Grace Pending
On the centenary of the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, St. John Paul II issued Centesimus Annus, prompted, in part, by both the symbolic and the actual impact of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall just two years earlier.
Centesimus Annus promulgated a three-fold invitation to
“look back” at the text [of Rerum Novarum] in order to discover anew the richness of the fundamental principles which it formulated for dealing with the question of the condition of workers. But this is also an invitation to “look around” at the “new things” which surround us and in which we find ourselves caught up . . . [as well as] an invitation to “look to the future”
On the heels of communism’s self-destruction – an economic order whose inherent oppressive and repressive natures were known, first hand, to John Paul II – a re-examination of the means of production and the conditions of workers was well in order.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) makes clear that the civil and political obligation to respect the right of private property is consistent with – and is, in fact, in fulfillment of – the Seventh Commandment (Thou Shall Not Steal) (CCC 2401, 2403):
The appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge. The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind.
The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise. (Emphasis added)
This right to acquire private property, and the legitimacy of holding it, is not, of course, unfettered.
The use of private property must be such that the holder will:
1) act as a steward of Providence (CCC 2404),
2) utilize the means of goods and production in ways that will benefit the greatest number – employing them with moderation and reserving the better part for guest, for the sick, and the poor (CCC 2405), and
3) subject himself to the governing political authority given the right and the duty to regulate the legitimate exercise of the right of ownership for the sake of the common good (CCC 2406).
If anything, Rerum Novarum emphasized the right to private property even more clearly and even more fundamentally:
[P]rivate ownership is in accordance with the law of nature. Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill.
Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates – that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right.
The Church has rejected socialism in part because, by its very nature, it seeks to infiltrate and supplant the family:
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error . . . The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.
Fundamentally, socialism demands and exploits for itself the means of production – through violence whenever necessary – in order, it says, to level the economic playing field.
Socialism is thus contrary both to the human condition and to man’s desire – God imbued – to exercise free will as it fails to grasp that human differences are both inevitable and worthy.
It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level.
Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such unequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community (Emphasis added).
Socialism’s, and thus also communism’s, great error is:
. . . the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.
Socialism destroys, while capital and labor – properly exercised and working together for mutual benefit – create, and build, and nurture (and are, it seems to me, an offshoot of creation itself).
Rerum Novarum handed down a pretty brutal indictment against socialism, even if it did not hand up an unqualified hip-hip-hooray for capitalist economies unconstrained by a respect for human dignity.
One hundred years later, with communist governments falling like dominoes, John Paul’s 1991 Centesimus Annus re-affirmed and re-iterated the basic principles of Rerum Novarum:
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil.
Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property.
A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it.
This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.
Socialism, and its even more evil communist counterpart, are contra-dignity, contra-community, contra-morality, and contra-mankind.
Notably, John Paul affirmed that business profits, which result only from market-driven economies, are not only legitimate, but that they also signal a healthy, functioning, and (hopefully) thriving economy, one from which all workers will ultimately benefit:
The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied.
But again, John Paul observed that the free market must itself be subject to the natural, moral law, and subordinated to the needs and the dignity of mankind:
But profitability is not the only indicator of a firm’s condition.
It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for the people — who make up the firm’s most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm’s economic efficiency.
In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs, and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society.
Profit is a regulator of the life of a business, but it is not the only one; other human and moral factors must also be considered which, in the long term, are at least equally important for the life of a business.
Moreover:
Rerum novarum is opposed to State control of the means of production, which would reduce every citizen to being a “cog” in the State machine. It is no less forceful in criticizing a concept of the State which completely excludes the economic sector from the State’s range of interest and action.
There is certainly a legitimate sphere of autonomy in economic life which the State should not enter. The State, however, has the task of determining the juridical framework within which economic affairs are to be conducted, and thus of safeguarding the prerequisites of a free economy.
But ultimately, John Paul reminds us, socialism’s and communism’s denial of man’s inherent dignity, and their suppression of free will, are fully rooted in atheism:
If we then inquire as to the source of this mistaken concept of the nature of the person and the “subjectivity” of society, we must reply that its first cause is atheism. It is by responding to the call of God contained in the being of things that man becomes aware of his transcendent dignity.
And atheism either blindly misses, or intentionally dismisses, man’s inherent and transcendent greatness:
The atheism of which we are speaking is also closely connected with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which views human and social reality in a mechanistic way.
Thus there is a denial of the supreme insight concerning man’s true greatness, his transcendence in respect to earthly realities, the contradiction in his heart between the desire for the fullness of what is good and his own inability to attain it and, above all, the need for salvation which results from this situation.
It’s pretty clear from Catholic social teaching that socialism is both unworkable and contrary to our God-given human spirit.
Socialism inevitably demands every last drop of blood from a subordinated, undifferentiated mass of humanity for its continued control and self-preservation, even as it acknowledges no limits to its bloody appetite.
And it is rarely restrained.
Except that, sometimes, competing and countervailing forces are willing enough and strong enough to oppose and overthrow it.
Socialism is, therefore, in and of itself, economic excess – an excess set on a course that inevitably grinds up and spits out every last thing and every last person in its wake.
Socialism is, without doubt, an immoral economic mess.
A functioning free market, on the other hand, necessarily depends upon the individual: men and women exercising free will, capable of unleashing their unlimited creative energies and their indomitable human potential. Those who, even as they act apart from one another to their own benefit, contribute together to a mighty engine of personal and economic growth.
Yes, of course there are market excesses and abuses. That is an inevitable consequence of unleashing so much creative energy and talent, all at once, in a fallen world.
As the Church teaches, these excesses must be addressed and abuses eliminated. That is the framework from which both Leo and John Paul have written.
Importantly, market excesses signal that something is amiss and needs fixing – whether at the individual, moral level, or at the broader societal level.
But these signals do not represent a failure of the system.
On the contrary, they are an integral part of it.
And these signals are completely missing whenever the means of production remain firmly in the grip of the state.
The free market, today, thus remains the engine of prosperity, growth, individual dignity, and humanity – provided, that is, that the moral order remains intact, human dignity is preserved, and society continues to subordinate it to God-given natural law.
If those last conditions are left unmet, the free market, too, will inevitably fail.
And well it should.
Peace
UPDATE: For additional thoughts – including some which make the claim that my post misrepresents (or worse) Church teaching and doctrine – please go to this lively forum, located here.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
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