Exactly 125 years ago, on January 10, 1890, Pope Leo XIII issued one of his greatest political encyclicals,
Sapientiae Christianae—a document that, like nearly everything Leo XIII wrote, deserves to be much better known today than it is. As one can always expect with Pope Leo, the prose is crisp and vigorous, the doctrine lucid and coherent, the logic irresistible, the conclusions noble and demanding. It is the kind of encyclical that the Church in every age needs in order to find its way in a turbulent ocean of massive waves and contrary winds. The whole encyclical may be obtained from the Vatican website (
see here), where all the encyclicals of Leo XIII are available—remarkably enough, considering that most of them contain doctrine to which later Magisterial pronouncements can be reconciled only with great difficulty.
