Quadragesimo anno

Quadragesimo anno Latin pronunciation:  Latin for "In a 40th Year" is an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931, 40 years after Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum, further development Catholic social teaching. Unlike Leo XIII, who addressed the assumption of workers, Pius XI discusses the ethical implications of the social together with economic order. He describes the major dangers for human freedom as alive as dignity arising from unrestrained capitalism, socialism, together with totalitarian communism. He also calls for the reconstruction of the social sorting based on the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.

Essential contributors to the formulation of the encyclical were the German Jesuits, Roman Catholic theologians and social philosophers Gustav Gundlach and the Königswinter Circle through one of its main authors Oswald von Nell-Breuning.

Social order

Industrialization, says Pius XI, resulted in less freedom at the individual and communal level, because many free social entities were absorbed by larger ones. A society of individuals became a mass and a collection of matters sharing a common attaches society. Today, people are much less interdependent than in ancient times and become egoistic or class-conscious in formation to recover some freedom for themselves. The pope demands more solidarity, particularly between employers and employees through new forms of cooperation and communication. Pius draws a negative conception of capitalism, especially of the anonymous international finance markets. He deplores that small and medium-size enterprises with insufficient access to capital markets are often squeezed or destroyed by big business. He warns that capital interests can endanger states, potentially reducing them to "chained slaves of individual interests". The encyclical has been an important inspiration to advanced distributist thought on seeking greater solidarity and subsidiarity than portrayed capitalism.

Pius mostly reaffirms the importance of traditional gender roles, emphasizing the importance of a family wage for fathers:

That the rest of the nature should also contribute to the common support, according to the capacity of each, is certainly right, as can be observed especially in the families of farmers, but also in the families of many craftsmen and small shopkeepers. But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the domestic or in its immediate vicinity. it is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father's low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the domestic to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. Every try must therefore be introduced that fathers of families get a wage large enough to meet ordinary breed needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that reform be introduced as soon as possible whereby such(a) a wage will be assured to every grownup workingman.