An outsider's look at Catholic social thought
Hux, Samuel
FROM THOMAS AQUINAS TO ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY An outsider's look at Catholic social thought SAMUEL HUX IN THE MIDST of the "what happened and whither now" assessments on the Left after the 1980...
...So forgive me, if you will...
...THERE IS LITTLE point in dwelling long on the clear liberal features, the "Christian Democratic" tone of Mater et Magistra: the concern for the just wage, the approval of labor unionism, the demand for full employment and balance between wages and prices, the insistence on the dignity of labor and the need for dignified working conditions, and such...
...But the popes appeal to him so often, and that gets us to the major point...
...However the "Protestant Ethic" aided the "Spirit of Capitalism," intellectual Catholicism has generally been resistant to that spirit - even though it's true, as R. H. Tawney pointed out in modification of Max Weber's theory, that without the "capitalist spirit" of Venetian and Florentine bankers in Catholic Italy a nascent capitalism would hardly have expanded as it did...
...Maybe not somewhere else, of course...
...On the one hand, it's not traditional socialist nationalization, so I suppose it's reformed capitalism...
...To grow rich without injustice is impossible" and Basil's that "the bread you keep belongs to the hungry...
...From Chrysostum's primitive communist declaration that "wealth is common to thee and to thy fellow servants, just as the sun is common, the earth, the air...
...Catholic terms!, I hear someone warning me...
...AMERICAN liberalism at least since the New Deal has felt that capitalism, whatever its capacity to create expectations of a high standard of living, had to be controlled, its individualistic urges contained by social planning...
...HERE I'D LIKE to take a quirky look at Aquinas before returning to a quirkier look at the encyclicals...
...And (2) what exactly does Aquinas say about natural rights and property...
...Most of the liberal and radical discussion of religion and politics in the United States recently misses the point...
...Which suggests that the charitable restraint of big capital is not enough to rely upon...
...If one's religious faith can be applied to political choice not with a large scope which takes into account the interconnectedness of human necessities but only through endorsement or rejection of the single issue, then either one's faith or its application of it is inadequate, down here...
...But since my own motives may be just as offensive as the trendies', some forthright confession of my own credentials, or lack of them, is only fair...
...WHAT AM I after...
...Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender...
...But perhaps the two popes are not so fundamentally at odds on this issue after all, thirty years having passed between them, and since Pius wrote that "it may well come about that gradually the tenets of mitigated Socialism will no longer be different from the program of those who seek to reform human society according to Christian principles...
...All the Constitution has to say is, in Article VI, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," and, in the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
...At the least Catholics might be able to advise the Protestant and Orthodox National Council of Churches that there's something worldly it could do in place of making its asinine pronouncements about the Middle East so pleasing to the PLO...
...But these are practical observations of administrative efficiency over what's held in stewardship (however one judges' their prescience), not observations about natural law...
...John's "opening to the left" is fundamentally at odds with the warning of Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 that although there was a clear difference between Communism and democratic Socialism, the latter having moderated its views on property and collectivism and having muted the notion of class war, Socialism and the church remained opposed to the extent that "No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist" - which opposition John dutifully repeats in his encyclical, in somewhat muted form, even while making the opening...
...Frankly, I don't think SAMUEL HUX teaches humanities at York College of the City University of New York...
...I put politics within quotation marks above because politics has to retain its root meaning of having to do with the polis - and the polis is down here, in this world...
...Aquinas concludes, "There is no robbery where sovereigns exact from their subjects what is due to them for the good of the common estate, even to the extent of using force" so long as the demands are not extortionate...
...some identifiably "Christian" collective direct action on the American political stage - as opposed to journalists reviewing the play and philosophers developing theories of political dramaturgy - the actors are generally moved by some single issue...
...because it is so often the assumption of the person who feels that religion should cease fooling around with theological subtleties and get down to where it's really at and get with it, the "Trendier than Thou" syndrome Paul Seabury analyzed a few years ago (Harper's, October 1978...
...But, "Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post...
...human affairs are organized more efficiently when a person "has his own responsibility to discharge" than they would be "if everybody cared for everything...
...but the last time I looked was well over twenty years ago...
...To the Summa Theologiae again, 2a 2ae, 66: Aquinas asks, "is the possession of external goods natural to man...
...their specificity is not to the point here...
...I'd be hard put to prove that a Catholic pronouncement does not remain the bugaboo it's often been in the past, except for followers of those mass-media revivalists and such, or to prove that John XXIII was "the Protestants' pope" not simply because he seemed a nice, friendly uncle...
...Community of goods," as a matter of fact, might itself be considered a dictate of natural law in the sense that man in the general, mankind, has been given by God usufruct of the earth...
...it's possible to distrust capitalism in favor of some vision essentially at odds with the democratic socialism I'm clearly hinting at: for instance, some quasi-fascist Corporativism after one reading of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum or Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno...
...but, imperatively, it's a good thought I'm obviously willing to think, and I judge that others might think it too., and I judge that others might think it too...
...The point about "Catholic democracy . . . is not that it is necessarily at any moment more democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum of democracy really is indestructible...
...I'd like to dissociate myself from this trivializing tendency of the age...
...for quite frankly such measures needn't mean all that much unless there is some radical redefinition of just property relations...
...Why isn't there such an ideology...
...But it is to argue that (1) John's teachings are perfectly in line with the priorities of social insurance and security of welfarist social democracy, or the latter is in line with the first, and (2), given his remarks on the social function of property, on the distribution not only of wealth but of the decision-making process in the creation of wealth, and, in general, his suspicion of the conventional privileges of capital, the social and economic arguments of Mater et Magistra are perfectly in line with the programs of such as Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer (Economic Democracy), Michael Harrington (Decade of Decision), and the "Meidner Plan" that Robert Heilbroner has outlined as "The Swedish Promise" (New York Review, December 4, 1980...
...needs is more, not less, direct religious involvement in politics...
...Countering the apparent primitive communism of some early church fathers, he decides that it is, for reasons in line with Aristotle's teachings in the Politics: a person tends to take more care of something that's his sole responsibility...
...And on the other hand, when John follows these remarks on the distribution of goods with the observation that since "large and medium size productive enterprises achieve rapid growth precisely because they finance replacement and plant expansion from their own revenues," the workers should share in those revenues beyond their wages because they help create the revenues, and when he follows this with a quotation from Pius XI's encyclical, "It is totally false to ascribe to a single factor of production what is in fact produced by joint activity...
...What we mean by that principle in public debate is, actually, hard to determine...
...A successful social democracy, economic democracy-call it what you will-couched in quasi-Marxist rhetoric is not a high likelihood...
...The individual holding of possessions is not, therefore, contrary to the natural law...
...But in fact the traditional American liberal attitude has never been quite' so distrustful of capitalism as traditional Catholic social thought has...
...Usury has never found a comfortable home in Catholic social thought...
...One can charge Chesterton with mighty exaggeration historically, but not prescriptively...
...The last time I looked I was a Protestant...
...Since the "free exercise thereof" must certainly include voting according to one's religious principles or campaigning in accord with them, it's difficult to see how the church/state argument is relevant...
...Thomas say...
...I'm not that sure that those are so compelling as Christian terms...
...And John is willing to sanction the nationalization of productive property, following Pius XI again, whom he quotes,' 'if these [enterprises] carry with them power too great to be left in private hands, without injury to the community at large" - although he appeals to Pius's "principle of subsidiarity" that what bears no threat to the commonweal should be left to the exercise of private moral responsibility...
...God has pre-eminent dominion over all things, and in his providence he ordered certain things for men's material support...
...I'm not sure of the historical truth of that last sentence...
...And Reinhold Niebuhr observed some years ago (while commenting on John XXIII's Mater et Magistra and Protestant surprise at its advocacy of the welfare state) that the social thought of the church in predominately Catholic countries had skipped over classical laissez-faire and retained much of the social and anti-atomistic ethos of medieval thought...
...It could not gradually dilute democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat...
...Nor is any of this an argument for nationalization, except in those industries with "power too great": I have my ideas about which they are...
...It is merely awkward...
...I may be the last person a Christian should listen to...
...But I do submit that in an age so taken with ecumenism there's the barest chance that a coherent Catholic social ideology might make some dent in Protestant social thought-assuming perhaps too hopefully it's something voting Catholics would buy...
...Like many converts, he knew more about the creeds of the church than many born to it...
...And without a faith that the market works best for the betterment of all so long as government makes the necessities of the market (including a little anti-competitive price-fixing), and not the betterment of all, its first priority, and without an uncomplicated belief in the justice of usury (call it what you will), it is absurd to speak of an endorsement of the capitalist spirit...
...When he affirms that "artisan and farm enterprises of family type should be safeguarded and fostered, as should also cooperatives that aim to complement and perfect such enterprises," and that it is not less fitting "that the State make special provision for them in regard to instruction, taxes, credit facilities, social security, and insurance," I don't necessarily hear Chesterton's call in The Outline of Sanity for "taxation of contracts so as to discourage the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property among small proprietors" - although I'm listening - but I do hear not only fostered but safeguarded...
...And by the nature of things that mystical democracy was destined to survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy itself...
...The gold you have hidden in the ground belongs to the needy" to Aquinas's cautious defense of private possession according to "human agreement" modified by the declaration that "in the case of necessity everything is common" to John's insistence that economic prosperity is defined not by "the sum total of goods and wealth" but by "the distribution of goods according to norms of justice...
...Since my religious credentials are defined by their absence, there's probably something impertinent in suggesting that Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, could be useful to those who share a political faith with me...
...But I'm not in the habit of thinking of bankers, whatever their religious affiliations, as particularly responsive to social philosophy...
...This is to say nothing, however, of individual possession...
...And I'd be hard put to prove that anti-Catholicism is no longer the "anti-Semitism of the educated," the educated so often now secularists...
...It's often assumed that the easily documented disproportionate numbers of Jews in left-liberal and socialist movements in American history is best explained as the tendency of immigrants and outsiders to flock to the parties welcoming the dispossessed...
...however: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...
...Thomas say...
...John XXIII: private property is a natural right, as Popes Pius and Leo and St...
...There cannot be without a Christian political ideology...
...To avoid the obfuscation conservatives generally like - we're talking about "productive property" obviously, not someone's house or garden or portable goods...
...a triumph of science over superstition," during an age of faith if only the faith of Deism, men were at least ashamed of brutal inequalities such as slavery, while with the emergence of the secular enlightenment and attendant "scientific sophistries" it was "that brotherhood was really disputed," that impressive theories of inequality arose to justify this or that...
...And then too, a democratic socialist with markedly conservative cultural inclinations, I am taken by the sheer traditionalism of Catholic social thought, tradition being to me not something frozen in the past but a living process of communication across the ages in which first words are not forgotten...
...Answering the question "is it possible for robbery not to be a sin...
...Neither is the invisible hand of the market: John early quotes Pius XI's recognition that "economic power has been substituted for the free marketplace," something some American classical economists still refuse to recognize (at least they tend to create market models to explain the functioning of an economy clearly guided by very visible grasping hands...
...Perhaps...
...and there's no appeal to Aquinas on this point in the encyclicals...
...and it is completely unjust for one factor to arrogate to itself what is produced, ignoring what has been contributed by other factors," he is explicitly saying that wealth should be distributed not simply because the powerful should be charitable (a dominant theme of Leo's Rerum Novarum) but because wealth is created partially by labor and justice demands that labor share fully in it - which is to take a considerable cut at the traditional privileges of capital upon which any traditional view of capitalism is based...
...Laissez-faire" simply does not trip easily over the tongues of intellectual Catholics outside the offices of National Review and the American Enterprise Institute (although I doubt that even there anyone really believes that the free competitive market really exists or is really desired by corporate board members...
...This is partly a consequence of facile association: the Roman Catholic church a sort of monarchy...
...But on the other hand there's nothing in the entirety of Question 66, "de furto et rapina," that's at odds with John and Pius on "Public Property" and they might have appealed to Aquinas on this point if they had been as willing as I am to risk being thought' 'Jesuitical" and to appreciate the irony...
...Chesterton remarks that before the "growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment...
...It is also difficult to see what, in most cases, the "political" positions of the fundamentalist revival have to do with Christianity itself...
...First, it pleases me in an ironic way, having been brought up in a Protestant tradition economically quietist-ic, the quietism usually amounting to a passive endorsement of an economic status quo...
...But we might consider the following...
...But considering the generally continued attachment to liberal values several generations later in the midst of fair professional success and economic mobility, the phenomenon is explained just as convincingly as an almost reflexive response to the communal traditions of Jewish living down the centuries, in which one is one's brother's keeper, and to the rabbinic commands that you never turn the poor away without a meal...
...or however unlikely the New and Fair Deal reforms without the "Catholic vote," the phrase "Catholic liberal" never seems to sound redundant...
...Or it may well be - I think it is - that even as early as Quadragesimo Anno the tenets of "mitigated" Catholic reformism were undergoing a change, accelerated in Mater et Magistra, in the direction of "mitigated Socialism...
...and partly illusion: Catholics do tend sometimes to be "Augustinian liberals" (John Roche's phrase), to be somewhat patient with human failure because man is sinful, and "sin," we like to kid ourselves, is a conservative notion, isn't liberal...
...I think there is some radical redefinition of just property relations...
...Leo XIII: private property is a natural right, as St...
...But this is to speak in a negative way, and it's perfectly possible for two people to distrust one thing and disagree on what they'd prefer in its place...
...But however strong the American Catholic attachment to the Democratic party has been (used to be...
...Why is there not a truly Christian politics in this nation...
...he decides that "in the case of necessity everything is common," that "If one is to speak quite strictly, it is improper to say that using somebody else's property taken out of extreme necessity is theft...
...the revivalists, with their incoherent collection of single issues they're willing to support, often to the expulsion from Congress of representatives who support their economic well-being (moral majoritarians by and large are not the rich), know what that means...
...In the Summa Theologiae (2a 2ae, Question 66) Aquinas distinguishes in value and kind between "theft" (furtum) and "robbery" (rapina): robbery is the more detestable because more physical injury can be inflicted, although theft is riot open, is done by stealth, is furtive...
...Would this mean "not-capitalism...
...Whatever the expansive mental habits of some Jesuit professor of political philosophy or the editorial staff of a journal of opinion such as Christianity and Crisis . . . or Commonweal, when there is in the U.S...
...This is not to argue for either...
...and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, etc...
...If liberalism did not go so far as socialism's open animus against the capitalist ethic, it was nonetheless distrustful of capitalism left to capitalists...
...Pius XI: private property is a natural right, as Pope Leo and, implicitly, St...
...For what I've been talking about is really the extension of democracy, and I can easily imagine a wry response to a democratic counsel from Catholic sources, a wry response from the "educated'' who are not educated to the irony that in the intellectual environs of a papal monarchy the distributist ethic has lived longer than it has anywhere else unless it's in the environs of a rabbinic nobility...
...Of course the anti-abortion "right to life" movement can be supported by Christian argument, if arguments are not too subtle...
...For such necessity renders what a person takes to support his life his own...
...Rather-and rather emphatically...
...Nonetheless they are kindred acts...
...Nor is there much point in more than noting the rather obvious "social democratic" features such as Pope John's endorsement of worker's consultation in management decisions and approval not only of social insurance and security but their wider extension...
...That's not important except to the degree, high I suppose, that people invest emotions in labels...
...In any case, I'd recall an argument Chesterton made sixty years ago in What I Saw in America while discussing democracy, the secularist spirit, and Catholicism...
...In a sense, no: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof...
...But, on the other hand, there is evidence of a Catholic distrust of capitalism closer to "mine...
...The "economic democrats" argue that the appeal has to be made in American populist terms, more or less...
...something of that "sense and taste for the infinite" remains...
...and answering the question "is theft justifiable in cases of necessity...
...Is the question naive...
...Of course what's "extortionate'' and what's "extreme necessity" are probably going to be subjective, self-interested judgments...
...For on the one hand this might suggest a modified kind of Chestertonian Distributism, of which there are echoes in Mater et Magistra, and "redistribution" has become a scare word for American conservatives old and new...
...reactions for instance to those fundamentalist movements such as Moral Majority: the caution that we should "remember the principle of separation of church and state...
...Is either ever justifiable...
...Some consideration of Pope John's great encyclical Mater et Magistra and some mental associations will reveal what I mean...
...I doubt that many (although I probably give more credit than is due) would disagree with John that "vigilance should be exercised and effective steps taken that class differences arising from disparity of wealth not be increased, but lessened so far as possible,'' for this can surely be taken to mean house, garden, and goods for all...
...On the other, if a given corporation cannot decide on its own to move its plant several states away and leave a town destitute, then in some sense it's no longer private property since its "owners" cannot dispose of it as they wish on a whim while fiddling profit receipts...
...The assumption behind it - that it's the business of religion to concern itself with the polity as much as with the saving and comforting of souls - is, at any rate, potentially vulgar...
...I slipped away from the church and, for reasons truly not relevant to this discussion, have never found my way back - while I have never been comfortable with a secular view of the world...
...Then Aquinas asks, "is it legitimate for individual men to possess anything as their own...
...And consequently, I add, if rational beings were to judge that collective possession were more reasonable, they could by human agreement fix upon such as an addition to the natural law and not in violation of it...
...Nationalization . It's a kind of theft or robbery, from one obvious point of view...
...Why this digging around in Catholic thought...
...Stewardship...
...there's greater peace when "everyone is content with his task" than when "quarrels . . . break out amongst men who, hold things in common without distinction...
...But for the most part the "politics" of the born-again is nothing more than the inarticulate yearnings, articulated by mass-media pastors, of people who have a poor sense of economic and social, domestic and international realities, and an insufficient understanding of or even concern for what it means in this world to be one's brother's keeper...
...it is to take the question of private property out of the realm of natural law where Aquinas, the pope's principal source, never put it, and to place it in the realm of human agreement, where Aquinas put it and where the thrust of John's arguments-however much his position constrains him to remain solidly within the encyclic tradition-tends to put it...
...But the broad folly of the fundamentalist constituency of the New Right is squarely within the tradition of religious involvement in politics in this nation...
...But I have other motives, of course, devious intentions...
...FROM THOMAS AQUINAS TO ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY An outsider's look at Catholic social thought SAMUEL HUX IN THE MIDST of the "what happened and whither now" assessments on the Left after the 1980 elections, I'd like to make a proposition which might seem odd, given the cheapening of the political process by some of the professedly religious during the campaign: what the U.S...
...And of course there's no specific justification of nationalization here, even if "sovereign" can mean now the "sovereign State...
...Not nationalization per se (about as likely in the U.S...
...But it might be somewhat displeasing to those who think primarily in terms of GNP to read that "National wealth . . . the economic prosperity of any people is to be assessed not so much from the sum total of goods and wealth possessed as from the distribution of goods according to norms of justice, so that everyone in the community can develop and perfect himself...
...but neither communism nor private possession is dictated by natural law...
...This is why it is natural for man to have dominion over things in the sense of having the power to use them...
...Even when the issue is worthy, it's rarely the case that actors are moved by some vision of the interconnectedness of issues...
...And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly moved to save itself, it always grasps at a rag or tag of that old tradition that alone is sure of itself...
...Two matters occur to me...
...it is what rational beings conclude as an addition to the natural law" (italics mine...
...I'm being presumptuous enough to try to imagine a lively process of assumption in John's mind which informs his disparate remarks on productive property in separate parts of the encyclical...
...A professor of mine, Leonard F. Dean, scholar and translator of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, used to say that the trouble with Utopias is that, there, only one thing happens at a time...
...I am fond of quoting the great German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher that religion is "a sense and taste for the infinite...
...the distribution of property is a matter not for natural law but, rather, human agreement, which is what positive law is all about...
...as multiple-candidate elections in the U.S.S.R., and probably about as meaningful), but economic reform beyond profit-sharing through what the "economic democrats" call "the reconstruction of economic decision-making through democratic worker- and worker/consumer controlled production," a truly mixed economy in which public holding companies would gain controlling interests in some key industries in order to police costs and prices, and what Harrington calls "the democratization of the investment function," to make sure not only that capital formation occurs but that capital is invested in socially necessary enterprises and that industry is patrolled to make sure its decisions do not run counter to the commonweal even if the decisions are seductively profitable at the moment...
...Thomas says...
...1) Why is John so pronounced in stressing the social function of property, insisting that if you have it you have it in stewardship, and what's the rather ambiguous meaning of the following conjunction?: John repeats that "the right of private property is from the natural law itself" while in the preceding sentence he has summarized approvingly a teaching from Pius XII (1941 Pentecost Broadcast) to the effect that "the right of every man to use [material goods] for his own sustenance is prior even to the right of private ownership...
...For, "The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men...
Vol. 108 • April 1981 • No. 7
