As we saw in the previous
posting on this subject, in response to the “new things” of socialism,
modernism and the New Age, in 1891 Pope Leo XIII proposed a program of expanded
capital ownership. This would empower
people and families, giving them the opportunity and means to overcome the
growing social alienation that had led to the development and growth of the new
things in the first place.
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| Judge Peter S. Grosscup |
Nor was this a “religious
thing.” A little over a decade after Leo
XIII presented his recommended social program in Rerum Novarum, Judge
Peter Stenger Grosscup of the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in
Chicago, Illinois, began writing a series of articles advocating widespread
capital ownership both as an economic measure and to secure a stable political
order.
Grosscup, one of
Theodore Roosevelt’s “trust busters,” thought that replacing the various state
laws of incorporation with a single federal law, reforming anti-trust
legislation (for years he had been warning about weaknesses in the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and may have influenced the Clayton Act of 1914), and
permitting workers and others to purchase corporate shares would “people-ize” American
corporations and reunite the country, starting to be torn apart by — not
surprisingly — the conflict between capitalism on hand that allowed only a few
people to own capital, and socialism on the other, in which only the State
(bureaucrats) owned capital.
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| Archbishop John Ireland |
Evidently acquainted
with Archbishop John Ireland, considered America’s leading expert on Rerum
Novarum (Grosscup and Ireland served on the same committee in a 1907
conference on trusts), Grosscup made the same assumption as Leo XIII that
effectively nullified their respective proposals for expanded capital
ownership: that the only way ordinary people can become owners of capital is to
save out of consumption income.
With the pontificate
of Pius XI, however, one of the missing pieces in Leo XIII’s thought was addressed. This was through Pius XI’s development of a doctrine
of social virtue explaining how the human person gains direct access to the
common good.
In Pius XI’s
thought, traditional individual virtues benefit individuals directly, and
society indirectly. Social virtues, on
the other hand, benefit society directly, but individuals indirectly.
Through acts of
social virtue, human persons can effect necessary changes directly in the
social environment — “the system” — conforming the institutions of the common
good more closely to human nature. This
establishes and maintains the proper environment for the acquisition and
development of virtue. People can more
easily become more fully human, because the system encourages them to become
virtuous.
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| Pope Leo XIII |
Through organized
action directed at building or perfecting the common good, people can secure their
natural rights and restructure institutions to conform to human nature as far
as possible. The work of social justice never
ends, because institutions as human creations can never be perfect.
This is in sharp
contrast to the principles of socialism that seek to absorb or subsume the
human person into the State or collective.
Socialism tries to change human nature by abolishing natural rights and conforming
it to “ideal” institutions as defined by some élite.
Leo XIII’s
program in Rerum Novarum took for granted what individualists and
collectivists alike did not even consider possible: that people can directly
access and reform the common good. Pius
XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy was the recognition of social justice
as a particular virtue directed to the common good with a defined act of its
own. This resolved one of the major
difficulties with the social program (as distinct from the social doctrine) of
Leo XIII.
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| Pope Pius XI |
Building on Leo
XIII’s thought in this manner was a major advance in developing a sound theory
of personalism consistent with natural law and Aristotelian-Thomist
philosophy. Personalism being any
school of thought or intellectual movement that focuses on the reality of
the human person and each person’s unique dignity, it demands that the
institutions of the common good be equally accessible by every natural person,
i.e., by every human being, and thus that every person have power.
Full and direct
access to the common good in turn requires more than every person being able to
exercise the full spectrum of the classic individual virtues and rights. This is because individual virtues and rights
only grant indirect access to the common good.
A holistic understanding of rights and virtues at both the individual
and social levels, however, requires that each person have direct access to the
common good and all its institutions through the free exercise of the social
virtues, especially social charity and social justice.
Pius XI, however,
left one question unanswered: how to pay for the restructuring of the social
order and turn people into capital owners without redistribution or any other
form of injustice?
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