As we’ve been pointing out on this blog for some time,
people, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, liberal or conservative, Jew or
Greek, slave or free, . . . whatever . . . have a positive knack for
misunderstanding virtually everything that Pope Francis says. Of course, a lot of this is conditioned by,
one, the fact that most people (even doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs), have
never learned how to think critically.
Two, most people hear what they want to hear, or what they think they
want to hear. The combination is fatal.
So, what did Pope Francis say this time? Objectively
speaking, and from a Just Third Way perspective, it was pretty innocuous
stuff. As he tweeted,
“How I
wish everyone had decent work! It is
essential for human dignity.
“Those who
value profits more than people are wrong. Money was not created in the image of
God; men and women were. The economy must serve the people, and the dignity of
work and workers must be protected. Workers are entitled to living wages, fair
treatment, and the right to organize and form unions. And jobs. Amen.”
Obviously, the character limit of Twitter prevents a tweet
from being anything more than a brief comment, with no room for the subtle
nuances and cautious qualifications of, say, an encyclical or an apostolic
exhortation. So, we have to be careful
not to read too much into these brief comments, and to keep in mind at all
times that, as pope, Francis’s comments, teachings, and pretty much everything
else relating to his office must, and can only be, understood within the
context of more than 2,000 years of Christianity, and who knows how many
millennia of Judaism, as well as whatever is true in other faiths and
philosophies. The Catholic Church, according
to its own statements and beliefs, claims a fullness of truth (at least so far
as it is within human capacity to grasp), not a monopoly that prevents anyone
else from being right.
(And, frankly, who would want to belong to any religion or
adhere to any philosophy that claimed you could not believe everything it
taught? After all, it’s one thing to
discover you’ve made a mistake in something and work to correct it, but quite
another to declare that it’s false, but you must believe it, anyway.)
Back to Pope Francis, however. We believe that he is correct in that work is
essential to human dignity. The problem
today is twofold — and Francis, constrained by space, couldn’t say enough to
make an important qualification that permeates Catholic social teaching and its
treatment of work: people limit themselves too much when they automatically
link “work” and “income.”
Yes, in the current condition of society, in which most
people have only their labor to sell, they are constrained to limit their
income generating capacity to what they can realize by selling their labor. That’s just a fact of life . . . for now.
As advancing technology takes over more and more of the task
of producing goods and services, however, relying on labor alone to generate a
living income becomes problematical. What
results is that, without ownership of the capital that is producing goods and
services (and thus the right to receive the profits from that capital), most
people are constrained to perform fake, boondoggle jobs just to get income, or resort
to State handouts: welfare. Both are
offenses against human dignity. Work
changes from ennobling man, to degrading him, while becoming a permanent dependent
of the State — effectively a slave — is even worse.