Leo XIII; A Light from Heaven
Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1961. First edition. Octavo, original blue cloth, original illustrated dust jacket. Books' front corners bumped, gentle creasing to top of pack panel of bright dust jacket. A near-fine copy. Item #269
First edition of this first biography of the first modern pope, with a frontispiece photographic portrait. Gioacchino Pecci was in poor health when he was elected in 1878 but he would serve for 25 years as Pope Leo XIII. "Leo made two extremely important and lasting contributions to modern Catholicism through two landmark encyclicals--Aeternis Patris, prescribing and promoting the study of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, 1879, and Rerum Novarum, the first encyclical ever published on social questions like just wage and the right of workers to organize, 1891. No documents from the era illustrate more clearly the new role of teacher the papacy had now assumed. They are symptomatic of the strong emergence of the papal Magisterium, so characteristic of the contemporary papacy." (John W. O'Malley, A History of the Popes). Approbations.
Price: $50.00