Still Angry After All These Years: What a 1931 Pope Got Right About Big Tech, Gig Work, and the Broken Economy

There’s something almost eerie about reading Quadragesimo Anno today. Pope Pius XI wrote it in 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression, watching fascism and communism rise across Europe like twin thunderheads. He was responding to a world coming apart at the seams — mass unemployment, obscene concentrations of wealth, and an ideological tug-of-war between unregulated capitalism on one side and violent collectivism on the other.

Sound familiar?

The document was issued exactly forty years after Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum — itself a landmark response to the brutal conditions of early industrial capitalism. Pius XI wasn’t just updating his predecessor’s work. He was sounding an alarm. The economic order, he argued, didn’t just need reform; it needed a revolution. It needed reconstruction.

What’s remarkable is how well his diagnosis still holds up, nearly a century later. The diseases have new names, but the symptoms are strikingly similar.

A Framework That Actually Works: See, Judge, Act

Rather than just summarizing the document’s ideas, it helps to walk through them using the See, Judge, Act method—a practical framework developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and later woven into Catholic Social Teaching. It’s a simple but powerful discipline: first, look honestly at reality. Then, weigh it against core human values. Then, do something about it.

SEE: What’s Actually Going On?

In 1931, Pius XI identified what he called a “dual peril.” On one side, unregulated liberal capitalism had produced the Great Depression and what he bluntly called “the international imperialism of finance” — a small class of financiers wielding power that eclipsed entire governments. On the other side, communism promised equality but delivered repression, violence, and the systematic destruction of religious and civil freedom.

In 2026, the dual peril looks different but feels remarkably similar. We don’t have breadlines in the traditional sense. Still, we do have a gig economy where millions of workers have no benefits, no job security, and no collective voice — technically “employed,” practically precarious. Global wealth has grown enormously, but the power over that wealth has concentrated in a handful of tech platforms and financial institutions whose decisions shape daily life for billions of people who had no say in the matter.

Meanwhile, the “echo chambers” of social media have replaced genuine public dialogue with digital warfare. We are more connected than any humans in history, and somehow more divided.

JUDGE: What Do Our Values Actually Demand?

This is where Pius XI’s framework gets sharp. Three principles in particular deserve attention:

Subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest, most local level of authority capable of handling them effectively. Recognizing this can inspire the audience to see their own power in shaping community decisions, fostering a sense of hope and agency.

The Social Mortgage on Property is perhaps the document’s most challenging idea. Pius XI affirmed that private property is a genuine right, but insisted it is not an absolute right. Property carries a social obligation. Ownership of something that affects the community comes with responsibilities to that community. In an age when a handful of companies own AI systems capable of automating roughly 40% of current jobs, this principle cuts deep. The “just wage” that Leo XIII championed must evolve into what we might now call a “just share”—some meaningful participation in the gains technological progress produces. Workers displaced by automation are not a statistic; they are people owed something by the society that benefited from that displacement.

Social Justice versus Social Charity draws a distinction worth preserving. Justice is about giving people what they’re owed — fair wages, equal treatment, access to opportunity. Charity, understood as solidarity, is about the social glue that holds communities together. An economy can be technically “growing” while simultaneously shredding the family structures, neighborhoods, and civic institutions that make human life meaningful. By Pius XI’s standard, that economy is failing — no matter what the GDP numbers say.

ACT: What Does Reconstruction Actually Look Like?

Pius XI was emphatic that the goal wasn’t to patch the existing system. His call for reconstruction can motivate us today to believe in the possibility of meaningful change and a better social order.

Vocational Groups were his alternative to pure class warfare. Instead of organizing society as “owners vs. workers,” he envisioned people organizing by industry or vocation — together, across the management/labor divide, setting standards and solving problems within their field. Today, this could look like genuine sectoral bargaining: tech workers, engineers, content moderators, and gig drivers in the same industry collaborating on shared standards for wages, safety, and AI governance — rather than each fighting isolated battles against individual corporations.

The Reform of Institutions called on the state to stop trying to do everything while simultaneously doing nothing well. Its proper role, he argued, was to “direct, watch, urge, and restrain.” Applied today, that’s a case for governments acting as genuine referees of the tech economy — breaking up monopolies, enforcing interoperability, and creating conditions where smaller, community-rooted ventures can actually compete. Not a planned economy. An economy with rules.

The Reform of Morals is where Pius XI pushed hardest and where modern readers are most tempted to roll their eyes. But strip away the ecclesiastical language, and the argument is straightforward: you cannot fix structural problems with structural solutions alone. A culture built around consumerism — the belief that identity is constructed through purchasing — will keep generating the same crises. A culture oriented around stewardship — the belief that what we have comes with responsibility — creates different incentives and different people. Policy matters. So does character.

Questions Worth Sitting With

To connect Pius XI’s ideas to today’s challenges, explicitly explain how principles such as subsidiarity and social obligation apply to gig work and social media algorithms, helping readers see their relevance in current economic debates.

On subsidiarity and technology: When a platform’s algorithm shapes what news you read, what work you find, and what community you belong to — who should have oversight of that algorithm? The company? The government? The community it affects? And what would meaningful community oversight even look like in practice?

On the social mortgage: If AI and automation generate enormous productivity gains over the next decade, who should benefit from those gains — and how? Is a Universal Basic Income a modern expression of the “just share” principle, or does it miss something important about the dignity of work itself?

In the gig economy, gig workers are legally classified as independent contractors, giving them flexibility but stripping them of protections. Is that a fair trade — or is “flexibility” simply a more palatable word for precarity? What would a truly just arrangement look like?

On social glue: Economic data shows rising wealth alongside rising rates of loneliness, declining civic participation, and weakening family structures. Is this a coincidence, or is there a causal relationship? If an economy produces wealth but destroys community, how should we measure whether it’s succeeding?

On reconstruction: Pius XI argued that piecemeal reform was insufficient — that the social order itself needed rebuilding. Is that kind of sweeping vision realistic today? Or has the complexity of modern globalized economies made reconstruction impossible, leaving us only with incremental tinkering?

Pius XI didn’t have all the answers. Some of his specific proposals — particularly his vision of corporatist vocational groups — were later misappropriated by fascist regimes in ways he did not intend and would not have endorsed. That history deserves honest acknowledgment.

But the core of his argument — that unchecked economic power corrodes human dignity, that ownership carries social obligation, that real community cannot be sustained by markets alone — hasn’t aged out of relevance. If anything, the intervening century has strengthened the case.

The question isn’t whether a 1931 papal document has modern relevance. The question is what we’re prepared to do about it.