Scottish Catholic Observer

O N May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII published what has proven to be his most influential encyclical, and arguably the most important encyclical of the 19th century: Rerum Novarum. Oddly, one could say that there was nothing new in Rerum Novarum. It reiterated age-old Church teaching on the social order in society. Now this is to be expected: Catholic teaching, the Magisterium of the Church, evolves. However, continuity is essential to the proper understanding of the Church, as the Holy Father has been teaching us since the beginning of his Pontificate. What was new in Rerum Novarum was that the old teachings were adapted to the new world. It was, effectively, the birth of the Church’s teachings on the new social and economic order that had developed with industrialisation. As such, it is still the foundation stone upon which all modern Catholic social teaching is based.

In a great and succinct definition, it has been stated that the social teaching or social doctrine of the Church is ‘the application of the Gospel message to social reality.’ It shows mankind the Divine plan for the secular world. Although touching upon the political realm, it is not political per se. However, it does underscore the moral dimension of the social and economic world, and there meets the world of politics.

Unlike the great systems of political and economic theory that have developed alongside modern Catholic social teaching, the Church’s social doctrine has the human person at its heart. Every human is created by God, and, therefore, equal as each shares the same dignity. Of course, this does not mean that there are no differences, but these are of an inferior importance. Effectively, differences are there to serve God’s plan for the creation of the Kingdom.

From this crucial starting point of the equality of all God-created and Christ-redeemed human beings, comes another essential element of Catholic social teaching. This is what Blessed Pope John XXIII called the ‘fundamental rights’ or what Blessed Pope John Paul II referred to as the ‘inalienable rights’ of the human person. These 18 rights are what underpinned much of human rights’ legislation, now sadly often used to restrict Catholic freedoms. These rights are countered by the fact that humans are created to be part of society, and are called to create this society in the image of Heaven, to turn it into the Kingdom of God.

The fact that human communities are Divinely created subjects them to natural law: this means that ultimately the power of civic authority derives from God, and not from man. Conversely, civic authority cannot act in contradiction to natural law, cannot go against the will of God. It is the Church’s duty to remind civic authority where it does stray. There is, once more, the need for the moral dimension, now expanded from the above-mentioned social and economic worlds into that of politics. Indeed, where civic authority deliberately strays from natural law, and where it constitutes a threat to civic society, there is a moral obligation on believers to resist.

Both the family and education fall under the remit of Catholic social teaching, but both fall outside the scope of this series. Its time limit simply excludes both vast topics from being examined even briefly. Instead, the focus will be on the socio-economic element of Catholic social doctrine. Of course, both the family and education will be touched upon within this remit.

Since Rerum Novarum, the emphasis has been on work, remuneration, ownership, distribution of goods, and social benefits. Some have seen this as the socialist element in the Church’s teaching, but they could not be wider off the mark. The socio-economic teachings of the Church are grounded in the Gospels, and, as such, predate socialism by 1800 years or more. That there is common ground is undeniable, but then so are the differences. Again, it is the centrality of the human being in Catholic social doctrine that sets it apart from its secular counterparts.

We have to be careful with Catholic social teaching. Given too much emphasis, it runs the risk of turning Our Lord into a social agitator, and reducing Him to being nothing more than a man who wished to improve social conditions. On the other hand, there are those who would reduce the social obligations implicit in the Gospels by denying the worldly applications of Our Lord’s teaching. In some quarters these extremes are labelled as ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, both terms without any justification in either the Gospels or in the Magisterium of the Church. This series, then, wishes to examine the socio-economic teachings of the Church without being reductionist. It also wishes to place these teachings back into the spotlight in a period of extreme economic and social upheaval.

Thinking about work has always been an integral part of the Church’s teaching on society. Our Lord is called the ‘carpenter’s son,’ and St Paul emphasised the need to earn a living when possible, and not to depend on others when it could be avoided. The fact that dependency cannot always be avoided, and that distributing by the rich to the needy is necessary, is made explicit by Jesus in the command to give, and implicit in the judgement on Lazarus and the rich man in Heaven.

Since the Gospels were written down, a whole set of accumulative teachings has enriched these earliest, essential teachings innumerably. For example, there is nothing specific on slavery in the earliest Christian writings, but, over time, the Church has come to address that particular scourge with ever increasing insistence. Indeed, even before the Transatlantic slave trade developed, Pope Pius II condemned the Portuguese trading in slaves with African rulers. Slavery, although a perfectly legitimate element of the Roman economy, was and is totally contrary both to the Catholic perspective on the fundamental equality of all mankind, and to the Church’s notions on the dignity of labour.

Of course, the Church’s teachings on socio-economic life changed as the economy changed. Thus, what was necessary to comment upon in first-century Palestine was perhaps missing in the Middle Ages. For the Middle Ages, the Church came up with a world-view anchored in the realities of the feudal period. It recognised the existence of a pyramidal society, in which the nobility exploited the rest of the population. To mitigate this, the Church taught that their economic privileges came with obligations: obligations to defend Christianity, obligations to defend the defenceless and obligations to take only as much from the workers as was needed.

As always, these exhortations were frequently ignored, including by men of the cloth. Yet they were there, and represent the Church’s true socio-economic vision of the period. The Church remained strongly opposed to usury, the charging of interest on loans, which, of course, is at the basis of contemporary banking—and at the heart of the modern crisis: it is not the case that lending money is necessarily bad, but the huge interests required are. At least, that is what the Church taught. Since the Council of Nicaea in 325AD, and on to the pontificate of Pope Benedict XIV in 1745, there were frequent demands to end the exploitation of the poor through the charging of interest.

One could provide an endless list of this type of teaching, as well as give concrete examples of where the Church put it into action. Perhaps the most famous was in the so-called ‘Reductions,’ run by the Jesuits in Latin America for the benefit of the native Indian population. These were large regions in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires where what we would now call ‘fair-trade’ principles were applied.

Yet modern Catholic social teaching is, as said above, different. It differs in that the socio-economic structures of the past two centuries are different from what went on before. A new concept had to be invented to accommodate these new facts, and it was the Italian Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli, who coined the phrase ‘social justice,’ which he based on the ideas of St Thomas Aquinas. It is this idea, and its development, that will form the theme of this series between now and Easter.