One
thing that a number of Pope John Paul I’s biographers have struggled with is
the puzzle of his working-class background and the fact that his father was a
socialist, combined with his obvious distrust of socialism of any kind. They see a contradiction in his open sympathy
for workers versus his theological “conservatism” (actually orthodoxy). As a result, chroniclers tend to gloss over
or downplay his comments about socialism by asserting — without proof — that he
was only opposed to certain kinds of socialism, notably Marxist communism.
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| Monsignor Félix Doupanloup |
Of
course, as we saw in the previous posting in this series, there is no
contradiction. John Paul I’s concern for
justice and charity discerned by observing human nature caused him to reject
socialism that discards or denies human nature, and distrust capitalism that
limits participation in human nature to the few.
John
Paul I had been thoroughly grounded in authentic Catholic teaching about God
and the natural law. He had a very high
regard for the pioneers of the revolution in Catholic schools in the nineteenth
century who took Pope Pius IX’s efforts to revitalize the Church seriously;
John Paul I addressed one of his letters in Illustrissimi
to Monsignor Félix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup (1802-1878) and noted the
assistance Dupanloup received from others such as Frédéric Alfred Pierre, comte
de Falloux (1811-1886) and Fr. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, O.P. (1802-1861).
(Luciani, Illustrissimi, op. cit.,
220.)
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| Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, O.P. |
Interestingly,
Lacordaire was a strong opponent of socialism in addition to supporting
Catholic education. (Edward McSweeny,
D.D., “Lacordaire on Property,” The
Catholic World, June 1887, 338-347.)
A former close associate of Hugues-Félicité
Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), considered by some authorities to be the
founder of “social Catholicism” and a leader in the New Christian/Neo-Catholic
movement, Lacordaire broke with de Lamennais when the latter renounced
Christianity and never spoke to him again.
As
John Paul I saw it, the problem was that many of his clerical contemporaries
and most of the Catholic laity throughout the world had been poorly educated;
Catholic education had, to that extent, failed them and the Church itself. They had been indoctrinated in a very
different idea of what constitutes Catholic social teaching.
Instead
of an approach that strictly confines social thought within the parameters
established by the natural law, far too many people even today adhere to the
New Christian/Neo-Catholic understanding of Catholic social thought. This, according to the solidarist economist
Franz H. Mueller (a student of Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J.) in his book, The Church and the Social Question
(1984), is due to the
unfortunate circumstance that the field of Catholic social thought had, through
a series of unfortunate events, become dominated by the avant garde theories promulgated by one man: Monsignor John A. Ryan
of the Catholic University of America.
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| Monsignor John A. Ryan |
It
came about in this manner. In 1906, in
his capacity as self-appointed authority on the social doctrine of Pope Leo
XIII, Msgr. Ryan published his doctoral thesis, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, Publishers). The book moved
its author into the front rank of commentators on Catholic social teaching and
may have been what eventually gained him a place on the faculty of the Catholic
University in Washington, DC.
Ryan’s
position was only seriously threatened once, when the rector, Bishop Thomas Joseph Shahan, brought in Fulton J.
Sheen in an effort to raise academic standards in the theology graduate
school. Standards had declined rapidly
under the leadership of Ryan, who brooked no interference from anyone, and was
busily forcing the curriculum down the path of modernism.
Sheen appeared
to be the ideal candidate to put the Catholic University graduate school of
theology back on track. He had left the
program at the Catholic University a few years previously after his second year
after being advised that Thomism was no longer taught in any coherent fashion
and the education he would receive was second rate at best. Sheen transferred to and received his
doctorate from the Louvain, being awarded his degree at the highest level, a
distinction given to only about forty or so individuals since the university
was founded.
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| Abp. Fulton J. Sheen |
What made Sheen
stand out was the fact that his doctoral thesis, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), was in stark
contrast to that of Ryan’s A Living Wage. Where Ryan relied on the principles of
socialism, modernism, and the New Age to make his case, Sheen chronicled the
infiltration of these “new things” into the philosophical consciousness of the
modern world. To make matters worse for
Ryan, the noted English convert G.K. Chesterton wrote the introduction to
Sheen’s book, praising it for the author’s commitment to reason and common
sense — Sheen was even characterized as “the American Chesterton.”
Correctly perceiving
Sheen as a threat — not to his person, but to the “new things” on which he had
built his career and attained his status — Ryan immediately took steps to
neutralize Sheen and undermine his reputation.
This was made all the easier due to the fact that Shahan retired soon
after Sheen’s arrival, and Ryan was able to carry out his campaign and exact
his revenge virtually unopposed.
What followed
was a decade of what Sheen later described in the introduction to his Life of Christ (1954) as virtual
torture, a crucifixion at the hands of Ryan.
Charges of heresy, lying, and mental instability, and vows to get rid of
Sheen at any cost followed in rapid succession from Ryan and his confreres and disciples.
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| Bishop Thomas Joseph Shahan |
Ryan’s actions
become understandable when we discover that he was a disciple of the agrarian
socialist Henry George and an admirer of the renegade priest Father Edward
McGlynn. Ryan’s ostensible refutation of
Georgist thought in the work he considered his magnum opus, Distributive
Justice (1916) — probably at the behest of Shahan, who had been one of the
examiners in the McGlynn case — is actually a blind.
By focusing on
and refuting (after a fashion) George’s theory of legal title — a non-issue for
George and not essential to his argument — Ryan was able to retain the
substance of George’s thought while jettisoning an unimportant form. A comparison of George’s 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, with Distributive Justice reveals that,
despite a superficial rejection of a trivial aspect of George’s theories,
Ryan’s analysis and theories are fundamentally identical to those of George.
Added in to
that volatile mixture was the fact that Ryan idolized one of the oddest
characters on the late nineteenth century political, economic, and literary
scene. This was Ignatius Loyola
Donnelly, termed by some “America’s Prince of Cranks.”
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| Ignatius Loyola Donnelly |
Donnelly, a
former Catholic turned spiritualist, was also a follower of George and a
primary source for the version of theosophy invented by the “old fraud” (as
Chesterton called her) Madame Blavatsky.
As a politician, Donnelly introduced legislation to abolish private
ownership of land and railroads, and also made fortunes in real estate
speculation.
As a novelist
and pseudo scientist, Donnelly wrote about the antediluvian world, hinting that
the source of his knowledge of events was his spirit guides. He also claimed to have discovered a secret
code by means of which Francis Bacon conveyed occult knowledge to his followers
in the future under the pseudonym “William Shakespeare.”
Ryan’s analysis
of the natural law in his doctoral thesis reflects these strong socialist,
modernist, and New Age influences on his thought, influences Sheen exposed in God and Intelligence. In particular, there is Ryan’s treatment of
private property that he claimed is a natural right, but not as true, nor true in
the same way, as other natural rights.
Ryan thereby
violated the first principle of reason in its “positive” aspect of the
principle (or law) of identity: that which is true is as true, and is true in
the same way, as everything else that is true.
As for the natural law itself, he shifted it from a matter of objective
knowledge to subjective opinion. As he
declared,
Natural rights are necessary means of right and reasonable
living. They are essential to the
welfare of a human being, a person. They
exist and are sacred and inviolable because the welfare of the person exists —
as a fact of the ideal order — and is a sacred and inviolable thing. (Ryan, A
Living Wage, op. cit., 48.)
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| Franklin Delano Roosevelt, New Deal president. |
Ryan’s
fundamental error, therefore, is his claim that “[n]atural rights. . . . exist
and are sacred and inviolable because the welfare of the person exists.” On the contrary: natural rights exist and are
sacred and inviolable because the human person
exists, not because the welfare of
the human person exists. Human existence is objective fact — knowledge. Human welfare
is subjective opinion.
Not
surprisingly, Ryan was known pejoratively as “the Right Reverend New Dealer”
and “Monsignor New Deal” for his enthusiastic support for the program and
anything else since the Wilson administration the increasingly anti-Catholic
Democratic Party advocated. Ryan’s
philosophical sleight-of-hand, the sort Sheen ably chronicled in God and Intelligence, set the stage for
economic aberrations such as the New Deal provided the leverage for the
incredible resurgence of the “new things” that effectively hijacked the Second
Vatican Council.
This was the
environment within which John Paul I as the first post-Vatican II pope taught,
and that his social doctrine must be understood as attempting to counter. As a Thomist, John Paul I was fully aware of
the weaknesses of what passed for Catholic social thought shaped and guided by
the teachings of Ryan. This was especially
so when it came to the issue of the living wage and the contradictions of the
underlying theory that formed the core of Ryan’s thought, with the body of
authentic Catholic teaching unadulterated by the “new things.”
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| Gregory XVI: countering the new things. |
As Pope Leo
XIII had made clear, and of which John Paul I was fully aware, the goal of
Catholic social teaching for the temporal economic order — this life — is a
society in which ordinary people have both the opportunity and means to own
capital. Unfortunately, the mechanism the
popes have advocated by means of which people can become owners — an increase
in wages — is ineffective and was instantly reinterpreted by adherents of the
“new things” as mandating a living wage.
The goal of widespread private property in capital was relegated to the
status of “prudential matter” by both capitalists and socialists.
As a result,
John Paul I, in common with every pope since Gregory XVI, was confronted with
well-organized and powerful opponents — capitalists and socialists — on two
fronts.
As a result of his commitment to the social doctrine of Pope Leo XIII he
had a sound battle plan
(strategy) in the form of widespread capital ownership . . . but no way of
implementing it.
The best John
Paul I could do was to continue to try and implement a holding action, which
was (as we might expect) mistaken for a solution: increases in wages and social
welfare, collective bargaining, and the acquisition and development of
individual virtue. These, while
essential, are by no means a solution (the last, development of individual
virtue, is not even a means or a solution at all, but the desired end). They are a way to give temporary assistance
and buy time on the way to developing and implementing a solution.
#30#
