Justified True Belief

(●) The pope who sent Christians back to Thomas Aquinas and wrote the church’s first full answer to the factory age. + In 1878 the cardinals, the senior churchmen whose one constitutional job is to choose a pope, elected a frail bishop of sixty-seven who had spent thirty-two years in a provincial town. Several of them expected to be back in conclave, the locked election that makes the choice, within a couple of years. They thought they were appointing a caretaker. He reigned for twenty-five years, and when he died the church’s relationship with the modern world had changed shape. Two documents did most of that work. Aeterni Patris (1879) told every Catholic school and seminary to go back and learn from Thomas Aquinas, and started a revival of medieval philosophy that was still producing first-rate books a century later. Rerum Novarum (1891) looked at what industrial work was doing to ordinary families and said, in a voice no pope had used before, that a wage too small to live on is an injustice whatever the worker agreed to. Neither document belongs only to Catholics. A good many of the arguments for God that fill philosophy departments today run on lines Leo told his church to recover, and the Protestant social thinkers of the 1890s were working the same ground at the same hour. One fact fixes him in time better than any date. Leo XIII was born in 1810, when Napoleon ruled Rome, and in 1898 he stood in the Vatican gardens and blessed a moving-picture camera. Of every human being who has ever been captured on film, he is the earliest born.

(●) 1810 AD: Born the sixth of seven sons in a hill town of the Papal States. + Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci was born on 2 March 1810 at Carpineto, a stone town in the hills south of Rome, to Count Lodovico Pecci and his wife Anna Prosperi Buzi. Carpineto lay inside the Papal States, and that phrase is worth slowing down for, because nothing else in the first half of his life makes sense without it. Across the middle of Italy the pope ruled as a king as well as a bishop, with his own government, his own courts and his own soldiers, and he would still be ruling that way when Pecci was sixty. The family was minor nobility of the sort that owned land, held local office, and counted every scudo. When the young Gioacchino later applied to the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics in Rome he met some doubt about whether the Pecci were noble at all, so he sat down and wrote a history of his own family to prove that they were a branch of the Pecci of Siena who had moved into the Papal States in the sixteenth century. It is a small thing, but it tells you something about him: when challenged, he went to the documents. At eight he was sent away with his brother Giuseppe, who was ten, to the new Jesuit school at Viterbo, and he stayed there six years. What those years gave him, more than anything else, was Latin. It became a second native tongue to him, which is why his encyclicals read the way they do, and why he went on writing Latin verse for his own pleasure to the end of his life. In 1824 the brothers moved on to the Collegio Romano, and when Gioacchino finished the course in rhetoric, which is the old training in how to speak and write so that people are persuaded, he was the student chosen to give the public address in Latin. He picked as his subject the contrast between pagan Rome and Christian Rome.

(●) 1837 AD: Ordained at twenty-seven, and sent within weeks to govern a province overrun by bandits. + He took a doctorate in theology in 1832 and went on to canon and civil law at the Sapienza. For a while he was not sure he wanted to be a priest at all, and there is nothing strange in that. Like plenty of ambitious young Romans he was reading theology and law together with a public career in view, and in a state the pope governed those two roads ran side by side for a long way before they forked. So Gregory XVI made him a domestic prelate in January 1837, which is an honorary rank in the papal household rather than a job, while he was still in minor orders, that is, in the first formal steps toward the priesthood and some distance short of ordination. The real work came with a desk in the Congregazione del Buon Governo, the interior ministry of the Papal States. Then cholera came to Rome, and he helped Cardinal Sala, the patron who had taken him up, oversee the city hospitals. It was Sala who pressed him toward the priesthood, hinting that a post was waiting which a layman could not hold. He was ordained on 31 December 1837. The post was governor of Benevento, a papal city stranded inside the Kingdom of Naples, and its problem was brigandage. Bands left over from the Napoleonic wars were working the countryside with the quiet protection of local nobles. Pecci arrived on 2 February 1838, came down with typhoid almost at once, recovered, and then went after the nobles rather than only the bandits, which was the part nobody expected. The bands had been chased for years without much trouble coming to the nobles who sheltered them, and naming those nobles took a different kind of nerve. He also negotiated a joint agreement with the Naples police so that a gang could not simply cross the border and vanish. In three years the province was quiet. In July 1841 he was sent to Perugia, a town with a strong anti-papal party, and governed it for a year and a half. There he did something worth noticing in the light of what he wrote fifty years later: he started a savings bank that lent to small tradesmen and farmers at low interest. He had seen, close up, that the working man’s problem is usually not idleness but the price of credit.

(●) 1843 AD: Three years as nuncio in Brussels put him inside an industrial country. + In January 1843 he was appointed nuncio to Brussels, which is to say the pope’s resident ambassador, and made titular Archbishop of Damietta. A titular see is a diocese that survives only as a name on a list, the church having lost the place itself centuries earlier, and it is handed to a man who needs a bishop’s rank for work that lies somewhere else entirely. Cardinal Lambruschini consecrated him on 19 February. Belgium at that moment was two things at once. It was the first country on the European mainland to industrialize, with coal and iron and the new railways, and it was a young kingdom where a Catholic majority and a Liberal minority were fighting hard over who would run the schools. Pecci backed the bishops on the schools, which in the end left the ministry glad to see him go, and he kept the good opinion of the court all the same: he came away with the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold and a warm letter in the king’s own hand, and Leopold I was no friend of the church’s claims. He travelled while he was there: through Rhenish Prussia in 1845, to Cologne and Mainz and Trier. When he was recalled he spent a month in London and a month in Paris, and met, among others, Nicholas Wiseman, later the first cardinal archbishop of Westminster. It is easy to skip past this chapter as diplomatic filler. It was not. Almost no one in the Roman curia of the 1840s had stood in a coal town and watched what the new economy did to a family’s week. He had.

(●) 1846 AD: Thirty-two years as bishop of Perugia, while the Papal States disappeared around him. + He made his solemn entry into Perugia on 27 July 1846 and stayed until 1878. Gregory XVI had meant to give him a cardinal’s hat, the rank that would have set him among the men who elect a pope. The old pope died first, and the hat did not come until 19 December 1853. Pius IX several times offered to bring him closer to Rome and he preferred to stay where he was, though it is fair to say that he and Cardinal Antonelli, the secretary of state, were not natural allies. The diocese got a working bishop. He insisted his priests actually preach, and catechize adults and not only children. He rebuilt the seminary, which he called the apple of his eye, paid for part of it himself, sat in on the examinations, and sometimes taught. And in that seminary, long before he had any thought of being pope, he introduced the study of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, and in 1872 founded an Accademia di San Tommaso to carry it on. His brother Giuseppe, by then a serious Thomist scholar, was at his elbow in all of it. The programme of Aeterni Patris was already running in one Umbrian seminary for twenty years before it went out to the world. These were not calm decades. In 1859 a handful of insurgents set up a provisional government in Perugia, and Pecci wrote begging them not to resist the papal troops sent to put it down. They refused. The troops stormed the town, and what happened there is the episode Italians still remember as the massacre of Perugia. In September 1860 it was Piedmontese troops entering the same town, Umbria was annexed before the year was out, and over the next years he wrote protest after protest against the new government’s religious laws, in his own name and for the bishops of Umbria. He never once ended up in serious trouble with the civil power; he was brought to court only once and was acquitted. By the mid-1870s his pastoral letters had turned to a larger question, the church and modern civilization, and men in Rome began to read them.

(●) 1878 AD: Elected at sixty-seven as a short reign, he lived to govern for twenty-five years. + Cardinal de Angelis died in July 1877, and that September Pecci was named camerlengo, the cardinal who administers the church between one pope and the next, which obliged him to move to Rome. Pius IX died on 7 February 1878, and after three ballots Pecci was elected on 20 February with forty-four of the sixty-one votes. He took the name Leo XIII and was crowned on 3 March. The coronation was held in the Sistine Chapel rather than in the open at Saint Peter’s, and the reason explains much of what followed. Italy had taken Rome in 1870 and the popes did not recognize the loss. Leo maintained his predecessor’s protest to the end and never set foot outside the Vatican again, which is where the phrase "prisoner of the Vatican" comes from. He also kept the rule forbidding Italian Catholics to vote in national elections, expecting that their absence would force the Italian state to deal with him. It did not work, and his successor dropped the policy. He was capable of being wrong at length, and this is the clearest case. Everywhere outside Italy he did better. He had inherited a papacy on cold terms with most of the governments of Europe, and within a decade the German Kulturkampf, Bismarck’s campaign against the Catholic church, was being wound down by agreement rather than by defeat. The smaller decisions went the same way. In 1878 he restored the Scottish hierarchy, which meant giving the Catholics of Scotland their own bishops and dioceses again in place of a mission administered from Rome. In 1879 he made John Henry Newman a cardinal, over the objections of men who thought the most famous English convert of the century unsound. In 1892 he asked French Catholics to stop fighting the Republic and to work inside it instead, advice most of them ignored.

(●) 1881 AD: He opened the Vatican archives to scholars of every church, and told them to follow the evidence. + The Vatican Secret Archives hold the papacy’s own paperwork back into the Middle Ages, including the parts no institution enjoys having read. In 1881 Leo opened them to researchers, and two years later, in a letter on historical study addressed to three cardinals, he gave his reason. It was not that the record was flattering. It was that a church which hides its record invites the worst construction of it. The historian’s duty, he wrote there, in a line he took from Cicero, is not to dare to say anything false and not to keep silent about anything true. (Cicero, De Oratore II.15.62, quoted in Saepenumero Considerantes, 18 August 1883; the letter survives in Latin and Italian, and the wording given here follows the Italian text.) Then he staffed the place as though he meant it. He brought in the best archivists he could find, among them the German church historian Joseph Hergenröther and the Dominican Heinrich Denifle, a palaeographer, which is to say a scholar trained to read the handwriting of ages that had no printing, and he built a reading library for the scholars using the collection. The same instinct produced the Vatican Observatory. On 14 March 1891 he re-established it on the hill behind the basilica, and said the point was to show that the church did not merely tolerate real science but wanted to promote it. A papacy that had put Galileo on trial was now running a telescope, and Leo meant everyone to notice. He was not equally open in every direction, and it would be dishonest to let the archives leave that impression. There were doors he shut hard. He ruled in 1896 that Anglican clergy are not truly ordained at all, and he kept the old restrictions on putting a Bible into a labourer’s hands without a guide, and both count against him as squarely as this counts for him. But on the one question of whether a church ought to be afraid of its own documents, his answer was no, and he acted on it.

(●) 1903 AD: He died at ninety-three, older than any other pope has been while still reigning. + Leo XIII died on 20 July 1903, aged ninety-three, after a reign of twenty-five years and five months. Two records rest on that sentence. Of all the men who have held the office, only Benedict XVI has lived longer, and he had resigned it nearly ten years before he died, so no other pope has been older than Leo was while still in office. Of the verified reigns, only two have run longer than his, those of Pius IX and John Paul II. None of it was owed to a strong constitution. He had never been robust, and what carried him was an almost mechanical regularity of habit together with a working day that exhausted the younger men around him. In 1898 the inventor William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, once of Edison’s laboratory and by then working in Europe for the Mutoscope and Biograph company, filmed him in the Vatican gardens over several sittings: riding in a carriage, walking, carried in a sedan chair, seated among his clerics, and rising to bless the camera itself. The surviving accounts put the filming in the spring or early summer of that year and do not agree on the month, and for a century the footage was credited to the wrong company and the wrong year, 1896, until work in the Vatican’s own archives sorted it out. The old man who had been a boy in Napoleon’s Rome is on film raising his hand toward the lens. He left eighty-six encyclicals, more than any pope before him, and two of them are still argued over by people who have never read the other eighty-four.

What He Taught

(T1) Reason is God’s own gift, and faith does not shrink it. + Imagine a man who has been told, all his life, that becoming a Christian will cost him his mind. He will have to stop asking certain questions. He will have to accept answers he is not allowed to test. By the 1870s that was the settled assumption of educated Europe, and a good many Christians had quietly accepted the terms, retreating into feeling and leaving argument to the other side. Aeterni Patris, issued on 4 August 1879 in the second year of his reign, refused the bargain. Leo’s claim is that the light of reason and the light of faith come from the same God, so the second cannot put out the first; grace completes nature rather than replacing it. Philosophy, on that view, is not a rival to faith but its outer defence, what he calls the bulwark of faith and the strong defence of religion (Aeterni Patris 7), because the people attacking Christianity borrow their weapons from philosophers and the defenders have to know how those weapons work. Then he named a teacher. Scholasticism is the method of the medieval schools: state the question, put the strongest objections first, answer them one at a time, and show your reasoning as you go. Its master was Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican whose Summa Theologiae argues in exactly that shape. Leo told the schools and seminaries of his church to go back to him, and added two conditions that are often forgotten. Read Thomas from his own pages, not from the textbooks about him. And where a medieval writer says something that a later age has disproved, do not repeat it for the sake of loyalty. He put money behind the instruction. A commission was set up in 1880 to produce a proper critical edition of everything Aquinas wrote, working from the manuscripts; the first volume appeared in July 1882, and the edition still bears his name.

(Q) "For, not in vain did God set the light of reason in the human mind; and so far is the super-added light of faith from extinguishing or lessening the power of the intelligence that it completes it rather, and by adding to its strength renders it capable of greater things." + Source: Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, 2 (English text published by the Holy See). He has just conceded that argument alone will not convert anybody, and that the church depends on grace rather than on clever men. The sentence is what he says next: the helps God has given are not to be thrown away because they are not everything, and chief among them is the right use of philosophy (T1).

(T2) Scripture is God’s word in every part, and the sacred writer did not err. + By 1893 the Bible had been under a particular kind of assault for sixty years. Higher criticism is the study of a biblical book’s sources, authorship and date, as against lower criticism, which compares manuscripts to establish the wording. The method is legitimate and Leo said so. What alarmed him was the habit that had grown up around it. A scholar would assume in advance that the miracles were legend, and then reason backwards from that assumption to a late date and a fictional author, so that the assumption did the work and the evidence was fitted to it afterwards. David Friedrich Strauss, whose life of Jesus treated the Gospel miracles as myth gathered around a real man, had shown a whole generation how to do it. Providentissimus Deus, issued on 18 November 1893, answered with a rule and a caution, and the caution is the half that gets forgotten. The rule: inspiration covers the whole of Scripture, not a devotional core with a husk of human error around it, because a book God is the author of cannot contain what God knows to be false. The caution: when Scripture describes the natural world it uses the speech of ordinary people, and the Holy Spirit "did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation" (Providentissimus Deus 18, quoting Augustine). The sacred writers, Leo says there, borrowing a phrase from Aquinas, "went by what sensibly appeared". The sun rises in Scripture for the same reason it rises in a weather report. He was demanding, not defensive. He wanted Catholic students to learn Hebrew and Greek and the neighbouring ancient languages, to work on the manuscripts, and to beat the critics on their own ground rather than complain about them. He established a standing commission for biblical studies in 1902. Protestant readers who agree with almost nothing else in his teaching often find themselves agreeing here, since the fight over an errant Bible was running just as hard in Princeton and Edinburgh as in Rome.

(Q) "But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred." + Source: Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, 20 (English text published by the Holy See). The sentence sits in a paragraph about honest difficulties. Leo has just granted that copyists made mistakes, and that some passages are genuinely ambiguous and need patient work. What he will not allow is the shortcut of conceding that the writer got it wrong, and a few lines later he gives the reason: inspiration excludes error as certainly "as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true" (T2).

(T3) Abolishing private property would rob the very poor it promises to rescue. + A bricklayer works, is paid, spends carefully, and after fifteen years has enough put by for a strip of land and a house on it. Leo’s argument starts there and asks a simple question about that strip of land. Where did it come from? It is the man’s wages in another form, saved instead of eaten. So a system that takes the land away from him is not taking from the rich; it is reaching back and taking the wages he earned, and with them the whole reason he went without. Rerum Novarum, issued on 15 May 1891, opens by facing the problem squarely rather than by defending the arrangement. A few men, Leo writes, now control the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade, and have laid on the mass of working people "a yoke little better than that of slavery itself" (Rerum Novarum 3). He is not a man explaining that everything is fine. His objection to the socialist remedy is that it misses who pays. Common ownership was the natural answer in the air in 1891, and Leo rejected it on the ground that ownership is a natural right, older than the state and not the state’s to grant or cancel: "Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body" (Rerum Novarum 7). A father, he adds, is bound by nature to provide for children who continue his own life, and he cannot do it with nothing of his own to pass on. Both halves of this have been quoted selectively for more than a century, by people defending property who skip the yoke, and by people quoting the yoke who skip the property. Leo held them together on purpose.

(Q) "Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life." + Source: Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 5 (English text published by the Holy See). The paragraph before this one makes the move the argument turns on: a working man’s savings, and the small property he buys with them, are simply his wages under another form. Take one and you have taken the other (T3).

(T4) A wage too small to live on is unjust, whatever the worker agreed to. + This is the sentence in Rerum Novarum that made people sit up, and it is worth seeing what it was answering. The respectable economics of 1891 held that a wage is a price, a price is settled by agreement, and once the agreed sum is handed over the employer has discharged every obligation he has. Leo restates that position fairly before he touches it, which is how you can tell he understood it. Then he takes it apart in two steps. Labour is personal, in that a man can decide whether to work at all; if that were the whole story, he would indeed be free to accept any wage or none. But labour is also necessary, because he must eat, and what a man does under the compulsion of hunger is not a free bargain in the way a purchase of furniture is. Beneath any contract, therefore, lies an older obligation that no contract can cancel: the wage must be enough to keep a sober and hard-working man alive. Leo is careful about what follows from this. He does not hand the state a wage schedule. His preference is for boards and associations to settle rates locally, with the law standing behind them where it must, and he expects a decent wage to work its way outward: a man who can support his wife and children can also save a little, and a workman with savings is a workman with a floor under him. The moral principle underneath is not new, and he knew where it came from. "Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts" (James 5:4). The law of Moses had said the same thing about paying a poor labourer before sunset (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Leo’s contribution was to apply it to a textile mill.

(Q) "Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner." + Source: Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 45 (English text published by the Holy See). Note what the sentence concedes before it claims anything. Free agreement stands; Leo is not abolishing the labour contract or setting a rate from Rome. He is saying that a bargain struck by a hungry man does not settle the question of justice, because the obligation is older than the bargain (T4).

(T5) Working men may form their own societies, and the state exists to protect that right rather than to crush it. + In 1891 workers’ associations were illegal or barely legal across much of Europe and widely suspected of being revolution in disguise. Leo defended them, and the shape of his defence matters. He does not say that unions are a useful concession, or that governments may permit them if they behave. He says men have a natural right to join together, because human beings are made to live in societies, and that a state forbidding its citizens to associate is attacking the very principle it stands on. The guilds of the Middle Ages had done this work, he notes, and nothing had been put in their place when they were swept away. He asks two further things of government, and they cut in opposite directions. Government should not swallow the family or the association; the smaller society has its own life and its own rights. And government must actively protect the weak, because a rich man has resources of his own while a labouring man has almost nothing but the law. Wage-earners, Leo says, belong mostly to the mass of the needy and therefore have a particular claim on the state’s care. Out of that pair of claims grew a principle later Catholic writers named subsidiarity: let the smallest body that can handle a matter handle it, and let the larger one step in when it genuinely cannot. He had already been tested on this in practice. In 1887 Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore came to Rome to argue against a condemnation of the Knights of Labor, an American workers’ organization whose secrecy and oaths had made Roman officials nervous, and Leo declined to condemn it. Cardinal Manning of Westminster, fresh from mediating the London dock strike of 1889, was pressing the same case from another direction. Rerum Novarum did not arrive out of nowhere; it arrived after two of his most senior colleagues had spent years telling him what was happening in English-speaking harbours and mills.

(Q) "For, to enter into a ‘society’ of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them; and, if it forbid its citizens to form associations, it contradicts the very principle of its own existence." + Source: Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 51 (English text published by the Holy See). The sentence runs on in the original to give the reason, that citizens and state alike exist by the same principle, the natural tendency of man to dwell in society. Leo puts the word society in quotation marks because he means it broadly: unions, guilds, benefit funds, burial clubs, any association working men form among themselves (T5).

(Q) "While, therefore, We hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences." + Source: Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, 31 (English text published by the Holy See). This is the instruction that shaped Catholic education for eighty years, and the half of the sentence that usually gets dropped is the half that makes room for everything the instruction does not cover. What his church did with it over the next century is the more surprising part of the story.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His call to read Aquinas started a revival that outlived him by a century and outgrew his church. + Papal instructions to study something usually produce dutiful textbooks and nothing else. This one produced a movement. At Louvain, Désiré Mercier built an institute of philosophy that taught Aquinas alongside the experimental psychology and physics of the day, on the theory that a medieval metaphysics which could not meet a laboratory was not worth reviving. In France, Étienne Gilson spent a career proving by patient historical work that medieval philosophy was philosophy and not a long pause between Aristotle and Descartes, and Jacques Maritain took the same principles into aesthetics, into politics, and into the arguments behind the postwar language of human rights, which he pressed at UNESCO while the United Nations declaration was being drafted. G. K. Chesterton wrote a short life of Aquinas in 1933 that medievalists still praise and that he appears to have composed largely from memory. The reach did not stop at the Catholic boundary, which would have pleased Leo and surprised his critics. When English-speaking philosophy of religion revived in the second half of the twentieth century, much of the work ran along lines his revival had reopened. There are the arguments that run from contingency to a necessary being, a contingent thing being one that might never have existed at all, a mountain or a man or a galaxy, and a necessary being one that could not have failed to be. There is the analysis of divine simplicity, the claim that God is not assembled out of parts and properties the way everything else is, and of what it means to call him eternal. There is the problem of how words learned from creatures can mean anything at all when they are said of God. Protestant and secular philosophers argue about Aquinas today because the texts were in print, in reliable editions, with a living tradition of commentary attached. That is largely Leo’s doing, and the critical edition his commission began in 1880 is still being published.

(†) Rerum Novarum founded a tradition, and later popes wrote on its anniversaries the way heirs revisit a will. + Forty years on, Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo Anno (1931) into the teeth of the Depression and named the principle of subsidiarity that Leo had left implicit. John XXIII marked seventy years with Mater et Magistra (1961); John Paul II, who had worked in a quarry and a chemical plant under German occupation, wrote Laborem Exercens for the ninetieth anniversary in 1981 and Centesimus Annus for the hundredth in 1991, the second of them written two years after Eastern Europe’s communist governments fell and largely about what their fall had settled and what it had not. Read in sequence they are a single argument revised across a century by men who kept going back to the same short document. Outside Catholicism the same hour produced a striking parallel. In November 1891, six months after Rerum Novarum, the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper opened the first Christian Social Congress in Amsterdam with an address on the problem of poverty, arguing that Christ’s church cannot be neutral between a starving family and a comfortable one. Kuyper was a Calvinist with few kind words for Rome, and he was working the identical ground, from the identical Scriptures, in the identical year. It is an instructive thing to notice about the 1890s: the industrial question was forcing Christians who agreed on almost nothing else into the same conclusions.

(†) On Scripture and on the archives he asked his own church to face the evidence, and that is how his successors read him. + Two of his acts belong together because they rest on one conviction: that truth already discovered cannot hurt a true church, and that concealment does more damage than anything concealed. Providentissimus Deus was read at the time as a hard line against the critics, and it was. But its lasting effect was to send Catholic students into Hebrew, Greek, archaeology and manuscript work, and its distinction between what Scripture teaches for salvation and how it describes the natural world was still being quoted seventy years later when the Second Vatican Council set out the church’s doctrine of Scripture in Dei Verbum (1965). The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, no friend of Protestantism, recorded that the encyclical won admiration even from Protestants. The archives had a stranger afterlife. Historians of every confession have been working in them since 1881, and a great deal of what is now known about the medieval and early modern papacy, including the parts least flattering to it, came out of the collection Leo unlocked. A pope who told historians not to keep silent about anything true was handing his own institution’s record to people who would use it. He did it anyway.

(†) Where much of Christendom parts company with him: a state bound to the true religion, Anglican orders, the Bible in the layman’s hands, and Mary as the road to Christ. + These are his own acts and his own words, not what later men did with them. A fair ledger has two columns. - The state and the true religion. Leo taught that a civil community, like an individual, is bound to worship God, and that the state is therefore "clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion" (Immortale Dei 6, 1885). Freedom of worship for other faiths is not a right in this account; it is something authority may tolerate to avoid a greater evil (Libertas 21, 33, 1888). Protestants have answered that faith produced by pressure is not faith at all, and that the apostles asked for no such help: Christ distinguished what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God (Mark 12:17), and Paul’s weapons were "not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:4). A great many Catholics came to the same conclusion, and the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Dignitatis Humanae (1965) grounded religious liberty in the dignity of the person, which is a different starting point from Leo’s. - Anglican orders. In the apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae of 13 September 1896 he declared "that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void" (Apostolicae Curae 36), on the ground that the Edwardine ordinal of 1550, the service book by which the English church under Edward VI ordained its clergy, had altered the form of ordination, meaning the words spoken over the man, and the intention behind them. The archbishops of Canterbury and York replied the next year in Saepius Officio, arguing that the same reasoning would unchurch ancient rites Rome accepts. The dispute stands unresolved, and the ruling is Leo’s own: the commission of scholars he had appointed that spring to examine the question came back divided, and he closed it by decree anyway. - The Bible in a layman’s hands. His apostolic constitution Officiorum ac Munerum (25 January 1897) reorganized the Index of Prohibited Books and forbade vernacular translations of Scripture unless approved by Rome or issued under a bishop’s care with notes drawn from the fathers, while translations published by the Bible societies were prohibited outright. He loved Scripture and had told his students to master its languages, and he still did not trust it to a labourer without a guide. The Bereans in Acts were commended for examining the Scriptures themselves to see whether Paul was telling the truth (Acts 17:11), and Paul told Timothy he had known the sacred writings from childhood (2 Timothy 3:15). - Mary as the road to Christ. Leo wrote eleven encyclicals on the Rosary, which is how he came by the name of the Rosary pope, and in one of them he put the claim at its sharpest: "Thus as no man goeth to the Father but by the Son, so no man goeth to Christ but by His Mother" (Octobri Mense 4, 1891). Catholic theologians answer that Mary’s mediation is wholly derived from her Son’s and adds nothing to it, which is a real qualification and should be heard. Most of Christendom still finds the sentence itself unsupportable beside Paul’s plain statement: "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). None of this cancels what he got right, and he would have been the last man to want it hidden. He told historians not to keep silent about anything true, and that instruction cuts toward its author as readily as away from him.