In the opening of
Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S.
Pinafore, Little Buttercup informs the Captain in cryptic terms that many
things are not as they might appear at first glance. Confused, the Captain responds in kind, trading
a list of random aphorisms for Buttercup’s “incomprehensible utterances.”
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| Sweet Little Buttercup, Aye! |
Of course, in
true Gilbertian fashion, Buttercup’s warning later turns out to make perfect
sense . . . once the assumptions in the World of Topsy-Turvy are accepted as
the norm, and if the audience does not look into them too carefully or critically. (E.g.,
two men who were mixed up as babies together end up with a significant age
disparity, and then change professional careers once the error is revealed, one
marrying the other’s daughter.)
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, something similar
happens with greater frequency than anyone cares to admit. We see this, for example, when trying to
understand the social justice doctrine of Monsignor John A. Ryan
(1869-1945). Although widely accepted as
social justice orthodoxy and a brilliant application of the principles laid out
in Rerum Novarum, Ryan’s thought has
a great many holes and contractions that are glossed over, a number of which
are detailed in The Church and the Social
Question (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy
Research, 1984) by Dr. Franz Hermann Mueller (1900-1994).
Mueller, a
student of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., (1854-1926), went into a great deal of
technical detail as to why, in his opinion, Ryan’s analysis of Rerum Novarum and the particular program
he developed did not appear to be consistent with common sense, Thomist
philosophy, or Catholic social teaching.
To take one non-technical example, Mueller quoted Ryan’s explanation as
to why his social program was neither fascist nor socialist.
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| Msgr. John A. Ryan |
Ryan believed the best answer to objections his
program was socialist “is the fact that the policy of public
ownership is gaining ground every day in every country,
and that no country now enjoying it has any thought of reverting to the other
system.” (Ibid., 105.) As Mueller noted, “Ryan anticipated the accusation that his program
was socialistic or paternalistic, but this, he felt would be an attempt at
refutation by name-calling, not deserving serious attention.” (Ibid., 106.)
In other words,
Ryan first declared that his program was not socialist because socialism was gaining
acceptance everywhere . . . which is not an answer. Further, he refused to answer a direct
question as to whether what he proposed was socialist on the grounds that he
did not have to answer such rude and insolent questions . . . again, not an
answer.
There is a great
deal more in Mueller’s analysis, but the reader might want to look it up on his
or her own. Used copies of The Church and the Social Question are
available at quite reasonable prices and might even be in libraries.
What we are
looking at today is something that Mueller and virtually everyone else has
taken for granted for over a century. This was ever since Ryan burst on the scene in
1906 with his doctoral thesis, A Living Wage, followed up a decade
later with his magnum opus, Distributive Justice (1916).
That is, everyone
just assumed, for good or ill, that Ryan took Rerum Novarum as his starting point and developed his social
doctrine as an application of the principles in the encyclical. Depending on what authority you choose to
believe, the agrarian socialist Henry George (1839-1897) either did or did not
influence Ryan’s analysis (Mueller believed that George’s influence was
pervasive, while a recent head of the John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic
Social Thought was of the opinion that George had no influence).
In Distributive Justice, Ryan ignored commutative justice, the justice that governs
equality of exchange (the law of contracts), that is, “equality of quantity.” (IIa
IIae, q. 61, a. 2.) Significantly, all forms of justice presuppose the validity
of commutative justice; (Catechism
of the Catholic Church, § 1807.) “Without commutative justice, no other form of justice is
possible.” (Ibid., § 2411.)
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| Orestes A. Brownson |
The etymology of the terms
distributive justice and social justice as Ryan used them is a fascinating
study in itself. For over a century,
commentators have assumed that Ryan began with the classic Aristotelian-Thomist
understanding of distributive justice, and then developed it in light of the
social justice teachings of Rerum Novarum. Authorities have struggled in vain to
reconcile the contradictions implicit in this assumption.
The facts tell a different story. Ryan derived his concept of
distributive justice and its equation with social justice not from Rerum Novarum, but from the utopian and
religious socialists of the 1840s.
Distributive justice and social justice were used interchangeably as
expressions of the principal doctrine of “the Church of the Future.”
As conceived by Orestes A.
Brownson (1803-1876) before his conversion to Catholicism as well as other adherents
of the various “religions of humanity,” the Church of the Future was
essentially a terrestrial paradise in which people worshiped humanity. In this framework, distributive and social
justice were equivalent terms meaning distribution on the basis of need. This was a direct result of heavy influence by
the theories of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier as filtered through his
American disciple Albert Brisbane. (Adam Morris, American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019,
82-83.)
Thus, Ryan’s
social thought did not derive from his interpretation of Rerum Novarum. Instead, his interpretation
of Rerum Novarum derived from his social
thought. What this meant specifically we
will examine in the next posting on this subject.
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