"SACRED AND INVIOLABLE": RERUM NOVARUM AND NATURAL RIGHTS: "Astonishingly, no one at the time seems to have noticed that this notion of private property as a natural and imprescriptible right had only recently been imported into Catholic theology, in all probability by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, the biggest name in 19thcentury Catholic social thought and, incidentally, the man who had been appointed rector of the Roman College when it reopened in 1824, the year Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, enrolled there as a student at the age of fourteen.13 Prior to that time it was understood that according to natural law the earth originally belonged to everyone and that its subsequent division, dictated in large measure by reasons of expediency, was a matter of human or positive law. That older view is summarized as follows in Gratian's Decree: "The division of property and slavery belong to the "right of nations" (ius gentium);.... by the right of nature all things are common and everyone is free."14 It is the view that Thomas himself sets forth in Summa theologiae, 1-2, q. 95, a. 4, where in like manner the division of property is assigned, not to the natural law simply, but to the "right of nations," defined as that part of the positive law (ius positivum) whose principles are derived from the natural law as conclusions from premises"
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