They do seem to keep coming,
don’t they? The questions from
distributists, that is. We’d prefer if
they were accompanied by checks with large numbers of zeros to the right of the
other digits, but we’ll take what we can get.
Anyway, we just got this question:
To what extent
does the Just Third Way incorporate Catholic social teaching and distributist
thought?
The Just Third Way
incorporates Catholic social teaching in two ways, one indirect, and one
direct.
Indirectly, because Louis
Kelso’s and Mortimer Adler’s work is based solidly on the natural law
principles found in Aristotelian-Thomism, and Catholic social teaching is also
based on the natural law, there is a fundamental consistency between the Just
Third Way and the Church’s social Magisterium. The three principles of
economic justice (participation, distribution, and social justice), and the
four pillars of a just market economy (1. Limited economic role for the State,
2. Free and open markets as the best means of determining just wages, just
prices, and just profits, 3. Restoration of private property, and 4. Widespread
capital ownership), are therefore “naturally” consistent with Catholic social
teaching, and it is fairly easy to correlate specific passages in the encyclicals
with them.
Directly, one of CESJ’s
principal co-founders, Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., was an
acknowledged expert in the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI, and he brought his
insights into Pius XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy into the Just Third
Way. Very briefly, this is that there is a direct “act of social justice”
by means of which everyone can (and must, as a moral obligation) organize to
gain access to the institutions of the common good, reform them so they work to
enhance instead of inhibit or degrade human dignity, and thereby provide the
proper environment so that everyone can acquire and develop virtue, preparing
one’s self for his or her proper end. Before Pius XI, there had been a
very slight hint in Aquinas that the common good was somehow directly
accessible, but most people just assumed that our institutions are beyond our
reach, and the best we can do is to be individually virtuous, and hope for the
best.
To oversimplify grossly,
Kelso and Adler showed us what to aim for, and Ferree/Pius XI showed us how to
get it. Perhaps Ferree summarized it best in his remarks on September 11,
1984 when he and Norm addressed the Lay Commission on the Economy, the group
organized by former Treasury Secretary William Simon, to present an alternative
to what they saw as a flawed document during the preparation of what became the
U.S. bishops’ pastoral on the economy in 1986, Economic Justice for All.
Ferree’s language may be less than pastoral (it’s a little hard to be
diplomatic when you’re telling people everything they think they know is
wrong), but if read carefully, it gets the point across:
I will explain
this topic more in detail in Washington at your hearing of September 17; and
have distributed a position paper for your perusal before that date — but after
this meeting. Here my preoccupation is
to underline the unique and enormous significance of what Mr. Norman Kurland
will have to say to you here.
1. Your present dialogue with the Episcopal
Committee is a “dialogue of the deaf,” not really being heard by either party
for neither side is factoring in the two fossil remains of the old and
universal Subsistence Economy which is now being replaced
everywhere by the Developed Economy of
Capital tools.
2. This first forgotten fossil is a “Subsistence”
legal Definition that is festering at the very heart of the Organization of our Developed Economy — namely in the
Business Corporation. Its effect is to
make labor relations a battlefield and to give credibility to the massive State
Intervention that often threatens to swamp both economic enterprise and even
the State itself.
3. The second overlooked fossil is a “Subsistence”
mechanism festering at the very heart of the Dynamics of our developed economy
— namely in the creation of Equity Growth by Capital Credit. Its effect is to project into the incredible
increase of wealth in the Developed World the same relative distribution which
had constituted the injustice of the Subsistence World through all History.
4. These have come under analysis only in the
last quarter century and have begun to influence national policy only within
the past decade.
5. This beginning national policy has the obvious
potential of removing both mortal wounds
from Developed Civilizations, thus making a Historical Breakthrough in every
way comparable to the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution itself.
6. This discovery that we are on the threshold of
a new breakthrough in history makes incalculable our present potential to
influence the future.
7. Meanwhile, the closest thing to an adequate
reply to the Modern Challenge to develop as specifically Social
Morality for Developed Civilization has been made by the Business Community in
what is known as “Management Theory”; but without any general recognition of
its historic achievement. This also must
find a place in your dialogue, since it is far and away your greatest claim to
credibility in crossing the threshold that has opened up.
In a word, our “Center for
Economic and Social Justice” wants to reorient your entire dialogue from
recriminations and defenses for the injustices we have all inherited, to the
justice we can all pursue in this truly historic opportunity. [Emphasis added.]
