A study of the British reception history of Rerum Novarum between 1891 and 1919 shows the key role of Fr. Vincent McNabb OP in popularising in the Catholic press what would become the predominant interpretation of the encyclical, switching its perceived emphasis away from the defence of private property to the advocacy of an urgent redistribution of property unjustly withheld from the impoverished working classes

The Acts of the Apostles relates how in the Jerusalem church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." The author of Acts is not simply reporting three separate facts about the apostles, how they felt, how they lived, and how they preached. Their preaching gains its power from their common faith and life. Their rejection of private property and redistribution of wealth, cutting at the roots of avarice, form an eloquent expression of their faith in the God who hears the cry of the poor, whose day of justice is at hand. The heart, the purse, and the voice are formed in a single apostolic life.

This picture of the apostolic life was at the heart of St. Augustine's vision of religious life and dear to the early Dominicans who adopted his Rule. Humbert of Romans in his Commentary on the Rule was adamant that the brother who even said “that’s my book!” and meant it committed mortal sin. All things had been shared before the Fall and would be in the Kingdom. Private property was a frequent cause of envy and strife. It tied down the heart. Humbert set out the different reasons why voluntary poverty was integral to the office of preaching. Preachers have to go everywhere and not everywhere could afford to support the retinue, the horses and servants, of a rich prelate.

Preachers often find it difficult to make themselves heard. Humbert of Romans emphasised the need for a measured delivery in a strong voice, but getting a hearing has always been more than a matter of mere audibility. The first Dominican chapels were small, built on the cheap in the expectation that the friars would find a welcome and a pulpit in others’ churches. They had not reckoned on the hostility of parochial clergy. It was soon discovered that they would have to build large churches of their own. From its earliest years the Order of Preachers had to adopt new ways of communicating the Gospel, or go unheard. A certain ingenuity and willingness to copy a good idea is traditional for us, where we do not decline. In Florence not only the church but also the piazza outside Santa Maria Novella would have to be enlarged after 1245 to accommodate the crowds who attended the open air sermons. And now the Dominican Family has its presence on the Internet.

In the contemporary recovery of virtue ethics some virtues have fared better than others. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has entries for justice, wisdom, courage, self-control and the good of friendship integral to the life of virtue as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. Yet between Hume’s fork and Humour there is no mention of humility. Why so? Aquinas wrote that “after the theological virtues, after the intellectual virtues which regard the reason itself, and after justice, especially legal justice, humility stands before all others.”

The reasons for this eclipse of humility are several. One is the absence of humility from the Classical Greek and Roman account of virtue or excellence. Not only is it missing from that account, but for many in the Ancient world to be humble or lowly was to suffer evil. Humilitas meant first a lowly and despicable origin. It was to be born a nobody. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero’s privileged interlocutor M, discussing that chestnut of ancient philosophy, whether happiness is a matter of virtue alone, or virtue in conjunction with good fortune, lists those evils, or apparent evils, which can afflict us and lie largely beyond our control, beyond the self-definition of character: “poverty, obscurity, insignificance, loneliness, loss of property, severe physical pain, ruined health, infirmity, blindness, fall of one’s country, exile and, to crown all, slavery.” The word ‘insignificance’ here translates the Latin humilitas.’ To some this humility was incompatible with virtue. If excellence is a matter of character, of who one is and not merely what one does, and if who one is in a patriarchal world is to be the son of this father, to claim these ancestors, to be a nobody is already to fail in excellence, to be base.

In words that tried, but failed, to temper growing contempt with resignation, John Henry Newman in Tract XC wrote this of the Thirty Nine Articles: ‘let the Church sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies...’. In Newman’s ears the language of the Via Media had come to seem deceitful. It took pride in plain speech, yet its words were so framed to include heresy with orthodoxy, false with true. The assured tones of the Articles and Prayer Book, cadences in which generations of Englishmen had come to find comfort and devotion, now seemed in 1841 to belong to a Church that would not listen to the sterner, clear, voices of Church Fathers. Such tones seemed instead to lull their hearers into complaisance. The lips of the Church could be said with irony to stammer, for assurance was only the proud veneer that smoothed over, as it smooth-talked, doctrinal confusion and hesitation. Newman’s words were those of Isaiah, who prophesied that the ‘stammering lips’ of foreign conquerors would command the sinful Israelites, as a result of their desertion of the Law’s clear precepts. Such words hit home: those who complained that the allusion to Isaiah fell wide of the mark could not do so except by excluding broad interpretations of Scripture and Creed of this kind, Newman’s very targets. But if not thus, how are we to proclaim our faith?