One of Pope John Paul I’s expressed concerns as Patriarch
of Venice was the plight of the poor.
His first “letter” in Illustrissimi,
in fact, is to Charles Dickens, and at first glance seems to be a standard
semi- or full-socialist condemnation of the evils and greed of capitalism, the
free market, the dictators of money, and so on, so forth.
The letter to Dickens is, however, much more profound than
the usual socialist interpretation would have us believe. As we saw in the previous posting in this series, many (if not most) people think that Catholic social teaching is about
garnering more and more material benefits for the poor.
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| Daniel Webster |
That is correct in a sense, but the material benefits
sought as the results of effective application of Catholic social teaching are
not increases in wages, benefits, and welfare, but the very material and
beneficial power over one’s own life.
For that reason, widespread private property in capital is essential,
because (as Daniel Webster noted) “Power naturally and necessarily follows
property.”
That being said, however, pay close attention to what was written
above: we did not say that Catholic social teaching means securing material
benefits of any kind. Very much the
contrary! Catholic social teaching has
as its goal institutional reform to make it possible
for people to secure material, social, and even spiritual benefits through
their own efforts, not to have such things simply distributed to them because
they need them.
Individual goods such as private property and even wages,
benefits, and welfare, regardless how
many people receive them, are, have always been, and will always be individual. As Pope Pius XI explained in § 76 of Quadragesimo Anno,
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.
Still, at first glance the letter to Dickens strikes the
reader as very socialist, indeed! It
also sounds very much as if John Paul I was strongly in favor of what is
variously known as syndicalism or guild socialism, i.e., some kind of diffused socialism with the economy controlled
at the local rather than the national level.
As he wrote,
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| Pope John Paul I |
You must be curious to know if and how some remedy has been
found for the situations of poverty and injustice that you reported.
I will tell you at once.
In your own England, and in industrialized Europe, the workers have
greatly improved their position. The
only power they could command was their numerical strength. They exploited it. . . .
The workers, at first separate and scattered grains of sand,
have become a compact cloud, in their unions and in the various forms of
socialism, which have the undeniable merit of having been, almost everywhere, the
chief cause of the workers’ upward rise.
Since your day, they have advanced and achieved much in the
areas of economy, social security, culture.
And today, through the unions, they often manage to make their voice
heard still higher, in the upper ranks of the government where, actually, their
fate is decided. (Luciani, Illustrissimi, op. cit., 5-6.)
This apparent paean in praise of socialism sounds pretty
good. Many people would conclude from it
that John Paul I was crediting socialism with greatly improving the lot of the
workers. They would also feel justified
in assuming that the future pope was going even further and actually advocating
socialism as the solution to the problems of the modern world.
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| Charles Dickens |
That is, many people would assume that is what John Paul I
was saying if they did not realize the import of the subsequent paragraphs. Having apparently praised socialism and the
labor movement to the skies, he suddenly changes tone and begins listing the
problems of the modern world that, somehow (and a little unfairly) he made
sound as if they were worse than those of the nineteenth century.
And what of now? Alas!
In your time social injustices were all in one direction: against
workers, who could point their fingers at the boss. Today, a vast array of people are pointing
their fingers. . . . Many workers are unemployed or fear for their jobs. They . . . feel treated as mere tools of
production and not as human protagonists. . . . Fear and concern are
great. For many the desert animal to be attacked
and buried is no longer only capitalism, but also the present “system,” to be
overturned with a total revolution. For
others the process of overturning the system has already begun. (Ibid., 6-7.)
Far from uniting people, then, the race to establish and
maintain the goal of religious or democratic socialism — the Kingdom of God on
Earth — has only led to greater alienation and anger. Where once the poor felt powerless against
the capitalist, they now feel powerless against “the system” that is failing in
the attempt to take care of everything.
The spiritual malaise that called socialism into being in the first
place is now worse than ever before.
Ironically (for it is clear that John Paul I was familiar
with Rerum Novarum), he had the
theoretical answer to the problem of social alienation: widespread capital
ownership. What he did not have was a
practical means of attaining the very remedy that Leo XIII advocated.
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| Saint Bernard of Clairvaux |
What he did have was a realization that obsessing about applications
to the exclusion or even contradiction of the underlying principles was
virtually a guarantee of ineffectiveness, especially in the area of social
justice. Calling to mind Pope Benedict
XV’s reminder at the beginning of World War I that we must always do “old
things, but in a new way” (Ad Beatissimi
Apostolorum, § 25), John Paul I chastised those who latch on to a single
application or assumption without regard to anything else in his letter to
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux by condemning —
. . . the attitude of those who stubbornly refuse to face
evident realities and fall into excessive rigidity and integralism, becoming
more monarchist than the king, more papist than the pope.
This happens. There
are those who, having mastered an idea, bury it and continue to preserve it, to
defend it jealously for their whole lives, never reexamining it, never checking
to see what it has become after so much rain and wind, after the storms of
events and changes.
Those who travel in the stratosphere run the risk of not
being prudent, and, crammed with purely bookish learning, they cannot once move
away from what is written, real nitpickers always intent on analyzing, taking
to pieces, always in search of hairs to split. (Ibid., 36.)
Note that John Paul I was not condemning integralism per se, “integralism” being the
integration of all aspects of life into the precepts of the Gospel and the
Magisterium (teaching authority of the Catholic Church). Rather, he was commenting on excessive integralism, the exaggeration
of one aspect of Catholic teaching to the exclusion of all else, making everything
subordinate to one thing.
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| Pope John Paul II |
Not surprisingly, John Paul II also commented on this
tendency in 1999 when he chastised the bishops of North and South America for
driving people out of the Church by exaggerating one part of Catholic social
teaching. As he declared, pointing out
that enthusiasm for one thing to the exclusion of others is contrary to the
very Gospel they were supposed to be spreading,
As I have already noted, love for the poor must be
preferential, but not exclusive. The Synod Fathers observed that it was in part
because of an approach to the pastoral care of the poor marked by a certain
exclusiveness that the pastoral care for the leading sectors of society has
been neglected and many people have thus been estranged from the Church. The
damage done by the spread of secularism in these sectors — political or
economic, union-related, military, social or cultural — shows how urgent it is
that they be evangelized, with the encouragement and guidance of the Church's
Pastors, who are called by God to care for everyone. They will be able to count
on the help of those who — fortunately still numerous — have remained faithful
to Christian values. In this regard the Synod Fathers have recognized “the
commitment of many leaders to building a just and fraternal society”. With
their support, Pastors will face the not easy task of evangelizing these
sectors of society. With renewed fervor and updated methods, they will announce
Christ to leaders, men and women alike, insisting especially on the formation
of consciences on the basis of the Church's social doctrine. This formation
will act as the best antidote to the not infrequent cases of inconsistency and
even corruption marking socio-political structures. Conversely, if this
evangelization of the leadership sector is neglected, it should not come as a
surprise that many who are a part of it will be guided by criteria alien to the
Gospel and at times openly contrary to it. (Ecclesia in America, § 67.)
Still, John Paul I had no effective means of going beyond
the usual expedients of wages, benefits, and welfare. Wisely or unwisely, therefore, he said
nothing, merely limited himself to calling for more solidarity and unity. These are good, even great words, but hollow
and empty without the power needed to make them meaningful.
The problem is that within the wage system, the presumed solution
is to raise wages in order to distribute sufficient income to clear
production. This raises the costs of
production, giving more incentive to capital owners to replace even more human
labor with technology, thereby requiring more increases in wages just to keep
up.
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| John Maynard Keynes |
(There is an added problem with Keynesian economics. Within the Keynesian paradigm, new capital
formation requires that production exceed consumption in order to “save.” This means that more goods must be produced
than can be consumed . . . thereby setting up a “paradox of savings,” viz., that more must be produced than
can be consumed, but it cannot be turned into financing for new capital unless
it is consumed!
(Keynes’s solution was to inflate the currency, shifting
purchasing power from one group of people to another group of people; the idea
that inflating the currency “creates” purchasing power is, obviously,
nonsense. Inflation “robs Peter to pay
Paul,” decreases the costs of production by cheapening money, and raises
prices, thereby increasing profits to owners of capital and causing additional
demands for more inflation and redistribution.)
What is needed is a way to increase consumption income
without raising prices — and thereby benefit everyone instead of just those who
profit from inflation. Not just
materially, but by bringing “labor” and “management” together in a common
cause, laying the foundation for genuine solidarity.
And that is what Walter Reuther realized he had found in
Louis Kelso’s economic theories. As he
said in his testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February
20, 1967, a few years before John Paul I wrote his letter to Dickens,
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| Walter Reuther |
The breakdown in collective bargaining in recent years is due
to the difficulty of labor and management trying to equate the relative equity
of the worker and the stockholder and the consumer in advance of the
facts…. If the workers get too much, then the argument is that that
triggers inflationary pressures, and the counter argument is that if they don’t
get their equity, then we have a recession because of inadequate purchasing
power. We believe this approach (progress sharing) is a rational approach
because you cooperate in creating the abundance that makes the progress
possible, and then you share that progress after the fact, and not before the
fact. Profit sharing would resolve the conflict between management
apprehensions and worker expectations on the basis of solid economic facts as
they materialize rather than on the basis of speculation as to what the future
might hold…. If the workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the
profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek
an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented
increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the
standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase
costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since
their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices
charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have
any inflationary impact upon costs and prices.
That addresses the income question — but what about the
power issue? Reuther was prepared for
that as well. Power follows property,
therefore —
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| Louis O. Kelso |
Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers
would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth
which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy. The Federal Reserve
Board recently published data from which it is possible to estimate the degree
of concentration in the ownership of publicly traded stock held by individuals
and families as of December 1962. Preliminary analysis of these data indicates
that, despite all the talk of a “people’s capitalism” in the United States,
little more than one percent of all consumer units owned approximately 70
percent of all such stock. Fewer than 8 percent of all consumer units
owned approximately 97 percent—which means, conversely, that the total direct
ownership interest of more than 92 percent of America’s consumer units in the
corporation-operated productive wealth of this country was approximately 3
percent. Profit sharing in a form that would help to correct this shocking
maldistribution would be highly desirable for that reason alone.… If workers
had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations
that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between
their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage
rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization
policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a
residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not
determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s
products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact
upon costs and prices. (Ibid.)
Unfortunately, John Paul I was not aware of what Reuther
said, nor of Kelso’s theories. What he
said about the need to develop solidarity and Christian values and so on was
and remains important, of course.
Regardless of one’s faith or philosophy, the whole meaning and purpose
of life is to become more fully human, which means acquiring and developing
virtue — “human-ness” — as long as that is consistent with basic human nature,
of course.
Acquiring and developing virtue, or doing anything else,
however, requires power, and the only legitimate, effective, and lasting power
comes from private property in capital.
And how to get capital ownership into as many people’s hands as possible
is what was missing in the thought of John Paul I, as well as other popes.
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