Yesterday we
looked at the situation of the non-owning worker, and briefly touched on the
matter of the fair wage, which many people assume to be the essence of social
justice. Much to the surprise of such
people, however, it turns out that neither wages nor private property is the
essence of social justice. Both wages and private property come under individual justice. As Pope Pius XI explained in § 79 of Quadragesimo Anno,
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| Pius XI: The fair wage is individual, not social, justice. |
What We have thus far stated regarding an equitable
distribution of property and regarding just wages concerns individual persons
and only indirectly touches social order, to the restoration of which according
to the principles of sound philosophy and to its perfection according to the
sublime precepts of the law of the Gospel, Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, devoted
all his thought and care.
This throws a
monkey wrench into the works for both individualists and collectivists — or,
for you Francophiles, a wooden shoe or sabot, for le sabotage. Many people
have committed themselves completely to the belief that “social justice” (as
well as the whole mission of Church and State) is the direct amelioration of
the ills of the temporal order, and the overall material benefit of humanity.
As the religious
socialist Claude Henri
de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) put it when setting forth the
principles of his new religion that he termed “New Christianity,” and his Apostles
(their term) called Le Église
Saint-Simonienne, “the Church of Saint-Simonism,”
The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the
moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize
itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end. (Henri de Saint-Simon, Nouveau Christianisme, 1825.)
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| Saint-Simon: the Prophet of New Christianity |
Is that, however,
what Pius XI — or Leo XIII — meant? That
the Catholic Church as well as all other organized religions should transform
themselves into NGOs and social service agencies and devote all their efforts
to “the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest
class”? Is that all “social justice”
means?
Not according to
Pius XI. (Leo XIII never used the term
“social justice.” In his day, along with
“democratic religion,” “New Christianity,” and a host of other terms, it was
just one more euphemism for “socialism.”
Pius XI changed that.) As far as
Pius XI was concerned, “social justice” is the particular virtue directed to
institutions — social habits — by means of and within which people realize their
individual good.
That is, social
justice is directed not to any individual
good, but to the common good, that
vast network of institutions within which human beings as “political animals”
realize their individual good. As Pius
XI explained in § 53 of Divini
Redemptoris,
It happens all too frequently . . . under the salary
system, that individual employers a
re helpless to ensure justice unless, with a
view to its practice, they organize institutions the object of which is to
prevent competition incompatible with fair treatment for the workers. Where
this is true, it is the duty of contractors and employers to support and
promote such necessary organizations as normal instruments enabling them to
fulfill their obligations of justice.
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| Meet the demands of Justice |
Most people skim
right through this, assuming that the many explicit references to social
justice in the preceding paragraphs mean that the “justice” mentioned in the
first sentence in this paragraph is also
“social justice”; the pope just forgot to put the word in.
Very much the
contrary! When Pius XI said “justice,”
he clearly meant classic, individual justice, e.g., “individual
employers are helpless to ensure justice.”
And social justice? “[T]hey organize institutions the object of
which is to prevent competition incompatible with fair treatment for the
workers . . . [and] enabl[e] them to fulfill their obligations of justice.”
So, what does individual justice demand in the above
paragraph? That’s easy: the payment of a
fair wage.
And what does social justice demand in the above
paragraph? Even easier . . . if it is
read carefully: the reform of institutions to make the payment of a fair wage
possible.
Shall we put it
even simpler?
· Individual justice = paying fair wage
· Social justice = makes paying fair wage possible
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| Rev. William J. Ferree, S,M,, Ph.D., CESJ co-founder |
If you do not see
the difference, go no further. The rest
of this posting, actually pretty much everything on this blog, will make
absolutely no sense to you. You might
want to give a go at reading Introduction
to Social Justice (1948), a pamphlet written by CESJ co-founder Father
William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., before wading through the rest of this series.
Yet — as we have
seen — paying a wage, however fair or just, does nothing in and of itself to
train a child to be an adult or a slave to be free. It trains them to be good children or slaves.
The fact is that
maintaining workers (or anybody else) in a propertyless condition, regardless
how well paid they might be, or how much “basic income,” family allowances, or
welfare to which they may be entitled, is analogous to parents who insist on
keeping their children utterly dependent on them for as long as possible,
regardless how old they might be. That
is why Leo XIII stated the ideal situation in no uncertain terms:
If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to
support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a
sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down
expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of
income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great
labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private
ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor
ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people
to become owners. (Rerum Novarum, § 46.)
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| Leo XIII: The law should favor ownership. |
Wages, minimum or
otherwise, are thus not the end in Catholic social teaching. Obviously ownership of capital is what is
presented as the goal. Wages are just a
way of getting there. As Pius XI
explained,
The redemption of the non-owning workers — this is the
goal that Our Predecessor declared must necessarily be sought. And the point is
the more emphatically to be asserted and more insistently repeated because the
commands of the Pontiff, salutary as they are, have not infrequently been
consigned to oblivion either because they were deliberately suppressed by
silence or thought impracticable although they both can and ought to be put into
effect. And these commands have not lost their force and wisdom for our time
because that “pauperism” which Leo XIII beheld in all its horror is less
widespread. Certainly the condition of the workers has been improved and made
more equitable especially in the more civilized and wealthy countries where the
workers can no longer be considered universally overwhelmed with misery and
lacking the necessities of life. But since manufacturing and industry have so
rapidly pervaded and occupied countless regions, not only in the countries
called new, but also in the realms of the Far East that have been civilized
from antiquity, the number of the non-owning working poor has increased
enormously and their groans cry to God from the earth. Added to them is the
huge army of rural wage workers, pushed to the lowest level of existence and
deprived of all hope of ever acquiring “some property in land,” and, therefore,
permanently bound to the status of non-owning worker unless suitable and
effective remedies are applied. (Quadragesimo Anno, § 59.)
There is,
however, something of a problem here.
Modern technology has advanced to the point where it can take a lifetime
of scrimping and saving out of wages to purchase enough capital to provide an
adequate and secure income. Most of the
experts therefore conclude that, since it appears to be impossible for most wage
earners to accumulate sufficient savings to purchase a capital stake, widespread
capital ownership must be prudential matter, and the goal of social justice
must be a fair wage.
But what if there
is another way to acquire and possess private property in capital? Does that change things?
We’ll look at
that tomorrow.
#30#
