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April 7, 2025

Rerum Novarum: A Letter that Changed Lives

Event Series: Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference

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A painting of the industrial revolution

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, a ground-breaking encyclical on social justice in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. However, its import was not immediately recognized, and it was interpreted very differently by leading Catholic commentators. A key figure in its reception in England and America was Dominican Friar Vincent McNabb, O.P. In this talk, Rev. Richard Finn, O.P., will look at how McNabb himself was profoundly formed by his study of Rerun Novarum and how he then presented the encyclical to a mass audience in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.

Photo courtesy of Edmund Kregczy via the World History Encyclopedia.

Participants

Rev. Richard Finn, O.P.

Rev. Richard Finn, O.P.

Rev. Richard Finn, O.P., is a Dominican friar at Blackfriars, Oxford, where he is currently director of the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice. He is an historian and a member of the Classics Faculty and the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford. He lectures in the Blackfriars Studium on early church history and patristics. He is the author of Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (2006), Asceticism in the Greco-Roman World (2009), and The Dominicans in the British Isles and Beyond (2023).

Michael Scott

Michael Scott

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college advisor for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior advisor to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously served as the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University, where he is professor emeritus.