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The
Early Church and riches
The later church, unable to challenge capitalism, makes compromises in its
social teaching
Until recently (1990s), there was no well defined body of guidelines called Catholic Social
Teaching (CST). The CST grew from scattered papal responses to particular
socio-economic situations that arose in Europe. When formulating their
responses, the popes have never taken account of the impacts of western
colonialism and imperialism. Developing countries were and still are expected
to somehow adapt the Euro-biased CST to their needs.
How Christ, St Paul and the
early Church Fathers viewed wealth
What Jesus advised the young man who
came to see him:
"If you want to be perfect (go the whole way), sell your possessions and
give to the poor and you will have riches in heaven... it is easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of God." [Matthew 19:21, 24. Also Mark 10:17-23]
"A man's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." [Luke
12:15]
"Sell your possessions and give to the poor... For where your treasure is,
there your heart will also be." [Luke 12:33, 34]
St Paul said: "Our desire is ...that
there might be equality... today your surplus will meet their need; in turn
their surplus will meet your need. Then there will be equality." [2
Corinthians 8:13,14]
We are told that "All the believers were
together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods,
they gave to anyone with need." Acts 2:44,45
"No one claimed that any of his possessions were his own but they shared
everything they had... From time to time, those who owned lands or houses sold
them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the feet of the apostles'
feet and it was distributed to anyone as he had need." [Acts
4:32-35]
The early church fathers were clear on their
view about riches.
Wrote Clement of Alexandria around the year 200:
"All possessions are by nature unrighteous... when one possesses them for personal
advantage and does not bring them into the common stock for those in
need."
Church Doctor St Ambrose (340?-397)
wrote:
"It is not with your wealth that you give alms to the poor but with a
fraction of theirs which you give back, for you have usurped something meant
for the common good of all."
Basil the Great (329?-379) agreed:
"That bread
which you keep belongs to the hungry; that coat in your closet, to the
naked... How do the possessors become rich if not by taking things that belong
to all?"
St. John Chrysostom (349?-407) was even more emphatic:
"I have often laughed
while reading documents that say: 'That one has the ownership of fields and house,
but another has its use.' For all of us have the use, but no one has the
ownership." And again: "How did you become rich? From whom did you
receive it, and from whom he who transmitted it to you. From his father and
grandfather. But can you, ascending through many generations, show the
acquisition just? It cannot be. The root and origin of it must have been
injustice."
Pope
Gregory the Great said in the 6th century:
"You are wrong to keep to yourself the wealth that God has created for
all. He is a killer when he keeps to himself what would provide for the
poor... when we share with those who are suffering, we do not give what
belongs to us but what belongs to them. This is not an act of pity but the
payment of a debt."
It is
the early centuries of Christianity that laid
the true foundations of Catholic social teaching. But then came the industrial
revolution and the growth of capitalism. The church found itself unable to
resist capitalism and sought accommodation instead.
Papal Social Teaching takes shape
Papal social teaching is generally
believed to have begun with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). That is not quite accurate. Leo's
predecessor, Pius IX, set out his views of the social order in the
encyclicals Qui Pluribus (1846) and Nostis et Nobiscum (1849),
and in other formal statements.
Pius IX
Pius was not writing with the universal church
in mind. His reasons were more down to earth: at the time several groups
(called 'secret societies' by the pope) were operating to unite Italy into one
kingdom and the pope was worried that a united
Italy would mean a loss of temporal power to which popes had become
accustomed. In Qui Pluribus he denounced these secret societies that sought to do this.
He ranted against "the crafty Bible Societies,
which renew the old skills of the heretics and force on people of all kinds gifts of the Bible" and
warned about "the
unspeakable doctrine of communism."
He expressed himself even more vigorously in Nostis et Nobiscum,
after riots in Rome had forced him to flee to Gaeta in 1848. The goal of
communism or socialism, he declared "is to excite workers
and others by continuous disturbance, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by
their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. ... Let our
poor recall the teaching of Christ himself that they should not be sad in
their condition, since their very poverty makes lighter their journey to
salvation, provided that they bear their need with patience and are poor not
alone in their possessions, but in spirit too."
So here was an early lesson from the papal
teaching:
the poor and deprived must
put up with their lot, they will be rewarded in the next life.
They must not envy the rich and powerful. Authority must not be challenged.
This has been the unvarying message of the popes to the wretched of the
earth, most of them today the Third World masses.
Leo XIII
Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius in 1878,
continued in the same vein. In his second encyclical, Quod
Apostolici Muneris (1878), he assured support for the ruling classes
(as the popes have done for centuries) and opposed calls
for equality. He wrote: "The revered majesty and power of kings
have won such fierce hatred from these seditious people that disloyal
traitors refuse obedience to the higher powers to whom, according to the
admonition of the apostle, every soul ought to be subject ... and they
proclaim the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties."
By the late 19th century, colonial domination
was in full swing and Leo realised that capitalism was replacing monarchies as
the dominant economic system in western Europe and the USA. The capitalists
were too powerful (and godless) to be manipulated by the church, so Leo knew
the church had to learn to live with the system.
Marx & Engels' Communist Manifesto
appeared in 1848 and Marx's Das Kapital in 1867. Marx had predicted
that the working class would become
alienated under the capitalist creed and Leo was worried that the church might
lose the workers to socialism and communism. In the encyclical On Socialism
(1878), Leo launched his polemic:
"We hasten to point out that a
deadly plague is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it
on to the verge of destruction... That sect of men called socialists,
communists or nihilists, bound together in a wicked confederacy, have long
been planning the overthrow of all civil society.
“They proclaim the absolute equality of all men in rights and duties... They
assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law. They strive to seize
and hold in common whatever has been acquired by lawful inheritance or by
labour or thrift... Socialists would destroy the right of property, alleging
it to be a human invention, claiming a community of goods.
The socialists have sought to distort the Gospel to suit their own purposes.
Their habit is always to maintain that nature has made all men equal...
“The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of
nature.... God has appointed various orders in civil society, differing
indignity, rights and power. The Church with much greater wisdom recognises
the inequality of men, inequality in actual possession and holds that the
right of property and of ownership stands inviolate."
Like his predecessor, Leo XIII advised the
poor:
Don't envy the rich but be contented with your lot.
Rerum Novarum (1991) was his attempt to
reach an accommodation with capitalism. Marx had rejected private property and
advocated class struggle to defeat the capitalists. Leo misunderstood Marx to
mean the abolition of all property whereas Marx sought only to abolish bourgeois
property based "on the exploitation of the many by the few". He does not explicitly attack the Marxist claim that the wage
system is inherently unjust or the correlative theory of surplus value. The
encyclical tacitly admits that the wage system is
inherently legitimate, as long as it keeps profit within "just limits".
In other words, the capitalist system needed only to be reformed, not
overthrown. Thus Leo condemned socialism but was not against capitalism.
Pius XI
Leo had underestimated capitalist
greed. The virtuous Christian employers, on
whom Rerum Novarum had relied to improve the lot of the
worker, had failed to materialize. Socialism, in consequence, had won the
allegiance of a steadily growing number of the world's dispossessed.
Pius's Quadragesimo Anno (1931)
celebrating the 40th year of Rerum Novarum accepted several elements
in the Marxist critique of capitalism. He accepted with Lenin that "free
enterprise" must evolve into monopoly capitalism, "an international
imperialism whose country is where profit is". The free market, Pius charged, "of its own
nature" concentrates power in those "who
fight most violently and give least heed to their conscience."
He discerned that under capitalism "economic
domination has taken the place of the open market. Unbridled ambition for
domination has succeeded the desire for gain; the whole economic regime has
become hard, cruel and relentless in frightful measure.'' As a result,
even the public authority was becoming the tool of plutocracy, which was thus
exerting a stranglehold on the entire world. All that he could propose was
that "all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles
of social justice and charity".
Resigned to the system and the inequalities it
created, Pius XI wrote that the workers would have to "accept without
rancor the place which divine providence has assigned to them." It was a
position spelled out by a predecessor, Pius X, that
"Human society as established by God is made
up of unequal elements. ... Accordingly, there (will) be rulers and ruled,
employers and employees, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians."
Pius XII
In 1941, this pope commemorated the 50th
anniversary of Rerum Novarum by a radio broadcast. He spoke on three fundamental values of social and economic life:
the use of material goods, work and the family. He reaffirmed the right to
private property and material goods. Man's work is at once his duty and his
right and it is for individuals to regulate their mutual relations and if they
cannot do so "fall back on the State to intervene in the division and
distribution of work". Pius affirmed that the private ownership of material
goods has a great part to play in promoting the welfare of family life. It
"secures for the father of a family the healthy liberty he needs in order to
fulfill the duties assigned him by the Creator regarding the physical, spiritual
and religious welfare of the family.''
The truth is that Pius XII had only general
principles to offer, no great insights. We must wait for the 1960s for some new thinking.
Reference
Papal Doubts about Capitalism, Gary MacEoin,
National Catholic Reporter (1997)
Blessed Pius IX, Roberto de Mattei (trans by J Laughland), Gracewings
(2004)
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