While not the
most immediate challenge facing people today, confusion over Catholic social
teaching has, as Pope Pius XI put it, “given rise to
controversies that are not always peaceful.”
If only to resolve these disputes rationally it will be useful to
explore how Catholic social teaching developed.
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| Pius XI: controversies not always peaceful |
After all, this is not really a “religious” issue, and the
Catholic Church’s social teachings are more fully developed than those of other
faiths and philosophies.
It began in the aftermath of the Financial, Industrial, and
French Revolutions.
Although the Bank of England was established in 1694 to
provide private sector industry, commerce, and agriculture with enough credit
to keep the economy running smoothly, the Bank was forced to accept government
debt to back its reserve currency instead of gold, silver, or private sector
assets such as land or businesses . . . or it would not have gotten its charter. This Financial Revolution not only allowed
the government to turn its own debt into money and thereby control the economy
for political purposes, it ensured that only the rich would be able to finance
and own the new machinery of the Industrial Revolution.
Because they did not have existing savings and could not
obtain credit to purchase the new machinery that took away their means of
making a living, many people were forced to go to work in the new factories as
wage workers. As technology became more
productive, human labor became economically less valuable and wages went lower
and lower. Having no capital of their
own, not even a tiny plot of land, dire poverty became the rule for workers and
their families.
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| Leo XIII: a yoke little better than slavery |
People who do not own capital and who have only labor to
sell when the economic value of labor falls in competition with capital are not
able to participate in society to any significant degree, and sometimes not at
all. As a result, as Pope Leo XIII said,
“a small number of very rich men were able to lay upon the teeming
masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”
The reaction was
not long in coming. A bad old idea was
given a new lease on life. Sometimes
called “the Divine Right of Kings,” this is the belief that the State or rulers
created or instituted by people are somehow greater than people created by
God. This offends against human dignity at
the most basic level and contradicts the natural law principle that the State
is made for man, not man for the State.
As the overriding
principle of the French Revolution, the idea that humanity as a whole is
greater than any individual human being became the basis for modern economic
and political theory. It became
acceptable to punish, imprison, or even execute people who had committed no
crime but who had the wrong opinions, were a financial burden or might become
one, or were simply inconvenient.
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| Waterloo, where Napoléon met his, er, Waterloo |
Nor did matters
improve after the fall of Napoléon.
Economically, politically, and religiously the world was in chaos. In an effort to correct the problems of
society, some people began developing new ideas of politics, religion, and even
the family to replace traditional forms of Church and State.
The movement did
not have a name until 1825, when Henri de Saint-Simon’s posthumous book was published,
Le Nouveau Christianisme, “The New
Christianity.” Saint-Simon’s ideas and those
of others combining Church, State, and Family into a single monolithic entity
became known as “the Democratic Religion” or “the Religion of Humanity.”
A decade later
Pierre Leroux, one of Saint-Simon’s followers and member of “the Church of
Saint-Simon” invented another term: “socialism.” By 1848, the terms communism and socialism
were interchangeable, although Karl Marx and others tried to restrict the term
communism to “scientific socialism,” meaning socialism untainted by religion.
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| Saint-Simon: the Kingdom of God on Earth |
Saint-Simon’s
idea was simple. Everything was to come
under the collective and the government was to have absolute control over
Church, State, Family, and individuals. Traditional
Christianity had been useful in its day, but that day was over. Collective Man would replace God. Jesus was the first socialist, a human being with
special insights who realized he was a part of the God-collective.
The whole of
society, construed as exclusively economic in nature, would be devoted to
material improvement, with special emphasis on the poor, regardless of natural
law or traditional notions of right and wrong.
The end justified the means. This
would establish “the Kingdom of God on Earth” in which man would worship
himself, what G.K. Chesterton called “the God Within.”
Nor was Saint-Simon
alone. Among many others promoting
schemes for political and religious betterment was fellow Frenchman Charles
Fourier, whose “Associationism” became very popular in the United States,
converting many people to socialism.
These included newspaperman Horace Greeley and Orestes Brownson before Brownson
converted to Catholicism and became a determined foe of all forms of socialism.
Brownson
condemned all socialism as a satanic travesty of Christianity. As he said, “Surely Satan has here, in
Socialism, done his best, almost outdone himself, and would, if it were
possible, deceive the very elect, so that no flesh should be saved.”
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| De Lamennais: bidding defiance to God |
Perhaps the worst
from the Catholic view, however, was the
“tormented, headstrong Breton priest” Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais, who,
Alexis de Tocqueville said, “had a pride great enough to walk over the
heads of kings and bid defiance to God.”
Ironically, de Lamennais,
considered the founder of liberal or social Catholicism, started out defending
the Church against governments that wanted to separate the Church from society
so that the State could control religious affairs. His solution, however, was to separate the
State from society so that the Church could control civil affairs.
Given these
details, it becomes easy to understand why the Catholic Church condemns “separation
of Church and State.” As used by the
radicals of the early nineteenth century, it did not mean that Church and State
are recognized as distinct societies, each with its own legitimate sphere of
action, sometimes alone and sometimes cooperating with each other. That has been Catholic teaching for two
thousand years: “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” etc.
No, “separation
of Church and State” as used by the radicals meant that either the Church or
the State was to be separated entirely from the social order and its functions
assumed by the other. It was a case of “Church
OR State,” not “Church AND State.”
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