Pope, Church beguile

I suppose I should by now be used to popular and media ignorance of Catholic teaching. But, like those very people, I seem to never learn.

There’s lately been shock, even incredulity, that Pope Francis has highlighted the plight of the poor and the immorality of economic injustice. Yet while he may have been more forthright and specific than his predecessors, nothing he has said in any way contradicts previous papal statements, or indeed historic Catholic teaching. On the contrary, it affirms it, it sings it, it lauds it to the heavens.

Anybody who does not recognize Christ’s outreach to and concern for the poor does not know Jesus. But to assume He came only for one section of society is heretical; as is to embrace some sort of hand-me-down socialism and try to transform Catholicism into a tawdry political ideology. All need God, whether wealthy or begging, and it could be that millionaires may be more spiritually impoverished than paupers. Yet the equality of the human soul surely demands action against a grinding degradation that leads to starving children, broken families and the monumental suffering of God’s creatures.

This is not about the lazy or the self-consciously marginalized, but about those generally living in the developing world who through no fault of their own have to fight to feed their children while others fight to deal with their children’s obesity. It’s the grand gulf between those who live in reality and those who live in reality television.

If anything solidified Catholic teaching around wealth, poverty and varying economic systems it was Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Sub-titled “On the Conditions of Labour,” it was an open letter that addressed the experience of the working class, at a time when Marxist ideas were gathering support. The Industrial Revolution had entered its second stage, inflation, unemployment and exploitation were common, and many turned to radical socialism as the answer.

Aware of the dangerous vacuum, Pope Leo emphasized that the state had a duty to promote social justice and that the Church was similarly obliged to speak out on matters of equality and fairness, not only due to simple decency, but also so as to help achieve peace and stability in a Europe edging towards chaos. Property rights were crucial, capitalism was by no means un-Christian when informed by ethical behaviour, and working people had a right to dignified treatment by employers.

“Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages,” stated the document. “Nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”

It inspired an entire generation, in particular the Catholic authors and journalists G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and their followers. The quintessentially Catholic economic and social doctrine known as Distributism grew from Rerum Novarum, based on land, family, small ownership of the means of production and a resistance to both unbridled capitalism and state socialism. Both errors, it argued, led to lack of freedom and an eventual war on the Church.

Fast forward to today and we see that Pope Leo, Chesterton and the rest were correct. The Church was actively persecuted under Communism and is facing increasing marginalization under an obsessive free market, which is something of a misnomer. When profit and demand — often contrived — are everything, people eventually become nothing. Capitalism is the best of a bad bunch of alternatives, but unless it listens to something greater than itself it will become oppressive. Who better fits the bill as “greater than itself ” than the Pope?

Socialists who assume Pope Francis is the conduit for their materialist beliefs will be terribly disappointed, as will conservatives who worry more about low taxes than low morals. Pope and Church beguile; it’s always been and will always be that way, thank God.

(Coren’s latest book is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His web site is www.michaelcoren.com.)