In
yesterday’s posting we gave a brief overview of solidarism, especially as it
relates to individual and social virtue.
We closed by noting, however, that what passes for solidarism in many
cases these days can hardly be called virtuous.
It violates natural law, particularly the natural rights of freedom of
association (liberty/contract) and private property, turning the tool of the
State into the master. This is a
phenomenon Archbishop Fulton Sheen noted in his first two books, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy
(1925), and Religion Without God (1928).
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| No, not Lenin, but Durkheim |
This
is in large measure due to the fact that many of today’s solidarists often cite
the work of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., but put an interpretation on it that
is closer to the thought of sociologist Émile Durkheim, a facist-socialist who
greatly influenced modernism and New Age thought, all of which insist on a
greatly expanded role of the State. This
has made it easy, especially since the Second Vatican Council, to twist the
interpretation of Catholic social teaching that underpins the Just Third Way
into something completely antithetical to Father Pesch’s or the popes’ original
intent.
To
be blunt, using Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum
Novarum to justify a vastly expanded role for the State, a mere social
tool, not the Hobbesian “Mortall God” so many today demand, is to misunderstand
Catholic social teaching at the most profound level. As the pope clearly stated, “There
is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior
to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his
body.” (Rerum Novarum, § 7.)
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| Rev. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
Father
Pesch should, therefore, be regarded more as the redeemer of solidarism than
its founder. He corrected Durkheim’s fascist,
socialist, modernist, and New Age concepts, and developed a Christian solidarism
on the foundation of natural law theory that complemented the vision of Pope
Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum — which
Durkheim contradicted. This is why Pope
Pius XI called two members of the Königswinterkreis
discussion group (composed primarily of students of Father Pesch), Father
Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., and Father Gustav Gundlach, S.J., to Rome to
consult on the writing of Quadragesimo
Anno.
To
Durkheim, God is a “divinized society” and religion is a social, not a
spiritual phenomenon. This, as Archbishop
(then Father) Sheen explained, puts collective man (and thus the State) at the
center, not God. As the (real)
solidarist Heinrich Rommen (a student of Father Pesch) analyzed this, the error
starts with a shift in the understanding of the natural law from the Intellect
(reason) to the Will (faith), leading to pure moral relativism, even nihilism. Socialism (especially of the Fabian variety,
but including infusions of Marxism as well), fascism, modernism, and New Age
thought become “authentic” Catholic social teaching, and the State is “overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.” (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 78.)
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| "Hi! I'm John Paul I!" |
Every
pope since Pius IX — John Paul I not excepted — has worked to counter this
shift from the Intellect to the Will. The
First Vatican Council declared the primacy of the Intellect to be an infallible
doctrine, and anathematized anyone who denied that knowledge of God’s existence
and of the natural law written in the hearts of all men can be known by the
force and light of human reason alone. The
first provision in the Oath Against Modernism is an affirmation of the primacy
of the Intellect, and the 1950 encyclical Humani
Generis starts off by identifying a denial of the primacy of the Intellect
as the chief threat to Catholic doctrine in the world.
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| Msgr. John A. Ryan |
Unfortunately,
thanks primarily to the efforts of one man, Msgr. John A. Ryan of the Catholic
University of America, the understanding of Catholic social teaching shifted
from the Intellect to the Will. According
to Ryan and other socialists, the collective has rights that individuals do
not, especially private property and liberty.
Ryan used Rerum Novarum to
justify a vastly expanded role for the State.
By his skill at both academic and civil politics he achieved an
ascendency as the authority on Catholic social thought that, despite its
obvious contradictions and weaknesses, was never successfully challenged until
the advent of the Just Third Way.
Ryan’s
principal error was to shift the basis of the natural law from the Intellect to
the Will, meaning his personal opinion.
As Heinrich Rommen, Mortimer Adler, Pope St. John Paul II, and others
have pointed out, this leads directly to the belief that “might makes right”
and that the collective created by man has rights that human beings created by
God do not have.
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| Pius XI: Only the human person has natural rights. |
This,
as Pius XI put it, is a theory “utterly foreign to Christian truth.” Why?
Because God created man, not mankind.
Man created the collective, an abstraction. God does not abstract (He is omniscient, and
has no need to do so, so as a “necessary Being,” He does not), so the only
source of rights the collective can have is the actual human beings who come
together to form a group. It is
therefore completely impossible that a creation of human beings can have rights
that human beings do not have!
Matters
were not helped any when followers of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc bought
into Fabian socialism and its offshoots, such as guild socialism and social
credit. This is supremely ironic, for
Chesterton and Belloc developed distributism to counter Fabian socialism, which
is based on an expanded agrarian socialism of Henry George. (Another irony: a
prominent distributist recently declared that distributism cannot survive
without georgism!)
Belloc
even wrote what many consider his greatest book, The Servile State, in 1912 to counter Fabian socialism. Yet many of today’s distributists and
Chestertonians slavishly follow the Fabians and advocate guild socialism and
social credit, and promote the work of Fabians E.F. Schumacher, Arthur Penty,
R.H. Tawney, and others, including the horrifying and perverted Eric Gill.
The
issue then becomes, What are we to do about this? We’ll look at that on Monday.
#30#
