~~~~
It is sometimes said that Pope Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum”, which in 1891 addressed the great surge for social change, was not related to Henry George’s call for a land tax to replace other public charges, or to the 1887 excommunication of his prominent Catholic supporter, Father Edward McGlynn.
On any reading of John Moloney’s “The Worker Question”, published on the 1991 centenary of “Rerum Novarum”, that position is impossible to maintain. Moloney, an avid opponent of Henry George’s ideas, was provided full access to Vatican archives. He left no doubt that whilst not specifically mentioning Henry George, countering him was the aim of the encyclical. Henry George obviously believed this was the case when he penned a sincere response to Pope Leo.
The year before the Pope’s encyclical, Henry George had spoken in Australia of the threat posed by impossibly excessive land prices. The Adelaide Observer of 26 April 1890 reported George as saying “In the colonies I have been through, the curse of land monopoly and land speculation is over everything. I don’t know of any new country where more striking instances of the absurdity and injustice of our present treatment of land is to be seen.” Worldwide speculative land values collapsed in the following year (1891) and terribly sad outcomes ensued during the 1893-1897 economic depression.
The political uncertainty and divided times were remarkably similar to those of today. It’s also astonishingly coincidental that the succeeding Pope Leo is to oversee a likely 2027-2030 financial depression from another worldwide collapse in land prices.
As he has great clout, rather than clinging to the partly ineffective analysis of his namesake, Pope Leo XIV could do no better than promote the proto-Georgist principles teeming within Pope Francis’ “Laudate Si'”. They represent a quick exit strategy from impending financial collapse.