The pope and conservative bishops attacked individualism, emphasized the reciprocal duties between hierarchical social classes, and identified the family, not the individual, as the core unit of society. Rerum Novarum said nothing about political liberty or democracy. The other shoe dropped in 1897, when Leo XIII issued Testem benevolentiae, which declared heretical many of the ideas associated with Catholic “Americanism” with its embrace of democracy, progress, individualism, and liberalism.
