The Catholic Church as a church of immigrants was also a working-class church, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s the Church turned to the “social question.” In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, denouncing the “misery and wretchedness” affecting the working classes and permitting both unions and government intervention on behalf of the poor and working classes. Closer to the ground, whether in orphanages and hospitals staffed by nuns or in parish pulpits, Catholic clergy proved sympathetic to the living wage and skeptical of laissez-faire.
