Chinese workers walk down a dirt access road from one of Beijing's major air polluters, the Capital Iron and Steel factory, 16 February 2001. (STEPHEN SHAVER/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Thirty years ago this month, on 1 May 1991, Pope St. John Paul II promulgated his landmark encyclical, Centesimus Annus, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which introduced the peculiar theologico-doctrinal endeavor now known as Catholic Social Teaching.

The moral doctrines and principles that Leo articulated in Rerum Novarum were not new. They had developed through centuries of theological refinement. Applying this aged wisdom to his analysis of the “new things” the industrial revolution of the late 19th Century had wrought, Leo nevertheless gave shape to a new body of theological reflection and doctrinal distillation that his successors have engaged and advanced in an unbroken tradition.