However unprecedented certain aspects of Robert Prevost’s election to the papacy may be—he is, as everyone knows, the first American pope, in addition to being, as fewer know or care, the first from the Augustinian order—it is his choice of papal name, Leo XIV, and the legacy he’s implicitly placed himself in, that has stirred both religious and secular imaginations. As commentators from across the political spectrum have noted, the name’s last bearer, Leo XIII (who reigned from 1878–1903), is widely remembered for his concern for social justice and the rights of workers and the poor, perhaps more so than any pope until Francis, Leo XIV’s immediate predecessor. Many interpreted this namesake to indicate both a continuation of Francis’s project of outreach to the poor and marginalized, and a renewal of a more rigorously justice-oriented approach to social questions within the magisterium. Leo himself has now confirmed this influence, arguing in his first address to the college of cardinals that we now live in a second Industrial Revolution, replete with its own innovations and challenges to human dignity.

But it is worth remembering that these concerns are not simply matters of Christian charity—though they are certainly that—but of the church’s ongoing navigation of modernity and its crises. As Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston wrote on his blog, Leo XIII “was pontiff at a time of epic upheaval in the world, the time of the industrial revolution, the beginning of Marxism, and widespread immigration.” However analogous this may sound to our own time, it would be too pat to say that these questions are simply ours, as well: The situation has developed too much in the past century, and these references, however superficially familiar, are simply too vague to illuminate anything with any clarity. The point of interpreting Leo XIV’s choice of name and what it means for his papacy, then, is not to locate precedent that will be replicated to the letter, but to look for signs, indications of direction, currents that may still flow in our own time, however wide or deep.

Leo XIII’s reputation as the “social pope” or “pope of the worker” stems largely from his encyclical, Rerum Novarum (Latin for “of revolutionary change”), subtitled “On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” Promulgated in 1891, Rerum Novarum has come to be seen as the founding document of Catholic social teaching, a branch of doctrine concerned with the common good, that is, aspects of society that may or may not fall within the orbit of ordinary politics, but which nevertheless demands ethical deliberation and conscientious discernment. (Encyclicals, though falling short of ex-cathedra infallibility, are generally seen as a determining factor in church doctrine.) Though perfectly mainstream in many respects, Catholic social teaching has often been associated with projects like Latin American liberation theology and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement, which interpreted the church’s insistence on universal human dignity as a call for radical intervention in worldly affairs, from state repression to nuclear proliferation.

Rerum Novarum, known for its critique of both capitalism and state socialism, is therefore concerned not simply with political economy but with labor relations as the nexus point of a social transformation affecting the entire world, the future of which Leo XIII could not know, but which he saw “fill[ing] every mind with painful apprehension.” The “vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science,” he argues, coincided with “changed relations between masters and workmen” and “the enormous fortunes of some few and the utter poverty of the masses.” And because the world had discarded the old ways of protecting the relatively weak and impoverished—“ancient workingmen’s guilds” and “the ancient religion”—the rapacity of the rich and the dire state of the poor had led to a “prevailing moral degeneracy,” a fraying of social bonds and a general abandonment of one another when faced with irresistible opportunity or crushing deprivation.

Rerum Novarum does not, as its title might suggest, prescribe revolutionary change; it counsels discernment in the face of a revolutionary situation. Against the depredations of the upper classes against workers, Leo advocates a renewed application of law and public authority, under the auspices of a reaffirmed common good. This demands a spiritual revival as much as a political one, since it requires universal recognition of each person’s equal dignity, regardless of class position. But seeing the state as primarily an agent of moral discernment, and not its arbiter, Rerum Novarum also advocates for trade unions, charitable foundations, and other non-state, self-organizing coalitions that will reduce the imposition of undue force. “The State,” he writes, “should watch over these societies of citizens banded together in accordance with their rights, but it should not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their organization, for things move and live the spirit inspiring them, and may be killed by the rough grasp of a hand from without.”

Which brings us to Rerum Novarum’s critique of socialism, something people from all corners of the political world will take up with vigor, as I learned—to my serious irritation—after posting something online suggesting that it is primarily a critique of capitalism. The encyclical approaches socialism first and foremost as a flawed solution to the problem of capitalism, not as a viable competing system in its own right. This is how the socialist project is described: “To remedy [the wrongs of capitalism] the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies.” This “community of goods,” which he calls the “main tenet” of socialism, must be “utterly rejected,” as it violates the dignity of the individual, inflames tension between classes, and “distorts the function of the State.”

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Those wishing to neutralize Rerum Novarum’s critique of capitalism have seized upon these statements. Yet, upon reflection, they’re shoddy tools for that purpose. For one thing, the discussion of socialism throughout the encyclical is simply riddled with errors: Notably, it misdescribes the kind of property that would be collectivized under mainstream socialist programs by conflating personal and private property and eliding productive property—that is, the means of economically significant labor—altogether. It also argues that labor and capital are mutually dependent, which, from the perspective of the critique of capital, is just question-begging. The socialist position would argue that, no, labor does not need capital, the latter being a social relation predicated on the creation of surplus value only once productive labor has been undertaken.

More importantly, the encyclical’s definition of socialism has more to do with impulses and discrete practices than programmatic politics. The real targets of the criticism are envy and resentment, hoarding and unjust expropriation, rather than, say, any of the usual targets of critiques leveled by anyone who watched 20th-century socialist experiments unfold (land reforms, wealth redistribution). In fact, the violent centralization of goods is a much better description of the rentier capitalism under which we currently live than any effective socialist regime of recent years.

This kind of interpretative effort is necessary when dealing with any political text, especially one as complex and contextually determined as Rerum Novarum. Its reception history is hardly less difficult to parse, as it’s subsequently inspired both Catholic Marxists who found ways of assimilating its critique of socialism without abandoning the project as well as authoritarian regimes like Portugal’s Estado Novo under Salazar, whose relatively palatable version of corporatism was underwritten by a regime of the torture and disappearance of political dissidents.

But the primacy of interpretation and analogy in Catholic thinking is as important to politics as it is to theology. The state of things is so desperate that Rerum Novarum’s quaint advocacy for unions and against child labor now seems like welcome progress. Yet if the encyclical is to guide a reappraisal of the church’s role in society, it should be considered not for its direct prescriptions but as a source of inspiration for critical engagement with received wisdom about what is simply given in human relations, and what can be argued about and changed—even if the encyclical itself comes to different conclusions. It is an opportunity for the church to renew its role, in words that reach back to the foundation of the faith, as a sign of contradiction.