
and especially economic changes and upheavals offered for moral consideration
after Rerum Novarum, have been treated with penetrating acumen by Our
immediate Predecessor in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. The ten years
that have followed it have been no less fraught with surprises in social and economic
life than the years before it and have finally poured their dark and turbulent
waters into the sea of a war whose unforeseen currents may affect our economy
and society.
What
problems and what particular undertakings, some perhaps entirely novel, our
social life will present to the care of the Church at the end of this conflict
which sets so many peoples against one another, it is difficult at the moment
to trace or foresee. If, however, the future has its roots in the past, if the experience
of recent years is to be our guide for the future, We feel We may avail
Ourselves of this commemoration to give some further directive moral principles
on three fundamental values of social and economic life; and We shall do this,
animated by the very spirit of Leo XIII and unfolding his views which were more
than prophetic, presaging the social evolution of the day. These three
fundamental values, which are closely connected one with the other, mutually
complementary and dependent, are: the use of material goods, labor, and the
family.
Use
of Material Goods
The
Encyclical Rerum Novarum expounds on the question of property and man’s
sustenance, principles which have lost nothing of their inherent vigor with the
passage of time, and. today, fifty years after, strike their roots deeper and
retain their innate vitality. In Our Encyclical Sertum Laetitiae
directed to the bishops of the United States of America We called the attention
of all to the basic idea of these principles which consists, as We said, in the
assertion of the unquestionable need “that the goods, which were created by God
for all men, should flow equally to all, according to the principles of justice
and charity.”
Every
man, as a living being gifted with reason, has in fact from nature the
fundamental right to make use of the material goods of the earth, while it is
left to the will of man and to the juridical Statutes of nations to regulate in
greater detail the actuation of this right. This individual right cannot in any
way be suppressed, even by other clear and undisputed rights over material
goods. Undoubtedly the natural order, deriving from God, demands also private
property and the free reciprocal commerce of goods by interchange and gift, as
well as the functioning of the State as a control over both these institutions.
But all this remains subordinated to the natural scope of material goods and
cannot emancipate itself from the first and fundamental right which concedes
their use to all men; but it should rather serve to make possible the actuation
of this right in conformity with its scope. Only thus can we and must we secure
that private property and the use of material goods bring to society peace and
prosperity and long life, that they no longer set up precarious conditions
which will give rise to struggles and jealousies, and which are left to the
mercy of the blind interplay of force and weakness.
The
native right to the use of material goods, intimately linked as it is to the
dignity and other rights of the human person, together with the statutes
mentioned above, provides man with a secure material basis of the highest
import, on which to rise to the fulfilment, with reasonable liberty, of his
moral duties. The safe guardianship of this right will ensure the personal
dignity of man, and will facilitate for him the attention to and fulfilment of
that sum of stable duties and decisions for which he is directly responsible to
his Creator. Man has in truth the entirely personal duty to preserve and order
to perfection his material and spiritual life, so as to secure the religious
and moral scope which God has assigned to all men, and has given them as the
supreme norm obliging always and everywhere, before all other duties.
To
safeguard the inviolable sphere of the rights of the human person and to
facilitate the fulfillment of his duties should be the essential office of
every public authority. Does not this flow from that genuine concept of the
common good which the State is called upon to promote? Hence it follows that
the care of such a common good does not imply a power so extensive over the
members of the community that in virtue of it the public authority can
interfere with the evolution of that individual activity which We have just
described, decide directly on the beginning or—excepting the case of legitimate
capital punishment —the ending of human life, determine at will the manner of
his physical, spiritual, religious and moral movements in opposition to the
personal duties or rights of man, and to this end abolish or deprive of
efficacy his natural rights to material goods. To deduce such extension of
power from the care of the common good would be equivalent to overthrowing the
very meaning of the word common good, and falling into the error that the
proper scope of man on earth is society, that society is an end in itself, that
man has no other life which awaits him beyond that which ends here below.
Likewise
the national economy, as it is the product of the men who work together in the
community of the State, has no other end than to secure without interruption
the material conditions in which the individual life of the Citizens may fully
develop. Where this is secured in a permanent way, a people will be, in a true
sense, economically rich because the general well-being, and consequently the
personal right of all to the use of worldly goods is thus actuated in conformity
with the purpose willed by the Creator.
From
this, beloved children, it will be easy for you to conclude that the economic
riches of a people do not properly consist in the abundance of goods, measured
according to a purely and solely material calculation of their worth, but in
the fact that such an abundance represents and offers really and effectively
the material basis sufficient for the proper personal development of its
members. If such a just distribution of goods were not secured, or were
effected only imperfectly, the real scope of national economy would not be attained;
for, although there were at hand a lucky abundance of goods to dispose of, the
people, in not being called upon to share them would not be economically rich
but poor. Suppose on the other hand that such a distribution is effected
genuinely and permanently and you will see a people even if it disposes of less
goods, making itself economically sound.
These
fundamental concepts regarding the riches and poverty of peoples, it seems to
Us particularly opportune to set before you today, when there is a tendency to
measure and judge such riches and poverty by balance sheets and by purely
quantitative criteria of the need or the redundance of goods. If instead, the
scope of the national economy is correctly considered, then it will become a
guide for the efforts of statesmen and peoples, and will enlighten them to walk
spontaneously along a way which does not call for continual exactions in goods
and blood, but will give fruits of peace and general welfare.
Labor
With
the use of material goods you yourselves, dear children, see how labor is
connected. Rerum Novarum teaches that there are two essential
characteristics of human labor: it is personal and it is necessary. It is
personal, because it is achieved through the exercise of man’s particular
forces; it is necessary, because without it one cannot secure what is
indispensable to life; and man has a natural grave individual obligation to
maintain life. To the personal duty to labor imposed by nature corresponds and
follows the natural right of each individual to make of labor the means to
provide for his own life and that of his children; so profoundly is the empire
of nature ordained for the preservation of man.
But
note that such a duty and the corresponding right to work is imposed on and
conceded to the individual in the first instance by nature, and not by society,
as if man were nothing more than a mere slave or official of the community.
From that it follows that the duty and the right to organize the labor of the
people belongs above all to the people immediately interested – the employers
and the workers. If they do not fulfill their functions or cannot because of
special extraordinary contingencies fulfill them, then it falls back on the
State to intervene in the field of labor and in the division and distribution
of work according to the form and measure that the common good properly
understood demands.
In
any case, every legitimate and beneficial interference of the State in the
field of labor should be such as to safeguard and respect its personal
character, both in the broad outlines and, as far as possible, in what concerns
its execution; and this will happen, if the norms of the State do not abolish
or render impossible the exercise of other rights and duties equally personal;
such as the right to give God His due worship; the right to marry; the right of
husband and wife, of father and mother to lead a married domestic life; the
right to a reasonable liberty in the choice of a state of life and the fulfillment
of a true vocation; a personal right, this last, if ever there was one, belonging
to the spirit of man, and sublime when the higher imprescriptible rights of God
and of the Church meet, as in the choice and fulfilment of the priestly and
religious vocations.
The
Family
According
to the teaching of Rerum Novarum, nature itself has closely joined
private property with the existence of human society and its true civilization,
and in a very special manner with the existence and development of the family.
Such a link appears more than obvious. Should not private property secure for
the father of a family the healthy liberty he needs in order to fulfil the
duties assigned him by the Creator regarding the physical, spiritual, and
religious welfare of the family?
In
the family the nation finds the natural and fecund roots of its greatness and
power. If private property has to conduce to the good of the family, all public
standards, and especially those of the State which regulate its possession,
must not only make possible and preserve such a function—a function in the natural
order under certain aspects superior to all others—but must also perfect it
ever more.
A
so-called civil progress, would, in fact, be unnatural, which—either through
the excessive burdens imposed, or through exaggerated direct interference—were
to render private property void of significance, practically taking from the
family and its head the freedom to follow the scope set by God for the
perfection of family life.
Of
all the goods that can be the object of private property, none is more
conformable to nature, according to the teaching of Rerum Novarum, than
the land, the holding in which the family lives, and from the products of which
it draws all or part of its subsistence. And it is in the spirit of Rerum
Novarum to state that, as a rule, only that stability which is rooted in
one’s own holding, makes of the family the vital and most perfect and fecund
cell of society, joining up in a brilliant manner in its progressive cohesion
the present and future generations. If today the concept and the creation of
vital spaces is at the center of social and political aims, should not one,
before all else, think of the vital space of the family and free it of the
fetters of conditions which do not permit even to formulate the idea of a
homestead of one’s own?
Our
planet, with all its extent of oceans and seas and lakes, with mountains and
plains covered with eternal snows and ice, with great deserts and tractless
lands is not, all the same, without habitable regions and vital spaces, now
abandoned to wild natural vegetation, and well suited to be cultivated by man
to satisfy his needs and civil activities; and more than once it is inevitable
that some families, migrating from one spot or another, should go elsewhere in
search of a new homeland.
Then,
according to the teaching of Rerum Novarum the right of the family to a
vital space is recognized. When this happens, emigration attains its natural
scope, as experience often shows; We mean the more favorable distribution of
men on the earth’s surface, suitable to colonies of agricultural workers; that
surface which God created and prepared for the use of all.
If
the two parties, those who agree to leave their native land, and those who agree
to admit the newcomers, remain anxious to eliminate as far as possible all
obstacles to the birth and growth of real confidence between the country of emigration
and that of immigration, all those affected by such a transference of people
and places will profit by the transaction. The families will receive a plot of
ground which will be native land for them in the true sense of the word; the
thickly inhabited countries will be relieved, and their peoples will acquire
new friends in foreign countries; and the states which receive the emigrants
will acquire industrious Citizens. In this way the nations which give and those
which receive will both contribute to the increased welfare of man and the
progress of human culture.
These
are the principles, concepts and norms, beloved children, with which We should
wish even now to share in the future organization of that new order which the
world expects and hopes will arise from the seething ferment of the present
struggle, to set the peoples at rest in peace and justice. What remains for us
but, in the spirit of Leo XIII and in accordance with his advice and purpose,
to exhort you to continue to promote the work which the last generation of your
brothers and sisters has begun with such staunch courage? Do not let die in
your midst and fade away the insistent call of the two Pontiffs of the social
Encyclicals, that voice which indicates to the faithful in the supernatural
regeneration of mankind the moral obligation to cooperate in the arrangement of
society, and especially of economic life, exhorting those who share in this
life to action no less than the State itself. Is not this a sacred duty for
every Christian?
Do
not let the external difficulties put you off, dear children; do not be upset
by the obstacle of the growing paganism of public life. Do not let yourselves
be misled by the manufacturer of errors and unhealthy theories, those
deplorable trends not of increase but of decomposition and of corruption of the
religious life: currents of thought which hold that since redemption belongs to
the sphere of supernatural grace, and is therefore exclusively the work of God,
there is no need for us to cooperate on earth. Oh lamentable ignorance of the
work of God! Professing themselves to be wise they became fools (Romans 1:22).
As
if the first efficacy of grace were not to cooperate with our sincere efforts to
fulfil every day the commandments of God, as individuals and as members of
society; as if for the last two thousand years there had not lived nor
persevered in the soul of the Church the sense of the collective responsibility
of all for all; so that souls were moved and are moved even to heroic charity,
the souls of the monks who cultivated the land, those who freed slaves, those
who healed the sick, those who spread the faith, civilization and science to all
ages and all peoples, to create social conditions which alone are capable of
making possible and feasible for all a life worthy of a man and of a Christian.
But you, who are conscious and convinced of this sacred responsibility, must
not ever be satisfied with this widespread public mediocrity, in which the
majority of men cannot, except by heroic acts of virtue, observe the divine precepts
which are always and in all cases inviolable.
If
between the ideal and its realization there appears even now an evident lack of
proportion; if there have been failures, common indeed to all human activity,
if divergencies of view arose on the way followed or to be followed, all this
should not make you depressed or slow up your step or give rise to lamentations
or recriminations; nor can it make you forget the consoling fact that the
inspired message of the Pope of Rerum Novarum sent forth a living and
clear stream of strong social sense, sincere and disinterested; a stream which
if it be now partly perhaps covered by a landslide of divergent and
overpowering events, to-morrow, when the ruin of this world hurricane is
cleared, at the outset of that reconstruction of a new social order, which is a
desire worthy of God and of man, will infuse new courage and a new wave of
profusion and growth in the garden of human culture.
Keep
burning the noble flame of a brotherly social spirit which fifty years ago, was
rekindled in the hearts of your fathers by the luminous and illuminating torch
of the words of Leo XIII; do not allow or permit it to lack for nourishment;
let it flare up through your homage; and not die, quenched by an unworthy,
timid, cautious inaction in face of the needs of the poor among our brethren,
or overcome by the dust and dirt carried by the whirlwind of the anti-Christian
or non-Christian spirit. Nourish it, keep it alive, increase it; make this flame
burn more brightly: carry it wherever a groan of suffering, a lament of misery,
a cry of pain reaches you; feed it ever more with the beat of a love drawn from
the Heart of your Redeemer, to which the month that now begins is consecrated.
Go
to that divine Heart meek and humble, refuge of all comfort in the fatigue and
responsibility of the active life; it is the Heart of Him who to every act
genuine and pure done in His name and in His spirit, in favor of the suffering,
the hard-pressed, of those abandoned by the world, or those deprived of all
goods and fortune, has promised the eternal reward of the blessed: you blessed
of my Father! What you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done it
to me!