Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions

by Reverend John LaFarge, S.J.

Consistently has America probed the causes which keep the labor situation in the United States in perpetual turmoil. It has insisted, in season and out of season, that the internal difficulties which the unions experience are not to be blamed upon the principle of trades-unionism in either form that it may take, whether of the industrial or of the crafts union. It believes that these difficulties are due to personal factors which can be remedied by a change of heart in certain leaders and by the education in the true concept of Christian trades-unionism of the great body of American labor. But another element in the trades-union situation must be reckoned with if trades-unionism is to be saved.

Speaking over the National Farm and Home Hour, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared that “the farmer’s welfare is labor’s welfare. The two are inseparable.” Mr. Green gave as the reason for his statement the “close and direct relationship” that exists between labor’s economy and the farmer’s economy. “This means that the buying power of the farmer depends directly upon the buying power of labor.” Large-scale agriculture, too, has produced a corresponding body of farm laborers, so that agricultural workers’ unions are now forming in fruit and vegetable farming, in beet growing, in onion growing, in large-scale dairies and in fruit and vegetable packing and canning.

It is not the alleged identity of interests between labor and agriculture which is our concern. Indeed, such an identity is vigorously denied by many prominent farm leaders who look upon such identification as mere propaganda for the proposed Farmer-Labor party. We are concerned with the danger to trades-unionism that was pointed out by Dr. Goetz Briefs of Georgetown University at the recent convention in Richmond, of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference: the formation of an ever-increasing wage-earning proletariat due to the vanishing ownership of the land.

The effect of this vanishing ownership, said Dr. Briefs, is to intensify to the point of madness the rivalries among wage-earners, and between wage-earners and their employers. It makes no difference whether it is an industrial or an agricultural wage-earner that is concerned. The bitterness and rivalry, with corresponding difficulty of reaching a solution increase as a greater and greater percentage of our citizens move into the purely wage-earning class, and thus swell the ranks of an eventual proletariat. The terrific pressure upon trades-unionism created by such a situation adds fuel to the flames of internecine labor disputes. A wider and wider area is opened up for the ambitions of organizers and organizations, and, worst of all, youth grows up conceiving of life only in terms of labor with no other idea of man’s temporal existence.

The Catholic Church appeals to charity and justice as the remedy for these disputes. But charity and justice belong to the supernatural order. They are gifts of Divine Grace, and Divine Grace builds upon nature. If that nature is to be restored, there must be a much greater equalization than now prevails between the two main types of wage-earning and the agrarian; and that can only be accomplished by the restoration of private property to the landless proletariat.

Growing tenantry is a sign of the proletarianizing process. In the rural districts, tenantry has increased from thirty-five per cent of the number of farms in 1900 to forty-five percent in 1935. As was shown by Dr. Edgar B. Schmiedeler, O.S.B., Director of the Catholic Rural Life Bureau of the N.C.W.C., this increased tenantry brings with it physical “erosion” of the farms, which are not cared for by those who do not own them; and social “erosion,” in the shape of irresponsible drifters; “vanishing liberty, since renters, like wage-earners, are not the free people that owners are.” But more threatening than that, it means the continuing of the ranks of competing industrial job seekers in the cities.

The Most Rev. Edwin V. O’Hara, Bishop of Great Falls, father of the Catholic Rural Life Conference, resumed recent Papal teaching as: “First, wide diffusion of privately owned property in land; secondly, the ownership of the land by those who operate it; and, thirdly, the desirability of the family-sized farms as opposed to the larger holdings on which farm laborers were little better than serfs.”

How can all this be brought about? The yearly discussions of the Catholic Rural Life Conference have crystallized certain ideas. The opinion has been very positively formed that no amount of mere economic allurement will attach people to the land who are at present disaffected from it. Farming may be made an attractive business for some of the higher-ups in the cotton or the wheat or the dairying oligarchy, or in the large-scale trucking enterprises, but though some way may be devised to make it yield a good living for the little farmers, the multitudes will not be attracted to farming merely because of its paying facilities. Nor will the multitudes be won by any back to the land mysticism, however it may appeal to individuals. Land as a mere money-making agent, or land as an end in itself, does not offer a sufficiently powerful and reliable incentive. People will only learn to appreciate the land and to value land ownership when they look upon it as an instrument; an instrument given to man by the Creator Himself, but an instrument primarily for a spiritual purpose, and only secondarily for the purpose of commercial or monetary profit.

This spiritual purpose is the sustenance and the physical permanence of the farm home, as the seat of the Christian family. This was put very plainly by the Most Rev. Aloysius J. Muench, Bishop of Fargo, as the fifth of six points with which he summed up the topic of religion and rural welfare: “The principles of social justice, effective tenancy legislation, etc., must have their first point in the farm home. The farmstead as a homestead must be cherished as the priceless social institute in the land.”

In a public address a few days before the Richmond meeting, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Alexander Troyanovsky, flung down a challenge to the principle of widely distributed, family-sized land ownership as the foundation for a healthy economic life in the nation. It is impossible, said Mr. Troyanovsky, to apply modern technique to the small-sized or family farm. Modern agricultural technique requires large-scale farming, and this means that the only course for American farming is to become collective. That Soviet statement is simply contrary to fact. Where the local community is organized on a cooperative basis, small farms can enjoy every bit of the modern technical facilities—mechanical, electric, biological, etc.,—as are enjoyed in any collective or large-scale enterprise. As was stated by the Conference in a resolution that drew general applause: “We must retain fee-simple ownership of land in small parcels and make technology and scientific research serve this type of land tenure.” A pioneer spirit can use twentieth-century methods.

Behind the Soviet challenge, however, lay a threat of a much deeper nature, a threat that hangs like a cloud over our congressional deliberations at the present time, to the effect that only rigid governmental control can restrain the domination of large-scale farming, curb wasteful competition and greed, and afford sufficient protection to the small farmer. Hence the farmer is confronted with only two entrees on his menu: virtual dictatorship or ruinous laissez-faire. To this challenge we reply:

First, that an immense amount can (and must) be done by the Government, State as well as Federal, to encourage distributed land-ownership and the useful organization of rural economy which does not fall into the class of rigid control or virtual dictatorship. As Bishop Muench noted in the third of his six points, the state can “safeguard the farmers’ interests in the sale of property so that that acquisition of private property is possible.” Taxes can favor small-scale ownership without invading the rights of individuals or destroying all private initiative. Taxation, said Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas at the recent opening of Congress, should favor the family-size farm. Governmental credit can be organized to help the small owner quite as much as the large.

Second, the amount that can be accomplished in this direction by voluntary effort is woefully underestimated. An experiment like that of Father Ligutti in Granger, Iowa, would have been thought utterly impracticable a few years ago. Yet Father Ligutti’s Slavs and Italians have demonstrated a high degree of self-subsistence and skillful utilization of modern technical resources within a framework provided for them through Federal aid. Other experiments spring up daily, all of them in one form or another teaching that no limit has yet been found to the efficacy of cooperation on Christian—not on merely materialistic—lines. The surface of cooperation between city and country groups, between producer and consumer, on a voluntary and regional basis, has hardly been scratched. How many charitable individuals, for instance, in our large cities, have experimented in a most eminently practical form of cooperation, that of making loans, on long-term payments, to young families starting life in the country? Incredibly little has been done in the field of voluntary international cooperation. We talk of export and surpluses as if these things were decreed by the gods on Olympus. Yet they are amenable to voluntary understandings which transcend governmental lines.

At the present time I know of at least one Catholic rural community which is trying to organize itself upon a cooperative basis. Pastor and Sisters are leading in the work. The community is in the East, and is fairly accessible to large centres. Let us suppose that a city Catholic, with some means and some leisure, were to interest himself in the affairs of such a community, were to spend a certain part of his time therein, study on the spot its possibilities for the exemplification of the Christian cooperative, confer with the local men and women who are trying to put the program across, and extend a certain amount of practical aid to the initial ventures—what an immense amount of good could be accomplished for the Catholic social program! Why should a community of decent, self-respecting people, of our own Faith, be obliged always to choose between the dismal alternatives of starting from absolute scratch, or else applying for Federal bounties which are granted only upon rigidly specified lines, entail heavy obligations and dependencies, and, anyhow, do not touch this sort of effort.

While I was writing this paragraph, Father McGoey, of Toronto, dropped in, who has accomplished such wonders in establishing his forty practically self-sustaining families, with their 241 souls, upon the land. He sees a plenty of ways which an intelligent, city Catholic can aid such a rural community. He can help the cooperatives to finance their project. He can help provide outlets in the city, such as a consumer’s organization, for the community’s produce. He can assist the rural community in getting books and furniture for a rural library. But the useful task of all, in Father McGoey’s opinion, for the city person, is to bring the rural dweller to a better appreciation of his own opportunities. This he can do best if he is himself a man who has made a successful career of city life, and so can add realism to his own comparisons.

Finally, it seems to me that we vastly underestimate, in this, as in other matters pertaining to social justice, the immense efficacy of a widespread popular education in the principles of a right order. Were our Catholic periodicals—speaking of Catholics alone—and our Catholic lecturers and preachers and professors of sociology and economics throughout the country to unite upon a wide and general program of educating the American as to the evils of proletarianism, the necessity of distributed private ownership and the family social unit, the nature and efficacy of Christian cooperation and Christian cooperatives, the possibilities, spiritual cultural of Catholic parish life, a definite brake would be put upon the centralizing and depersonalizing theories of agrarian economy which are now invading political circles. The majority of thinking farm leaders welcome these basic truths when they are explained to them. “We simply must accept your Catholic family-economics program,” said the non-Catholic President of a secular college in conversation with a delegate to the Richmond convention. We have had, I believe, altogether too much agrarian defeatism. Let us begin to market the harvest of knowledge which alone can stop the Bolshevist weed from springing up and choking industry and agriculture to death.

From America Magazine (1937)
Farm Ownership Linked With Trades Unions: The Catholic plan replies to a Soviet challenge

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Leo XIII And Labour

by Charles J. O'Malley

There are men who make history and there are documents that make civilization. Leo XIII. was one of the greatest makers of history that the Nineteenth century knew. He was more. Generations hence it will be said of him that he was one of the greatest builders of civilization his age produced. It is a matter of simple truth to say that no states man of his day exerted as powerful an influence on the age, and it is certain no thinker of the century just closed did so much to restore right social order for the future. During life Pope Leo XIII was often classed with Gladstone and Bismarck; yet he was greater than they. They were at best, solicitious only for the welfare of single nations. Leo XIII struggled to bring about the uplift of all nations. No man of his age strove so earnestly to make universal justice prevail. More spiritual than Gladstone, more farseeing than Bismarck, more philosophical than both combined, after ages will show that in the work of preserving social order he was the greatest force the Nineteenth century produced.

A proof of this may be found in the now world-famous encyclical, "On the Condition of Labor." Officially styled the encyclical Rerum Novarum, obviously it had its base in that vigorous pronouncement against Socialism, Communism and Xihilism issued December 28, 1878. The encyclical on labor was issued May 15, 1891, but in reality it must be regarded as a supplement to the former. This is true because political agitators of that day had almost inextricably bound the social question and the question of labor together. In the former Leo had insisted that it was the duty of all who had authority or wealth to make better the condition of those who toil. It was their duty, he asserted, to see that the laborer should have his proper wages. In the latter he insisted even more urgently that justice ought to be done. In the first he warned against the acceptance of false ideals, which, put in operation, would bring about the destruction of Christian faith, the Christian home and that civilization which grew out of Christianity; yet urged at the same time that evils existed which ought to be rooted out. In the latter he showed rulers and employers and those employed how they could be changed without injury to the existing system. The tone of the encyclical was one of sympathy for the oppressed. "Some remedy," he urged, "must be found, and found quickly, for the misery and wretchedness pressing so heavily and so unjustly, even at this moment, on the vast majority of the working classes. The custom of working by contract, and the concentration of so many branches of trade in the hands of a few individuals, have brought about a condition of affairs in which a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself."

Strong as this is, and as far-seeing as it is vigorous, the "Great White Shepherd," as some one has called him, was not content with mere statements. The right of man to own private property was next considered. He declared it man's natural right. "To affirm that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race, is not to deny that private property is lawful. The earth has been granted to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it has been assigned forever to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man's own industry and by the laws of individual races. Is it just that the fruit of one's own sweat and labor shall be possessed and enjoyed by some one else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed the labor."

So spoke the "workingman's Pope" on the right of each individual to use and to enjoy that which his toil earned. Yet even this did not fill up the measure of his solicitude. With Socialism preaching its alluring doctrine throughout the earth, he felt that again it must be analyzed and its evil principles exposed. Turning to its main tenet community of goods he showed that it must be rejected, since it would only injure those it would seem to benefit. It would utterly destroy the system of wages and introduce widespread confusion and disorder. It would be impossible, he declared, to reduce civil society to a dead level. Socialists may do their utmost to that end, but all such striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exists among mankind manifold differences of the most important order. People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal conditions. All this, the Pope goes on to explain, is part of the lot of humanity, and has to be accepted as such. ~No strength and no artifice will ever succeed in wholly banishing from human life some of the ills and inequalities which beset it. The Pope utterly condemns the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the capitalist and laborer are intended by nature to live in conflict. Capital cannot do without labor or labor with out capital. In the precepts of religion, the Pope declares, is to be found the guidance of each class with regard to its duties towards others. Religion teaches the laboring class to carry out honestly and fairly all equitable agreements entered into; never to injure the property or to attack the person of an employer; never to resort to violence or to engage in any riot or disorder. Religion teaches the wealthy owner and employer that their work-people are not to be accounted their bondmen, and that it is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or physical power. The employer must never tax his work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their age or sex. All masters of labor "should be mindful of this, that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and Divine."

It is often objected by Socialist leaders of our day that Leo XIII analyzed existing evils well, but prescribed no remedy. The statement is untrue as often as it is made. We have seen that he advised the application of the teachings of Christianity. He even went further. He urged the organization of societies of Christian workingmen, and declared that they ought to be protected by the state. The state, moreover, he asserts, ought to protect the rights of those who toil by seeing to it that just laws be passed and enforced protecting the interests of laborers. Shorter hours ought to be provided, the virtue of female laborers ought to be insured by legal enactment, and finally child labor ought to be abolished by the state. Every person who labors ought to be given wages sufficient to provide frugal comforts for himself and family. The law of the various countries, declared this statesman, ought to be so executed that they shall make for justice. Since justice is all that can be desired, what more do the agitators desire? "What other could they expect Leo XIII to suggest?

Here it may be well to ask how this tremendously important document was received by the civilized world? Could such a pronouncement be delivered without exciting almost universal comment? Obviously, it could not. Catholic thinkers, of course, applauded; yet it is true that the non-Catholic world was not chary in commendation. In England the London Times declared that it "abounded in observations worthy universal attention, and breathed a spirit of Christian charity which, if imitated, would go far to resolve all the industrial questions of the epoch." The St. James Gazette asserted that it manifested "an ardent love for the working people, many passages being inflamed with an eloquent anger against the inhuman abuses which too often find their way into industry and commerce!" The Guardian, the English High Church organ, warmly commended it, saying that "in all questions which concern labor the Catholic Church instantly puts itself on the side of the working population." "Its effect," continued that journal, "will be of immense importance in the development of the social question, and it will be so, also, without doubt for the future of the Catholic Church. The Anglican Bishop of Winchester declares that if the Pope were not listened to "the world will have to expiate its neglect by some terrible calamities." In France commendation was equally strong from opponents of the church. Barres, a Socialist leader in the Chamber of Deputies, declared that, "given a few years to efface existing mistrusts, and the Democracy would no longer see an enemy in the priest." Leroy-Beaulieu, the Socialist, in "The Papacy, Socialism and Democracy," declared the world was beholding "the return to the stage of one of the greatest actors in history." Emile Olivier, also a Socialist, asked in comment, "when has not the church sided with the poor? When has it ever failed to spread over them its maternal wings?" Vorwarts, the great organ of German Socialism, asserted that the Pope had "gone in advance of all princes and all governments of civilized states, and has resolved the social question. He has resolved the social question so far as it is given to any existing power to resolve it." Now that the church in this country is engaged in a conflict with Socialism, the foregoing quotations certainly have a timely value.

Nor was there lack of analysis and commendation in our own country. The American mind is quick to grasp every discussion that is of value. Nearly two years afterwards the great encyclical was thus analyzed in an address by H. C. Simple, of Montgomery, Ala., in the Columbian Catholic Congress held in Chicago:

The platform of Catholics on the condition of labor was announced by Leo XIII. in the encyclical Kerum Novarum. This paper seeks to gather a syllabus of leading social principles from that immortal document, which called forth letters of thanks from the Emperor of Germany and the President of the French Republic, and which shows that the head of the church as the reverend counselor of states is the father of Christians and the friend of the people.

What task more arduous than to define the rights and the duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and labor? What more perilous than to discuss the foundations of society when every word is scanned by crafty agitators, enemies of peace and order? Yet what more humane than to extinguish the members of the mighty conflict which threatens the very foundations of society, than to alleviate the hardships suffered by the defenseless victims of the un-Christian laws, greedy competition, rapacious usury and despotic monopolies and trusts?

All agree, arid no one can deny, that some remedy must be found, and quickly found, for the misery and wretchedness which press so heavily at this moment on the large majority of the very poor. But where is it to be found?

Socialism steps forward and answers: I have found it; I am the redeemer of society. I will invest all property in the state; I will give it the sole administration, and it shall distribute to each according to his needs. Thus I will abolish poverty and bring back the golden age of universal equality.

"No," replies the Holy Father. "Your project is at once futile, unjust and pernicious. It is futile, for if all goods must forever remain in common, where is the workingman s hope of bettering his condition by industry and economy? Where is his liberty, his inalienable right to invest his wages permanently and profitably, to dispose freely of the fruit of his sweat?

But above all, it is emphatically unjust. Centralization of property in the state violates natural rights. The state cannot take away the right to acquire property, for this right is from God, who made man in His own image and likeness, and said Let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping thing. We see this natural right by the light of pure reason, and see it in ever-recurring necessities, and in nature's first law of self-preservation. We see it in our intelligence, which surveys the vast outward world of countless objects necessary and useful for the support of life, and which joins the future to the present. We see it in our free will, which directs and guides us under things best suited to each of us. And no matter how primitive a condition of man be conceived, even though no state existed, yet if a man occupy for his exclusive use any of the goods of earth or any spot on its surface which no other has occupied, it becomes his, and if besides occupying it he expends on it the labor of his hand or his mind, he stamps it with his own personality, and to dispossess him would be to rob him of his labor.

"This natural right to acquire and hold property is manifested more clearly still in the rights and duties of the father of the family. What right more clear, what duty more sacred for the father than to provide for his offspring against the wretchedness of want in this mortal life ? Yet by what other means can this sacred duty be fulfilled than by this acquisition and ownership of permanent property, to be transmitted by inheritance?

True, the state may regulate exercise of these natural rights, and in the exercise of this power to regulate the transmission of property by inheritance, or testamentary gift, may it not correct to some extent the great evil of our times, the accumulation of millions on millions by single individuals or families, by the imposition of such inheritance taxes as will not only provide some relief to the suffering poor from the heavy burdens of taxation, but secure a fund for the merely frugal support of industrious worldngmen in times of hardship? The state may even enter the domestic circle to protect the members of the family, but the state cannot usurp or absorb the parental authority, or destroy its very life, by assuming the control of all property.

Taken from "Leo XIII: The Great White Shephard of Christendom

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An Introduction to Distributism

by John Médaille

Distributivism, also known as Distributism, is an economic theory formulated by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton largely in response to the principles of Social Justice laid down by Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Its key tenet is that ownership of the means of production should be as widespread as possible rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few owners (Capitalism) or in the hands of state bureaucrats (Socialism). Belloc did not believe that he was developing a new economic theory, but rather expounding an old and widespread one against the novelties of both Capitalism and Socialism.

Belloc believed that Capitalism could never achieve economic equilibrium on its own. It is an unstable system for two reasons: divergence from its own moral theory and from insecurity of two kinds. The moral theory of Capitalism is based on freedom, but it tends to accumulate property in the hands of a few owners; as ownership becomes more and more limited, more and more power passes to a small capitalist class. The state increasingly becomes a tool to protect “wage contracts” which are increasingly leonine, that is, based on inequality. One side may refuse the contract (the employer), but the other side, the worker, generally has no choice but to accept it because the alternative is starvation. The state can no longer be a neutral arbiter between classes but becomes a defender of one class upon whom jobs and growth are increasingly dependent.

In addition to this moral problem,Capitalism also has two kinds of insecurity: insecurity for the workers and even insecurity for the capitalists. There is insecurity for the workers because the wage fetches less in old age, nothing in sickness, and jobs themselves are at the discretion of capitalists3 (e.g., “outsourcing”). But Capitalism also produces insecurity for the capitalist.

Competitive anarchy makes the system as unstable to owners as it is to workers and results in gluts and underselling. Capitalism responds by becoming less capitalistic; it uses the law to raise barriers to competition and to limit liability; the corporation itself is an adjustment to the inherent instability of Capitalism that allows investors to limit liability. The ardent socialist does not fear a pure Capitalism nearly as much as does the ardent capitalist.

Given its instabilities, Capitalism must, perforce, find some way of stabilizing itself. Belloc argues that there are only three stable solutions: slavery, socialism, or wide-spread ownership of property, (or some mixture of the three.) “To solve Capitalism you must either get rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both.” Of the three solutions, slave societies have shown themselves to be highly stable over long periods of time, but this solution is precluded by our Christian heritage. But the third solution, what Belloc calls the “proprietary state,” is regarded as untenable by the intellectual and political elites, which leaves only the second solution, some sort of socialism. Thus in practice Capitalism breeds a collectivist theory which leads to a servile state. The transition to socialism follows the line of least resistance because nothing really changes when the state buys up the waterworks or the rail lines. But socialist practice does not really mean socialism. In practice, socialism merely means increased regulation, a solution that appeals to both corporate interests and socialist “reformers.” Although the rhetoric is different, the results are the same. The “socialist” reformer continues to pile regulations on top of big business, a situation big business is more than content to see, because in return these regulations serve as entry barriers to potential competitors and thereby guarantee greater security from competition and hence greater security of profits. In turn, the capitalist becomes increasingly responsible for the welfare of the workers in return for a greater security of property and profits. In the end, you have neither socialism nor Capitalism, but servility, the servile state. The practical result of all of this is an increasing dependence of workers on the government and corporatist solutions. Health care, unemployment insurance, and retirement benefits pass from control by the individual to control by the corporation or the state.

The servile system has already begun. Indeed, it is already here. The differences between a “socialist” Europe and a “capitalist” America are merely differences of degree rather than of kind.
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Both depend on the same bureaucratic organization and social welfare systems. This state of affairs did not come about by way of conspiracy but by way of necessity; Belloc seems to have been absolutely correct in his predictions. Until the 1940’s, Capitalism was a highly unstable system suffering ever increasing cycles of economic euphoria and depression, culminating in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The system needed help to stabilize itself exactly as Belloc said it would. The real change came with the introduction of Keynesian economics, which made the government responsible not just for this or that social welfare program, but for making up shortages in aggregate demand by redistributive taxes. In other words, Keynesianism is itself “distributist,” or rather “re-distributist”; but it redistributes income rather than property. Therefore the debate, in practical terms, is not between Distributivism and its opposite, but between kinds of Distributivism, between redistribution of income and distribution of property. But one way or another, economic liberalism cannot provide stability on its own; it needs the help of distributists of one sort or another. Income redistribution, being a constant and ongoing process, will always require a vast state apparatus to assess the funds on the one hand and determine eligibility on the other.

Keynesianism has been adopted by nearly every modern regime, whether of the right or left, because it seemed to work. As a result, the inherent instabilities of Capitalism have been rendered less extreme, with depressions rendered much milder than the convulsion which shook this country and Europe at the end of the 1920’s. But Keynesianism enlarged state power, taxes, and the size of government to previously unimagined levels. We have become accustomed to having the government solve all problems and do so at the highest possible level. Even right wing administrations have dropped all pretense of “federalism” and seek to intrude more and more on daily life; the teacher in his classroom, the cop on the beat, the shopkeeper in her store become increasingly the objects of federal concern and less of local regulation.

But today the future of the Keynesian arrangement seems in doubt. In both Europe and America, the costs of government seem ready to outstrip the ability of society to support them. Further, the willingness of corporate interests to continue the arrangement is ending; they have invested great sums and great energies in seeking an end to the system and their efforts are paying off. Corporations are seeking to externalize social costs that have theretofore been part of the wage system, such as medical insurance, pensions, and unemployment costs. However, it is doubtful that shifting these responsibilities can be accomplished without introducing the very insecurities that occasioned the arrangements in the first place. Thus the Keynesian system seems to be caught in a conundrum, the very conundrum pointed out by Belloc. It cannot continue its Keynesian bargain (and this is especially so in the face of global competition), and it cannot drop it without risking chaos.

The economic theory of Distributivism is based on the distinction between distributive justice and corrective justice found in Aristotle. Distributive justice deals with how society distributes its “common goods.” Aristotle defines these as “things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1130b, 31-33). This refers to the common goods of a state, a partnership, corporation, or some cooperative enterprise. For Aristotle, these things should be divided by “merit” based on contributions, but what constitutes this merit will be a matter that is determined culturally, “for democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or with noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence” (Ethics, 1131a, 25-29). Corrective justice, on the other hand, deals with “justice in exchange”; that is with transactions between individual men. In this case, justice consists in exchanging equal values, in “having an equal amount before and after the transaction" (Ethics, 1132b, 19-21). Corrective justice is properly the subject of economic science per se, while distributive justice is irreducibly cultural and involves decisions about what constitutes a just distribution.

Modern economics tends to treat distributive justice in one of two ways. For the socialist or the Keynesian, it is primarily a political question and necessitates control of the economy by the state. For the orthodox neoclassical economist, distributive justice will be the unintentional result of the achievement of equilibrium under conditions of perfect competition (cf. John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth); in other words, equity would be an automatic by-product of equilibrium. Hence distributive justice is swallowed up, as it were, by corrective justice and accomplished without anyone intending it, the very essence of the “invisible hand” theory. However, this has never happened and is never likely to happen. It is not only that the necessary conditions (e.g., “perfect” competition) can never be satisfied, nor even that justice, a virtue, cannot be divorced from human intentionality. Rather, the problem is with the very nature of corrective justice, which is “equality in exchange.” Thus corrective justice tends to perpetuate whatever division of property existed before the exchange; distributive equity cannot therefore result from exchanges (Cf. Pareto optimality). But for the Distributivist, distributive justice is prior to corrective justice (as it was for Aristotle and Aquinas), just as production is prior to exchange. Thus equity is prior to equilibrium, and equity will depend on the distribution of the means of production. Equity is not the by-product of equilibrium but its cause; indeed, equity and equilibrium are practically the same word and very nearly the same thing.

Distributivism is often viewed as a romantic “back to the land” movement, or even a desire to return to the Middle Ages. But this criticism is unjustified. Indeed, well-divided property has both a long history and a current presence. Two examples should suffice: the “land to the tiller” programs of Korea and Taiwan, and the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation. In Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War, the estates were broken up and sold to the peasants at a rate well below market values. The resulting increase in purchasing power of the previously penniless peasants spurred the growth of business and industry and catapulted these nations from backward and oppressive societies to modern industrial states in only one generation. In the Mondragón Cooperative, 77,000 worker-owners do $16 Billion/year in sales making everything from muzzle loading hunting guns to modern built-to-order factories. They also operate an extensive network of social programs, schools, colleges, training institutes and research facilities. In addition, we can cite an impressive number of successful ESOP’s and other employee owned businesses. Thus Distributivism would seem to be perfectly adaptable to the modern world and even confers competitive advantages.

Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum viewed the just wage as the means of spreading ownership; Belloc reversed that by finding that wider ownership was the means of achieving the just wage. In this, Belloc appears to be correct, as John Paul II acknowledged when he called for associating the worker with the ownership of the workbench at which he labored. It should be clear that the only way to reduce the size of government and increase the range of freedom and justice is to eliminate the need for big government. But as long as there are great imbalances in wealth and poverty, there will be great bureaucracies in government and industry.

©John C. Médaille
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.html
john@medaille.com

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Distributism, State Power and Papal Teachings

by Thomas Storck

Last spring an interesting dialog took place in the pages of The University Concourse on the subject of distributism, which is the economic system elaborated in the first half of the twentieth century by such Catholic writers as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Fr. Vincent McNabb. Its most complete exposition was in Belloc's book, The Restoration of Property (1936). In the latest round of this controversy there seem to be several points which are especially at issue. The first is the question of the role of the government in promoting a just economy, in particular, a distributist economy. For example, Dr. Kevin Schmiesing, in his article in the May 4 Concourse, advocates what he calls a "free economy," in which a just society would be brought about by "moral suasion in a call for simpler living, more generous aid and care for the impoverished and marginalized, and more voluntary efforts to ensure that all people participate in the productive process through ownership of property," and in which the government would have little role. And Mr. Philip Harold similarly warns against the "temptation" to rely overmuch on governmental power to implement a program of economic justice. Therefore we should first look at this question of the role of the state and of state power in creating and maintaining a just economic order.

THE ENTIRE ENCYCLICAL TRADITION

It would be easy for me and for the others who have taken part in this discussion to state our opinions about the degree and kind of governmental intervention in the economy which is justified. But in doing so we would too often be simply asserting our opinions. I suggest that the correct method of procedure for us as Catholics is to look to the entire encyclical tradition, that is, the tradition of modern papal social teaching beginning with Rerum Novarum in 1891 and embodied in encyclicals and other documents down to the present day. There we will find an interrelated body of doctrine addressing this very question, as well as other questions about the relationship between the moral law and the economy. In my previous articles I quoted several passages from these encyclicals, but I cannot recommend too highly to the readers of this journal that they return to the sources and read these seminal documents in their entirety, especially Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII, Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI, and the present Holy Father's three social encyclicals, Laborem Exercens, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Centesimus Annus. Nor is it the case, as some have asserted, that somehow Centesimus represents the overturning of all the previous documents--as if the Church had suddenly disavowed all that she formerly taught. Centesimus is firmly in the same tradition as its predecessors.

NEITHER MINIMIZING NOR MAXIMIZING STATE POWER

Suffice it to say that the general attitude taken by these documents toward the role of the state in the economy is one of neither minimizing nor maximizing state power. Certainly the principle of subsidiarity, which Dr. Schmiesing cites and which Pius XI formulated in Quadragesimo Anno--that the state should not assume tasks best left to lower groups--is of fundamental importance, but that same Pontiff in the same encyclical notes that the economic proposals of the moderate socialists of his day (1931) "often strikingly approach the just demands of Christian social reformers" (QA, no. 113) and that "certain forms of property must be reserved to the State, since they carry with them an opportunity of domination too great to be left to private individuals without injury to the community at large" (QA, no. 114).

I cite these remarks simply to show that the papal, and perforce the Catholic, approach to state power in the economy cannot be reduced to Dr. Schmiesing's principle of "less rather than more state intervention." But I do not want to start a war of papal quotations. I would prefer that all our readers look at the encyclicals themselves, and I trust to their good sense and open minds in doing so.

NO NEUTRALITY

Moreover, there is another aspect of the question of the government and the economy that we should keep in mind. This is that, no matter what a government does or does not do with regard to the economy, it is taking a stand. Just as a state that passed no laws condemning abortion could not take refuge in the sophistry that it was neutral on the subject, so a state that takes a hands off attitude toward the economy is taking a position on the economy just as much as the most statist regulatory regime that one can imagine. It is impossible for a government not to affect the economy, either by its laws or its lack of laws. There is no such thing as simply "allowing the economy to be itself," for the economy, like all the other creations of mankind, must have some framework in which to function. The question is, shall this framework be one that we try to make (as much as we can) a Christian framework, or one that follows the deistic philosophy of the eighteenth century?

Another point that was raised in our discussions concerns what are often called "occupational groups" or "guilds." These entities are not only an integral part of the distributist program, but have figured very largely in papal teaching. In Quadragesimo Anno Pius XI devoted a good deal of space to describing how these groups would function, and his successor, Pius XII, continued to champion them. Nor does John Paul II neglect them, as when, in Laborem Exercens, he refers to "intermediate bodies with economic, social and cultural purposes; they would be bodies enjoying real autonomy with regard to the public powers, pursuing their specific aims in honest collaboration with each other and in subordination to the demands of the common good...." (no. 14)

Anyone acquainted with the papal social tradition would immediately see here a reference to occupational groups.

However, I still must answer Dr. Schmiesing's question: Would the decisions of these groups be backed by the power of the government or would they be merely voluntary organizations such as the American Bar Association?

Pius XI contrasts the occupational groups with free associations such as the ABA, and pointedly notes that he hopes that a flourishing of free associations will "prepare the way and...do their part toward the realization of those more ideal vocational fellowships or 'groups' which We have mentioned" (QA, no. 87). Generally Catholic commentators on this question see the occupational groups as analogous to the medieval guild on this point, in that in order to practice a certain trade or profession one was required to be a member of the appropriate guild and abide by the decisions of the guild. And the power of the state stood ready to enforce guild decisions, if necessary. However, the government did not set guild policy nor appoint guild officials, who were elected by the members. This sort of arrangement often puzzles those accustomed to capitalism. They understand purely private entities and they understand the government. But the notion of some sort of intermediate body, with a real role to play in bringing order to the economy, yet not a department of the government is strange to them. But before concluding that such bodies are unnecessary or harmful to the economy, I would simply urge my readers to remember that the tradition of economic thought with which we Americans are most familiar stems ultimately from the deistic tradition of Adam Smith, a bitter enemy of the Catholic Church incidentally.(1)

Space unfortunately prevents me from going into detail about the role of occupational groups in the economy, but we must remember that they are not an example of state power, but of the natural grouping of those working to further the same endeavor.

ABUSES OF CORPORATE POWER

Dr. Schmiesing cites various examples of the abuse of state power. I deplore them as much as he does. But it would be as easy to bring up examples of the abuses of private corporate power, beginning with Rerum Novarum, which speaks of "a small number of very rich men [who] have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than slavery itself" (RN, no. 2). Moreover, as I set out at more length in my first article (January 28), distributism is not a statist system. Just because it rejects the unrestrained competition of capitalism (something also rejected again and again by the Popes), does not mean that it makes use of the government to regulate the economy. Distributism calls for the wide ownership of private property, with the laws (for example, the tax code) designed to discourage the concentration of property in the hands of a few. It is hard to find anything in the Catholic tradition which is against such arrangements.

THE ROLE OF LAW

A third and very important point that is at issue in our controversy concerns the role of the law as coercive agent. Both Dr. Schmiesing and Mr. Harold warn that using the laws to promote economic justice must tend to become a violation of human freedom. And in the first place, I repeat that any attempt to establish a Christian economic order must be preceeded and accompanied by a renewed preaching of the Gospel. Men's hearts must turn to God if the society is to turn to God. But this does not mean that the law can never have a punitive effect. One last quotation from Pius XI in which he refers to the laissez-faire philosophy of the nineteenth century will illustrate what I mean.

A stern insistence on the moral law, enforced with vigor by civil authority, could have dispelled or perhaps averted these enormous evils. This, however, was too often lamentably wanting. For at the time when the new social order was beginning, the doctrines of rationalism had already taken firm hold of large numbers, and an economic teaching alien to the true moral law had soon arisen, whence it followed that free rein was given to human avarice.(2)

In most matters we recognize that the law is both teacher and restrainer of evil doers. Thus we want to prevent abortion even if we cannot convert the abortionist. Our Catholic ancestors applied the same philosophy to the economic order, and however much they strove to convert those who injured the common good by their greed, they also sought to restrain them precisely to protect the most economically vulnerable members of the society.

EFFECTS ON FAMILIES

Probably the biggest reason that Americans today have difficulty thinking about making fundamental changes in the economy is that we are convinced that our economy is doing so well. Every day we are bombarded with positive economic statistics from rising Dow Jones averages to increased GDP or worker productivity. But one way to put this in perspective is to ask, How many families can afford to live on the income of the father alone? If we accept that a normal family life allows a mother to devote herself full-time to the care and education of her children, what can we say about an economy that makes a normal family life so difficult for so many? Despite the statistics, I do not think such an economy can be regarded as healthy.

My plea and hope is that Catholics will allow themselves to ask some fundamental questions about the economy which go beyond the usual assumptions which we receive from the culture around us. Then we can look at what our Catholic tradition has said and perhaps find some surprising truths, but truths which are nonetheless part of the salvific message of Jesus Christ, as held and taught by his teaching Church until the end of time.


(c) Thomas Storck. All Rights Reserved.

Thomas Storck's latest book is Christendom and the West : Essays on Culture, Society and History. He is a contributing editor of The New Oxford Review and a member of the editorial board of The Chesterton Review. This article first appeared in the University Concourse, Franciscan University.

---------------------------------

Footnotes:

1 Adam Smith described the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages as "the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the...liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind...." The Wealth of Nations, bk. 5, chap. 1, pt. 3, art. 3.
2 Quadragesimo Anno, no. 133

© The University Concourse, October 3, 2000

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Forty Years After

Monday, May. 25, 1931
from Time Magazine

Return Novarum. Forty years ago last week, the long-headed little old man in the Vatican peered out into the revolutionized industrial world and saw that all was not going to be peaceful. To 81-year-old Gioacchino Vincenzo Pecci, His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, who had been Civil Governor of Benevento and Governor of Perugia and far more a man-of-the-world than his dogmatist predecessor Pius IX, it seemed a good moment for Mother Church to say her say about social and industrial reform.' So he composed and issued a great encyclical entitled Rerum Novarum ("Concerning New Things"). Firmly rejecting the new Socialism and its "community of goods" as "directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind," he enunciated a platform which he was later to expand so as to put Mother Church on record for trades unionism, the eight-hour day, minimum wage laws, old age pensions and much else that was "radical" then, commonplace now.

"There is no intermediary," he said, "more powerful than Religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice." He recognized the occasional justification for strikes, the necessity for labor unions and decent wage standards, but he made clear that Mother Church could go no further. "As for those who possess not the gifts of fortune," he said, "they are taught by the Church that in God's sight poverty is no disgrace, and that there is nothing to be ashamed of in earning their bread by labor."

Quadragesimo Anno. As last week's 40th anniversary of Rerum Novarum approached, the roundheaded, 73-year-old man in the Vatican who 40 years ago was an energetic priest fond of mountain-climbing, and who since has shown himself one of the great Statesman-Popes, beheld the industrial and financial worlds again seething with a great unrest. In Russia the overturn had come, violently, and Mother Church had suffered there with Capitalism. Throughout the world, even Capitalists were saying, "Capitalism is not perfect. It must mend itself and mankind." Achille Ambrogio Damiano Ratti, His Holiness Pope Pius XI, perceived that the appropriate moment again had come for Mother Church to announce her attitude towards the social scheme.

To the Vatican printshop last fortnight went a long document entitled Quadragesima Anno ("In the 40th Year"). To the world Press and to a throng of the faithful assembled last week at the Vatican for the occasion was handed another long document, an official resume of Quadragesima Anno, Pius XI's encyclical on the social and industrial world of today, amplifying and interpreting Leo XIII's. Finally, a throne and microphone of gold and silver were set up in the Courtyard of St. Damascus and the Pope came forth in person to address the workers and employers of the world.

John Jacob Raskob, member of the finance committee of General Motors, sitting with Mrs. Raskob and their daughter Elizabeth in a reserved seat near His Holiness, may well have wondered what would happen to Capitalism if Mother Church should move her great weight leftward from the position taken by Leo XIII. But the official resume of Quadragesima Anno dispelled all fear. It said that Rerum Novarum was still "the Magna Charta of all Catholic activity in the social sphere. . . . "It is ... absolutely necessary to reconstruct the whole economic system by bringing it back to the requirements of social justice so as to insure a more able distribution of the united proceeds of capital and labor. Thus will be achieved that uplifting of the proletariat which Leo XIII so ardently desired. ... In the present order this can be accomplished only by a fair and just wage. . . ." Extempore To the world's surprise. Pius XI did not read his official resume into his world-reaching microphone. Instead he extemporized for over an hour in three languages, repeating each sentence in Italian, German, French. His keynote: "Prayer, action and sacrifice—there is what is necessary for you, the children of our predilection. That is what you need, you, the workers; you, the financiers; you who finance all industry, labor in justice and charity, in fraternity and in peaceful cooperation. . . . May the Holy Spirit descend upon you. . . ."

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Distributism vs. Capitalism

by Roy F. Moore

Most of Distributism’s critics consider it as a form of Socialism. They point to the fact that both Chesterton and Belloc started as Socialists, and that is where their command of the facts comes to an end. Both Chesterton and Belloc clearly pulled away from the dark path of Socialism, and openly attacked it. But they never ceased their assault on Capitalism. So, in the minds of certain defenders of Capitalism, Distributism must still be Socialism.

Why do people insist on misunderstanding what we support and oppose? Why do folks believe we are against a “market economy”? It is because we have been indoctrinated in the belief that a “market economy” and a “capitalist economy” are one and the same.

But they aren’t.

A market economy has been with us ever since civilization began. The buying and selling of goods, trade across borders, barter and exchange and competition among rivals are part and parcel of a society’s life. From the days of ancient Babylon to our computerized age, the ebb and flow of production and commerce goes on like the tide and the seasons. After the coming of Christ and the spread of His Church into European society, the laws and life of commerce gradually became more humane, and the greed of the powerful was mostly held in check.

In western and central Europe during the High Middle Ages, as Belloc notes in his classic book, The Servile State, the guilds regulated the markets and the crafts, while the Crown kept tabs on financial and legal matters. High quality of goods and services were protected and preserved, competition was allowed to flourish, but within certain boundaries. And under-girding all was the authority of the Church, vigilant in defending God-given rights and the good of souls in both government and marketplace.

But between the late Renaissance and the birth of the Protestant Reformation, all that began to change and for the worse. The Church found its authority weakened due to internal corruption and heresy, and a Protestant legal system ushered in by John Calvin enabled the kings and princes of northern Europe to seize the Church’s lands and enrich the powerful few. Usury, no longer condemned as a sin, became the legal norm, and the wise prohibitions against usury that once protected the lower classes were tossed aside as if they were filthy rags. Bankers and wealthy merchants took advantage of the chaotic times to worsen the lot of the workers, farmers and craftsmen.

As the centuries plodded on, the ancient restraints on the market and finance crumbled away. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the poor and the farmers were fed into the factories, working themselves into their graves. Such abuses were the stuff of Charles Dickens’ fiction that was clearly based on fact, since he himself was forced to work as a boy in such a factory. He wrote eloquently and heart-breakingly of those black years and the poverty and shame.

This state of affairs which would be called Capitalism would have its explainers and defenders, the primary one being Adam Smith and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. In it, he posited an “invisible hand” that guided economies toward the good, believing that “enlightened self-interest” would keep any forces of chaos unleashed by this system in check. Chesterton thought otherwise when he wrote:

It was the mystical dogma of (Jeremy) Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Such abuses and turmoil brought forth moral revulsion, which emerged in the reaction of Socialism. But since, like Capitalism, it believed in centralization of economic and political power, the cure it promoted for the ills it protested was worse than the disease. And since, like Capitalism, it had a materialistic core, it saw the religious and spiritual as a dangerous drug for the masses, an “opiate of the people” as the foul Karl Marx put it. Neither system prizes the common man owning his own means of earning a living, not depending on a wage paid either by big government or big business.

As Chesterton put it:

Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

In Distributism, productive property is owned by the many, rather than the few. In practical terms, it means small business, co-operatives and worker-owned and managed businesses run the day-to-day workings of commerce. Big businesses are encouraged by government to break up into smaller, independent units. Government, in turn, is reduced in size and scale, with local government handling most of the responsibility thus eliminating the need for overregulation and reducing the size and scope of government, as well as the demand on taxpayers. Hence, a true market-based economy arises, one not plagued by the lust for dominance that infests both Capitalism and Socialism.

Chesterton knew that the word Distributism sounds suspicious to the ear. He admitted it so, saying it was “awkward but accurate”. And we are waiting for a better name. But in the meantime, better to be accurate and awkward than to be false and flowing.

Gilbert! Magazine
Reprinted with Permission

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The Reign of Christ the King

by Michael Davies

On 11 December 1925, Pope Pius XI promulgated his encyclical letter Quas Primas, on the Kingship of Christ. The encyclical dealt with what the Pope described correctly as "the chief cause of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring." He explained that the manifold evils in the world are due to the fact that the majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives; that Our Lord and His holy law have no place either in private life or in politics; and, as long as individuals and states refuse to submit to the rule of our Saviour, there will be no hope of lasting peace among nations. Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ—Pax Christi in Regno Christi.

The teaching of this encyclical was ignored and passed over, if not actually contradicted, by the Second Vatican Council. It is an incontrovertible fact that this Council conspicuously and, one must conclude, deliberately, failed to reaffirm the teaching of Quas Primas in which Pope Pius XI reaffirmed the unbroken teaching of his predecessors that states as well as individuals must submit themselves to the rule of Christ the King. In affirming this fundamental truth of our faith, Pope Pius was not referring simply to Catholic nations, or even to Christian nations, but to the whole of mankind. He stated this truth unequivocally by quoting a passage from the encyclical Annum Sacrum of Pope Leo XIII:

The empire of Christ the King includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith: so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ.

All men, both as individuals and as nations, are subject to the rule of Our Lord Jesus Christ the King, and this for two reasons. Firstly, because, as God, He is our Creator. Psalm 32 summarizes the correct Creator-creature relationship in the following inspired terms:

Let all the earth fear the Lord: and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of Him. For He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created.

"For He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created." God is our Creator. We are His creatures. Without Him we would not exist. We owe Him everything, and He owes us nothing. Those who are created have an absolute obligation to love and serve their Creator. This obligation is unqualified; there is no question of any possible right on the part of any man at any time to withhold his obedience.

It is only when men live their lives within the correct perspective of the Creator-creature relationship that social and political harmony and order prevail. "The peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." When men repudiate this relationship, disharmony and disorder take over, the disharmony and disorder of sin, the disharmony and disorder introduced for the first time by Lucifer, once the most magnificent of all God's creatures, who, overcome with pride, boasted: Non serviam—"I will not serve." The Catechism teaches us that our purpose in life is to know, love, and serve God in this world so that we can be happy with Him forever in the next. We cannot claim to love God if we do not serve Him, and we cannot claim to serve God if we do not subject ourselves to the law of Christ the King. "If you love me," He warned, "keep my commandments." (John 14:15).

In Quas Primas, Pope Pius XI explains the second reason that we must subject ourselves to Our Lord. He explains the beautiful and profound truth that Christ is our King by acquired as well as by natural right, for He is our Redeemer:

Would that those who forget what they have cost our Saviour might recall the words: “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, but with the Precious Blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled.” We are no longer our own, for Christ has purchased us “with a great price”; our very bodies are the “members of Christ.”

The double claim of Our Lord Jesus Christ to our allegiance, as our Creator and our Redeemer, is well summarized in the Book of the Apocalypse, where St. John tells us that Christ is "the ruler of the kings of the earth." (Apoc. 1:5). The fact that the kings of the earth—in other words, the nations and those who rule them—are subject to the Kingship of Christ pertains to what is known as His Social Kingship, that is, His right to rule over societies, as well as individuals.

No one claiming to be a Christian would, one hopes, dispute the fact that as individuals we must submit ourselves to the rule of Christ the King, but very few Christians, Catholics included, understand, let alone uphold, the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. His social kingship can be implemented fully only when Church and State are united. The separation of Church and State was condemned unequivocally by the Roman Pontiffs until the Second Vatican Council. The Church's teaching is that the State has an obligation to render public worship to God in accord with liturgy of the true Church, the Catholic Church, to uphold its teaching, and to aid the Church in the carrying out of her functions. The State does not have the right to remain neutral regarding religion, much less to pursue a secular approach in its policies. A secular approach is by that very fact an anti-God and an anti-Christ approach.

Those who ignore or repudiate the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His right to rule over societies as well as individuals, accept, perhaps without realizing it, the abominable theory of democracy enshrined in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man, the declaration which constituted a formal and insolent repudiation of the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the declaration which enshrined the greatest heresy of modern times, perhaps of all times: that authority resides in the people. On the contrary, as the Popes have taught, Omnis potestas a Deo—-"All authority comes from God." "Not so!" reply the revolutionaries. Omnis potestas a populo—"All authority comes from the people."

How well the term "revolutionaries" applies to these men! A revolution is best defined as the forcible overthrow of an established government, and this is precisely what they did. They overthrew the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ in favor of the heresy that authority resides in the will of the majority—the heresy that is the source of all the evils in society today. The promulgation of The Declaration of the Rights of Man constituted the first formal repudiation of Our Lord's Social Kingship. It was the most influential act in the process of securing His virtually universal dethronement during the next two centuries.

Before examining the extent to which this Declaration constituted a repudiation of Catholic teaching on the authority of the State, it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the content of this teaching. A state is composed of two elements: the government, or those who govern, and the governed, authority being vested in those who govern. The Church is not committed to any particular form of government. Despite the tendency of Popes to refer to "princes" in their encyclicals, they were in no way opposed to democracy, if all that is meant by this term is that those who govern are chosen by a vote (based on either limited or universal suffrage). Leo XIII explains:

The right to rule is not necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of government. It may take this or that form provided only that it be of a nature to insure the general welfare. But whatever be the nature of the government, rulers must ever bear in mind that God is the paramount Ruler of the world, and must set Him before themselves as their exemplar and law in the administration of the State.

What the Popes maintain, logically and uncompromisingly, is that the source of authority is precisely the same in an absolute monarchy, such as that of Louis XIV in 18th-century France, as in a country where the government is chosen in a democratic election in which every citizen has the right to vote, such as the United States today. Omnis potestas a Deo—"All authority comes from God." Pope Leo XIII explained in his encyclical Immortale Dei, Nov. l, 1885, that:

Every civilized community must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its author. Hence it follows that all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme lord of the world. Everything without exception must be subject to Him, and must serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern, holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the Sovereign Ruler of all. "There is no power but from God." (Rom. 13:1)

"There is no power but from God." This quotation from Romans 13:1 states all that needs to be stated concerning the source of authority. Because those who govern derive their authority from God and govern as His legates, and not as holding their authority from the people, no government can have a true right to enact any legislation contrary to the law of God, even if such legislation is the manifest wish of the majority of the people. The Church is totally opposed to any concept of democracy in which authority is said to reside in the people and in which those who govern are said to receive their authority from the people. Pope Leo XIII insisted in Immortale Dei that:

In a society grounded upon such maxims, all government is nothing more nor less than the will of the people; and the people, being under the power of itself alone, is alone its own ruler. . . . The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself. Thus, as is evident, a state becomes nothing but a multitude, which is its own master and ruler.

In the July 1950 issue of the American Ecclesiastical Review, Monsignor George Shea explains the situation that should prevail in a predominantly Catholic state as follows:

In a Catholic society, it is incumbent upon the State to be a "Catholic State," to declare and to treat Catholicism as "the religion of the State." The formal, official, and exclusive recognition and profession of Catholicism by the State in a Catholic society as its own one and only religion, in short, the establishment of Catholicism as "the religion of the State," seems necessarily contained in the very notion of the State's duty to accept and profess the true religion, therefore Catholicism, with its creed, code and cult. How else could the State, qua State, in truth accept and profess Catholicism, together with its tenet that it alone is the true religion?

This is a faithful summary of consistent papal teaching. In Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII teaches:

Men living together in society are under the power of God no less than individuals are, and society, not less than individuals, owes gratitude to God, who gave it being and maintains it, and whose ever-bounteous goodness enriches it with countless blessings. Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its teaching and practice—not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only one true religion—it is a public crime to act as though there were no God. So, too, is it a sin in the State not to have care for religion, as a something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for States are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will. All who rule, therefore, should hold in honour the holy Name of God, and one of their chief duties must be to favour religion, to protect it . . . . "

In the same Encyclical he cites as reprehensible these views:

The State (civitas) does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty towards God. Moreover, it believes that it is not obliged to make public profession of any religion; or to inquire which of the very many religions is the only one true; or to prefer one religion to all the rest; or to show to any form of religion special favour; but, on the contrary, is bound to grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief.

In his Encyclical Libertas Humana, 20 June 1888, he teaches:

"This kind of liberty [liberty of cult], if considered in relation to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of Him; that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic faith.... Civil society [civilis societas, quia societas est] must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it.

St. Pius X wrote in his Encyclical Vehementer Nos, ll February 1906:

That the State should be separated from the Church is an absolutely false and most pernicious thesis. For first, since it is based on the principle that religion should be of no concern to the State, it does a grave injury to God, He Who is the founder and conserver of human society no less than He is of individual men, for which reason He should be worshipped not only privately but also publicly.

The Rights of Man were discussed by the French National Assembly during the meetings of August 1789, and adopted in October of the same year. Some of the articles are not simply acceptable, but actually commendable, e.g., Article 7, concerning the detention of citizens; Article 8, stating that laws cannot have a retroactive effect; and Article 9, concerning those who have been arrested but whose guilt has not been proven. Other articles are ambiguous. But some others are positively incompatible with Catholicism, particularly Article 6, which begins by stating that the law is the expression of the general will. This is a complete negation of the teaching of the Church that all authority comes from God. Pope Pius VI had no hesitation in condemning the Declaration as "contrary to religion and to society.[1] Acceptance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man rules out the possibility of a Catholic state and the social reign of Christ the King. This is hardly surprising in view of the Masonic origin of the Declaration. Father Denis Fahey wrote:

That the preparation and the triumph of the French Revolution were the work of Freemasonry does not need proof, since the Masons themselves boast of it. Accordingly, The Declaration of the Rights of Man is a Masonic production.[2]

Father Fahey quoted in support of this contention a statement by Monsieur Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly in 1904:

Freemasonry had the supreme honor of giving to humanity the chart which it had lovingly elaborated. It was our Brother, de la Fayette, who first presented the project of a declaration of the natural rights of the man and the citizen living in society, to be the first chapter of the Constitution. On 25 August 1789 the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Masons, definitively adopted, almost word for word, in the form determined upon in the Lodges, the text of the immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man.[3]

Father Fahey summarized the Declaration as a formal renunciation of allegiance to Christ the King, of the supernatural life, and of membership in Christ's Mystical Body. He continued:

The French State thereby officially declared that it no longer acknowledged any duty to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ, and no longer recognized the dignity of membership of Christ in its citizens. It thus inaugurated the attack on the organization of society under Christ the King which has continued down to the present day.[4]

Father Francis J. Connell has explained that the fundamental issue at stake in the necessity for Church and State to be united in Catholic countries is not the obligation of states to obey the laws of the Catholic Church, but "the obligation of civil rulers in their official capacity to obey the divine positive law of Jesus Christ." He adds: "In other words, the real point at issue is not the relation between the State and the Catholic Church, but rather the relation between the State and Christ the King."[5]

This is a point of crucial importance. The obligations of the State to God, deriving from the rights of Christ the King, are quite independent of any particular historical circumstances which may have influenced the writing of a particular encyclical. The citations from encyclicals which have been cited demonstrate that the Popes were laying down general principles with a permanent validity. These principles retain their validity no matter what may have been the circumstances which prompted particular encyclicals. Writing in the American Ecclesiastical Review in May 1953, Cardinal Ottaviani condemned those who attempt to bypass permanently valid teaching in encyclicals on the grounds that it was transient and applicable only to the historical circumstances which prompted it:

The first fault of these persons consists precisely in their failure to accept fully the arma veritatis and the teachings which the Roman Pontiffs during the past century, and particularly the reigning Pontiff Pius XII, have given to Catholics on this subject in encyclical letters, allocutions, and instructions of various kinds.

To justify themselves, these people assert that in the body of teaching imparted within the Church there are to be distinguished two elements, the one permanent, and the other transient. This latter is supposed to be due to the reflection of particular contemporary conditions.

Unfortunately, they carry this tactic so far as to apply it to the principles taught in pontifical documents, principles on which the teachings of the Popes have remained constant so as to make these principles a part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine.

After summarizing papal teaching on the question of Church and State, including "the duty of rulers of a Catholic State to protect from everything that would undermine it the religious unity of a people who unanimously know themselves to be in secure possession of religious truth," Cardinal Ottaviani traces this teaching through successive pontificates up to that of Pope Pius XII and concludes:

These principles are firm and immovable. They were valid in the times of Innocent III and Boniface VIII. They are valid in the days of Leo XIII and of Pius XII, who has reaffirmed them in more than one of his documents . . . . I am certain that no one can prove that there has been any kind of change, in the matter of these principles, between Summi pontificatus of Pius XII and the encyclicals of Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris against Communism, Mit brennender Sorge against Nazism, and Non abbiamo bisogno against the state monopoly of fascism, on the one hand; and the earlier encyclicals of Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, Libertas, and Sapientiae Christianae, on the other.

"The ultimate, profound, lapidary fundamental norms of society," says the august Pontiff in his Christmas radio-message of 1942, "cannot be damaged by the intervention of man's genius. Men can deny them, ignore them, despise them, disobey them, but they can never abrogate them with juridical efficacy."

It is incontestable that Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on Religious Liberty, did not reaffirm authentic papal teaching on the social reign of Christ the King. It is certainly arguable that it also contradicts papal teaching on Church and state, teaching which Cardinal Ottaviani described as "part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine."

The most scholarly defense of Dignitatis Humanae was written by an Australian priest, Father Brian Harrison. Father Harrison is a scholar of complete integrity, who makes no attempt to defend what is indefensible. He writes:

Even more striking than Dignitatis Humanae's omission of any obvious reiteration of the obligation of public authorities to recognize Catholicism as uniquely true (not to mention the subsequent removal of prayers and hymns expressing this teaching from the new Mass and Office of Christ the King) is the conciliar Declaration's affirmation of certain ideas which bear at least a prima facie appearance of contradicting previous papal statements. [6]

Father Harrison was not only honest, but prudent, to concede that the social kingship of Christ was not affirmed by Dignitatis humanae, as not one word affirming it can be found anywhere in the Declaration, and his reference to the new Mass and Office of Christ the King is very significant. An accepted principle with regard to liturgical worship is that the doctrinal standpoint of any religious body must necessarily be reflected in its liturgy. This can be summed up by the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, which can be translated freely as meaning that the manner in which the Church worships, lex orandi, must reflect what the Church believes, lex credendi.

The true import of the new Office can be deduced primarily from what has been removed from the preconciliar Breviary, and a comparison of the two texts reveals the systematic removal or modification of complete prayers or individual phrases which could not be reconciled with the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae, that is, prayers which give liturgical expression to the Social Reign of Christ the King, and demand that states as well as individuals must submit themselves to His rule. The same procedure has been applied to the Proper of the Mass for the Feast. An introductory note in the 1952 edition of the St. Andrew Daily Missal explains that:

Pope Pius XI (whose motto was Pax Christi in regno Christi) instituted the Feast of Christ the King as a solemn affirmation of Our Lord's Kingship of every human society. He is King not only of the soul and conscience, intelligence and will of all men, but also of families and cities, peoples and states and the whole universe. In his encyclical letter Quas primas, the Pope showed how laicism or secularism, organizing society without any reference to God, leads to the apostasy of the masses and the ruin of society, because it is a complete denial of Christ's Kingship. This is one of the great heresies of our time, and the Pope considered that this annual public, social, and official assertion of Christ's divine right of Kingship over men in the liturgy would be an effective means of combatting it.

Pope Pius XI wrote in Quas Primas:

Nations will be reminded by the annual celebration of this feast that not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honour and obedience to Christ.

Forty years later, almost to the day, by the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanae on 7 December 1965, the Church ceased to demand that rulers give public honour and obedience to Christ. The title of the Declaration itself, "The Dignity of the Human Person," epitomizes the man-centred ethos of the Declaration. It is no longer the rights of Christ the King which must take priority but the so called rights of contemporary man, rights which he ascribes to himself in virtue of what is said to be his developing consciousness of his own dignity. In an address to the last Council meeting, on the very day of the promulgation of the Declaration, Pope Paul VI remarked:

One must realize that this Council, which exposed itself to human judgement, insisted very much more upon this pleasant side of man, rather than his unpleasant one. Its attitude was very much and deliberately optimistic. A wave of affection and admiration flowed from the Council over the modern world of humanity. Errors were condemned, indeed, because charity demanded this no less than did truth, but for the persons themselves there was only warning, respect, and love. Instead of depressing diagnoses, encouraging remedies; instead of direful prognostics, messages of trust issued from the Council to the present-day world. The modem world's values were not only respected but honoured, its efforts approved, its aspirations purified and blessed.

The values of the modern world are now clearly apparent even in nominally Catholic countries today in the legalization of divorce, contraception, pornography, sodomy, and abortion. Pope Paul's illusion that his Council would purify the aspirations of the modern world was finally dispelled for him when he wept at the establishment of an abortion clinic in Rome itself before his death in 1978.

The Breviary Office of Christ the King

The hymn Te saeculorum Principem of First Vespers has had the following verses omitted:

The wicked mob screams out."We don't want Christ as king," While we, with shouts of joy, hailThee as the world's supreme King.May the rulers of the world publiclyhonour and extol Thee;May teachers and judges reverence Thee; May the laws express Thine orderAnd the arts reflect Thy beauty.May kings find renown in their submissionand dedication to Thee.Bring under Thy gentle rule ourcountry and our homes.Glory be to Thee, Jesus, supreme overAll secular authorities;And glory be to the Father andThe loving Spirit through endless ages.

The hymn Aeterna Imago Altissimi has been transferred from Matins to Lauds, and the following changes made. The last two lines of the second verse stated that the Father had entrusted to Christ, as His right, "absolute dominion over the peoples" (Cui iure sceptrum gentium Pater supremum credidit). This has been replaced by an admonition that we, as individuals, should willingly submit ourselves to Christ (tibi volentes subdimur qui iure cunctis imperas).The following verses have, not surprisingly, been omitted completely:

To Thee, Who by right claim rule over all men,We willingly submit ourselves;To be subject to Thy lawsMeans happiness for a state and its peoples.Glory be to Thee, Jesus, Supreme over all secular authorities;And glory be to the Father andThe loving Spirit through endless ages.

A version of the Vexilla Regis has been abolished completely. Originally found in Lauds, some of its verses read:

Christ triumphantly unfurls His Glorious banners everywhere; Come nations of the world, and On bended knee acclaim the King of kings. How great is the happiness of a country That rightly owns the rule of Christ and Zealously carries out the commands God gave to men. The plighted word keeps marriage unbroken, The children grow up with virtue intact and Homes where purity is found. Abound also in the other virtues of home life. Beloved King, may the light from Thee That we desire, shine on us in all its glory; May the world receive the gift of peace, Be subject to Thee and adore Thee.

A number of readings from Quas Primas itself were included in the Office, and they explained the traditional teaching on Church and State with great clarity. They have all been removed, showing how blatantly the compilers of the new Breviary went about their task of eliminating liturgical references to the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The removal of these readings from Quas primas must certainly be seen as an affront to the memory and the teaching of Pope Pius XI, at whose behest the Office had been composed only forty years earlier, with the specific aim of reminding rulers that they are bound to give public honour and obedience to Our Lord. Could this great Pope possibly have imagined that within four decades he would have a successor who would totally mutilate the Office that he had approved so recently, and that this mutilation would have the objective of removing any suggestion that rulers are bound to give honour and obedience to Our Lord? Pope Paul VI stated explicitly to the rulers of the world that the Church asked no more of them than freedom to pursue its mission.

The thoroughness with which Archbishop Bugnini's Consilium expunged every specific expression of Our Lord's Social Kingship from the liturgy can hardly be denied. Its members did not even miss a reference to Our Lord's Social Kingship in the Good Friday liturgy. The first of the Solemn Collects, the one for the Church, read:

Let us pray, dearly beloved, for the holy Church of God: that our God and Lord may be pleased to give it peace, keep its unity and preserve it throughout the world: subjecting to it principalities and powers, and may He grant us, while we live in peace and tranquillity, grace to glorify God the Father almighty. {my emphasis]

This prayer has been replaced by the following:

Let us pray, dear friends, for the holy Church of God throughout the World, that God, the almighty Father guide it, and gather it togetherso that we may worship him in peace and tranquillity.

Lest anyone should imagine that an undue significance has been placed upon changes in the Breviary and Missal relating to the doctrine of Christ the King, a comment by Archbishop A. Bugnini, Great Architect of the Liturgical Revolution, should prove very illuminating.

In the ecumenical climate of Vatican II, some expressions in the Orationes sollemnes of the Good Friday service had a bad ring to them. There were urgent requests to tone down some of the wording. It is always unpleasant to have to alter venerable texts that for centuries have effectively nourished Christian devotion and have about them the spiritual fragrance of the heroic age of the Church's beginnings. Above all, it is difficult to revise literary masterpieces that are unsurpassed for their pithy form. It was nevertheless thought necessary to face up to the task, lest anyone find reason for spiritual discomfort in the prayer of the Church. The revisions, limited to what was absolutely necessary, were prepared by study group l8 bis. In Intercession 1: "For the Church," the phrase subiciens ei principatus et potestates ("subjecting principalities and powers to it [the Church]") was omitted: even though this was inspired by what St. Paul says about the "angelic powers" (Col. 2:15), it could be misinterpreted as referring to a temporal role which the Church did indeed have in other periods of history but which is anachronistic today.[7]

So there we have it. The social kingship of Christ is an anachronism.

In my book The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty, I have documented in great detail the manner in which Dignitatis humanae abandoned the traditional concept of a Catholic state as taught by the Popes. The term "Catholic State" is not so much as mentioned throughout the entire Declaration. Article 6 accepts the possibility of a religious body being given "special legal recognition," but insists that "it is at the same time imperative that the right of all citizens and religious bodies to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice." This hardly corresponds with the insistence of Pope Leo XIII:

"Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges."

One of the privileges denied to the adherents of false religions in a Catholic state was that of propagating their errors in public and persuading the Catholic citizens to repudiate the truth for heresy. This was the case prior to Vatican II in such Catholic states as Spain, Colombia, and Malta. The Popes did not teach that in a Catholic state non-Catholics should be forced to embrace the Catholic faith or be prevented from practiçing their religions in private. In Immortale Dei, Pope Leo XIII taught that:

The Church is wont to take earnest heed that no one shall be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will, for, as St. Augustine wisely reminds us, “Man cannot believe otherwise than by his own free will.”

It is necessary to make a distinction of crucial importance, the distinction between religious liberty considered from a legal or juridical standpoint, that is as a civil right, and from a theological standpoint. Considered from a juridical standpoint, it examines the grounds for and the extent of the legal coercion to be applied to the expression of religious belief in the external public forum.

Considered from a theological standpoint, that is, a standpoint based upon the nature and will of God as revealed to man, there can be no question of any natural right to believe or to propagate error. As Pope Leo XIII teaches, man has a natural right only to follow the will of God and obey His commandments. In the Liberal sense, liberty of conscience is the right of an individual to think and believe whatsoever he wants, even in religion and morality; to express his views publicly, and to persuade others to adopt them, using word of mouth, the public press, or any other means. He has the right to choose any religion or to have no religion, and this, Liberals claim, is a natural right.

Dignitatis Humanae did not affirm that anyone has a natural right, a moral right, to believe in or to propagate error, but upheld the traditional teaching in this respect.

The Declaration affirmed not a moral but a civil liberty, and so the question must be considered from a purely juridical standpoint. In considering the question of religious liberty from the juridical standpoint, the following distinctions must be kept in mind. The first distinction must be that between the internal forum and the external forum. The internal forum refers to what a man does in private, the external forum to what he does in public. The second distinction must be made between not being forced to act against one's conscience, i.e., freedom from coercion, and freedom not to be restrained from acting in accordance with one's conscience. The traditional Catholic teaching is that in religious matters: 1. No one must be forced to act against his conscience in private. 2. No one must be forced to act against his conscience in public. 3. No one must be prevented from acting in accordance with his conscience in private. 4. The right of acting in accordance with one's conscience in public can be restricted.

Let us take a specific example. Before Vatican II, Jehovah’s Witnesses in Spain were allowed to practice their bizarre religion within the privacy of their homes and to meet together in private with other members of their sect. They were not forced to take part in public Catholic worship. They were not, however, in accordance with (4) permitted to interfere with the faith of Catholics by visiting their homes with the object of perverting their faith, to publish anti-Catholic literature, or to propagate their errors through the radio or TV or by holding public meetings.

Father Francis J. Connell explained in the American Ecclesiastical Review that what a man does in private affects only himself and his family, but when he acts in public the rights of other citizens are involved:

It is fully within their [civil rulers’] right to restrict and to prevent public functions and activities of false religions which are likely to be detrimental to the spiritual welfare of the Catholic citizens or insulting to the true religion of Christ.[8]

The word "toleration" is of crucial importance for understanding the discontinuity between Dignitatis Humanae and the classic papal teaching. Pope Leo XIII taught in Libertas Humana:

While not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest, she does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good.

This was the consistent teaching of the Popes up to and including Pope Pius XII. Those in error had no natural right to propagate their views—the propagation of error is an evil—but it could be tolerated in the interests of the common good ("public welfare") to prevent a greater evil, such as civil unrest. Pope Leo XIII insisted in Libertas Humana that the overriding criterion in the question of toleration is the common good, and that to judge aright, we must acknowledge that the more a state is driven to tolerate evil the further it is from perfection; and that the tolerance of evil which is dictated by political prudence should be strictly confined to the limits which its justifying cause, the public welfare, requires.

This was official teaching of the Church up to and during the Council. Writing in the American Ecclesiastical Review in 1950, Msgr. George W. Shea insisted that what is at issue here is a question of principle, i.e., "the relations which should per se obtain by reason of the nature of Church and State in a Catholic society, so that any deviation from these relations, while tolerable perhaps as a concession prompted by expediency, could not merit approval on principle." [my emphasis][9] There is not the least suggestion in the teaching of any pre-Vatican II Pope that there could be a natural right on the part of non-Catholics not to be prevented from propagating their errors in public.

The traditional teaching, described by Cardinal Ottaviani, as "part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine" was upheld time and again during the conciliar debates. Cardinal Siri of Genoa warned that:

We cannot legitimize what God merely tolerates; we can only tolerate it, and that within the limits of the common good. We cannot therefore accept the proposed schema insofar as it recommends liberty for all without discrimination. . . . We should therefore consider more carefully the contribution of theological sources to this problem of religious liberty and determine whether or not the contents of this schema can be reconciled with the teaching of Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII. Otherwise, we weaken our own authority and compromise our apostolic effort.[10]

Bishop Emilio Tagle Covarrabuias of Valparaiso, Chile, spoke in the name of forty-five Latin American bishops when he stated:

I am very much against this schema. It merely rearranges the previous version, and it contains a number of contradictions. . . . Many passages are too complacent towards false religions and run the risk of indifferentism and Liberalism. It does not seem possible to grant the same rights to all religions indiscriminately. Only the one true Church has the right to religious liberty, strictly speaking. Other religions can only be tolerated, depending upon the circumstances and persons.[11]

Cardinal de Arriba y Castro of Tarragona defended the traditional papal teaching as follows:

This is probably the most delicate problem of the whole Council with respect to the faith. We must clearly affirm this basic principle: only the Catholic Church has the duty and the right to preach the Gospel. That is why proselytism on the part of non-Catholics among Catholics is illicit and should be prevented by the civil authorities as well as by the Church, as the common good requires. . . . The Council must be careful not to decree the ruin of Catholicism in those countries where it is in fact the only religion.[12]

It is no exaggeration to state the changing of the Spanish Constitution to correspond with Dignitatis Humanae has indeed brought about the ruin of Catholicism in that country. During the Synod of European Bishops in October 1999, Msgr. Fernando Sebastián Aguilar, Archbishop of Pamplona, lamented the fact that in Spain "the cultural convictions on which social life is based are undermined and are more atheistic than Christian." Divorce, abortion, homosexual acts, contraception and proselytism by Protestant sects, which were all illegal prior to DH, have been legalized. Spain now has the lowest birthrate in Europe, and there is a Mormon temple in Madrid.

During the Council, the schema on religious liberty was often called “the American schema.” The finalized text of Dignitatis Humanae can be considered almost entirely the work of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., and he attributed its success to "the solid and consistent support of the American bishops and their numerous interventions"—interventions which he had written and which they had accepted and read with the most abject docility. Father Murray continued:

Undoubtedly, the support derived its basic inspiration from the American experience, from which the Church has learned the practical value of the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment. . . The object or content of the right to religious freedom, as specified both in the Declaration and in the American constitutional system, is identical." [my emphasis][13]

In his book American Participation in the Second Vatican Council, Msgr. V. A. Yzermans writes: "It was a delightful victory for the American hierarchy."[14] He would have been more accurate in describing it as a delightful victory for Father Murray, in view of the fact that, as one American prelate expressed it: "The voices are the voices of United States' bishops, but the thoughts are the thoughts of John Courtney Murray!" In his book John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict, Father Donald E. Pelotte has no doubt that although other members of the commission helped to pen the final text of the Declaration, "Murray's contribution was decisive. The very acceptance of Murray's basic thrust, only ten years after his admonition from the Jesuit Curia in Rome, was itself a singular recognition."[15] Ten years previously Murray’s Jesuit superiors had forbidden him to teach what Dignitatis Humanae made the official teaching of the Church. What had taken place was described with complete accuracy and with total approval in the 20 July 1992 issue of The Catholic Virginian by Father G. P. Fogarty, S.J., President of the American Catholic Historical Association, who gave Father Murray credit for the fact that Dignitatis humanae "made universal Catholic teaching what had previously been considered an aberration of the American Church." The doctrine of the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ was thus rejected by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in favor of the Constitution of the United States, a country in which "the majority of men have thrust Jesus Christ and His holy law out of their lives; . . . [where] Our Lord and His holy law have no place either in private life or in politics," a state which has become "nothing but a multitude, which is its own master and ruler." There is no realistic possibility of the repudiation of Christ’s Kingship in Dignitatis Humanae ever being reversed. This sublime teaching is not sacrosanct in the Church of the third millennium, but the non-infallible teaching of Vatican II most certainly is.

[1] Encyclical Letter, Adeo nota, 23 April 1791. Para 13. Senza dire con inutili parole tutte le deliberazioni prese dall’Assemblea del Contado, basterà citare quei diciassette articoli dove i diritti dell’ uomo erano pressappoco accolti come erano stati spiegati e proposti nei decreti dell’ Assemblea Francese, ossia quei diritti che erano contrari alla Religione e alla società; essi venivano accolti come fossero base e fondamento della nuova Costituzione. Altrettanto basterà ricordare gli altri diciannove articoli, che erano i primi elementi della nuova Costituzione, presi e attinti dalla stessa fonte della Costituzione Francese. Pertanto, poiché non poteva assolutamente accadere che Noi sancissimo tali deliberazioni e che i Nostri ministri, dovunque fossero, le osservassero, avvenne che l’’Assemblea rappresentativa tosto manifestasse quel furioso ardore di ribellione per il quale già da tempo combatteva e che fino ad oggi aveva nascosto.[2] Foreword to G. Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked (London, 1965), p. 16.[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17.[4] Ibid., p. 17.[5] American Ecclesiastical Review, No. 125, 1951, p. 9.[6] B. Harrison, Religious Liberty and Contraception (Melbourne, 1988), p. 14.[7] A. Bugnini, La riforma liturgica , 1948-1975 (Edizioni Liturgiche - 00192 Roma, 1983), p. 127.[8] American Ecclesiastical Review, No. 119, 1948, p. 250. [9] Ibid., No. 123, 1950, p. 161,[10] Henri Fesquet, The Drama of Vatican II (New York, 1967), p. 591.[11] Ibid., p. 600.[12] Ibid., pp. 591-592.[13] Msgr. V. A. Yzermans, American Participation in the Second Vatican Council (New York, 1967), p. 668. [14] Ibid., p. 623. [15] 15 Donald E. Pelotte, John Courtney Murray: Theologian in Conflict (New York, 1975), p. 98.

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