I am not one to listen to a religious authority on much, but this guy got it. Worth every minute of reading.
In our anti-society of rapacious consumption of the “new” and “improved,” and the unease instilled in us by mass marketers and politicians who cry that if we do not act now we will be lost—“Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n!” cries the Prince of Politicians to his fellow devils in Milton’s hell—we are apt to credit Pope Leo with seeing the light of novelty. No such thing. The ancient Romans held the political innovator to be a plague. Res nova means revolution, and the “spirit of revolutionary change,” rerum novarum spiritus, writes Leo, has been disturbing the nations of the world.
What are the elements of this upheaval? Leo names five: “The vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; the changed relations between masters and workmen; the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; the prevailing moral degeneracy.” The first is a neutral datum; it is the stage. The next three are social conditions with deep moral implications. The fifth is a moral sickness which would, unchecked, vitiate any attempt to solve the problems of the working classes by monetary or juridical means—we might say, by mechanical means.
He then goes on to blame secularism.
How did matters come to this pass? Leo blames the secularism spreading like a contagion from one European nation to the next. He had made that charge in his earlier encyclicals. One after another, the institutions that once brought master and workman together have been weakened or destroyed. The guilds were abolished; Leo will, in his practical recommendations, return again and again to the model of the guild. For the guilds, founded in the Middle Ages, were social, economic, and religious all at once. Guildsmen trained the young in their trades; they maintained a high standard of quality; they provided stability in costs and profit; they cared for their invalid members and their widows and orphans; and they united in the worship of God, especially to celebrate their patronal feasts.
One might disagree with that at first; but think about this : Merchant capitalism(European middle ages) is basically what started capitalism. So, considering religious conformity is what started it, why couldn't the slow elimination ruin it?
Now one cannot cure sin by sin. Our Lord tells us: one cannot cast out devils in the name of Beelzebub. But this, Leo sees, is what some revolutionaries pretend to do: “To remedy these wrongs the Socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies” (emphasis mine). Leo does not condemn Socialism for its practical failure, although he notes—did he board a time-machine to visit Russia and Cuba and what used to be Great Britain?—that “the workingman himself would be among the first to suffer.” We must see the relationship aright. Socialism is not evil because it fails. It fails, because it is evil. Nor is it justified because unchecked rapacity is evil—the antisocial money-squeezing which Dickens, alike suspicious of socialists, condemned. One does not hire Belial to fight Beelzebub.
" to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies” (emphasis mine)"
That sentence is kindaaa a big deal. Misinterpretations about communism is what lead to labeling stalin, cuba or NK "communist". They are not. They are socialist dictators. This guy gets it.
Marx didn't even talk about socialism that much. I wonder why?
We work; we exercise our minds, as God commanded us even before the fall. Man puts himself into his work, and so the reward of his work becomes his own, not the property of the State(Can I get a Amen? lol). Nor is this property held at the allowance of the State, reverting to the State at his decease. For, unlike the beasts, he dwells as it were above the current of time: “Man, fathoming by the faculty of reason matters without number, and linking the future with the present, becoming, furthermore, by taking enlightened forethought, master of his on acts, guides his ways under the eternal law and the power of God, whose providence governs all things.” His deeds, says Leo, “do not die out.” He makes his own “that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his individuality.” That includes the land itself.
Thus the right of private property is grounded, not in practical economics, but in the theomorphic nature of man. Are we now ready to consider the State, and laws established for the common good? By no means. It’s a symptom of our secular disease that we idolize the untrammeled individual, motivated by one hedonism or another, whether of rapacity or lust, and the State established to adjudicate among the hedonists. Such a man is less than fully human, and such a State is at once greater than a true state, as a tumor outgrows the organ it supplants, and less than a state, in that it provides at best for a tolerably managed common-evil.
Favorite part :Unchecked avarice may destroy families by depriving them of the material goods to which the workman rightly lays claim. But socialism destroys families by denying their very nature, and by usurping their functions: “The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household, is a great and pernicious error.”
Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil - Crisis Magazine
In our anti-society of rapacious consumption of the “new” and “improved,” and the unease instilled in us by mass marketers and politicians who cry that if we do not act now we will be lost—“Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n!” cries the Prince of Politicians to his fellow devils in Milton’s hell—we are apt to credit Pope Leo with seeing the light of novelty. No such thing. The ancient Romans held the political innovator to be a plague. Res nova means revolution, and the “spirit of revolutionary change,” rerum novarum spiritus, writes Leo, has been disturbing the nations of the world.
What are the elements of this upheaval? Leo names five: “The vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; the changed relations between masters and workmen; the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; the prevailing moral degeneracy.” The first is a neutral datum; it is the stage. The next three are social conditions with deep moral implications. The fifth is a moral sickness which would, unchecked, vitiate any attempt to solve the problems of the working classes by monetary or juridical means—we might say, by mechanical means.
He then goes on to blame secularism.
How did matters come to this pass? Leo blames the secularism spreading like a contagion from one European nation to the next. He had made that charge in his earlier encyclicals. One after another, the institutions that once brought master and workman together have been weakened or destroyed. The guilds were abolished; Leo will, in his practical recommendations, return again and again to the model of the guild. For the guilds, founded in the Middle Ages, were social, economic, and religious all at once. Guildsmen trained the young in their trades; they maintained a high standard of quality; they provided stability in costs and profit; they cared for their invalid members and their widows and orphans; and they united in the worship of God, especially to celebrate their patronal feasts.
One might disagree with that at first; but think about this : Merchant capitalism(European middle ages) is basically what started capitalism. So, considering religious conformity is what started it, why couldn't the slow elimination ruin it?
Now one cannot cure sin by sin. Our Lord tells us: one cannot cast out devils in the name of Beelzebub. But this, Leo sees, is what some revolutionaries pretend to do: “To remedy these wrongs the Socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies” (emphasis mine). Leo does not condemn Socialism for its practical failure, although he notes—did he board a time-machine to visit Russia and Cuba and what used to be Great Britain?—that “the workingman himself would be among the first to suffer.” We must see the relationship aright. Socialism is not evil because it fails. It fails, because it is evil. Nor is it justified because unchecked rapacity is evil—the antisocial money-squeezing which Dickens, alike suspicious of socialists, condemned. One does not hire Belial to fight Beelzebub.
" to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies” (emphasis mine)"
That sentence is kindaaa a big deal. Misinterpretations about communism is what lead to labeling stalin, cuba or NK "communist". They are not. They are socialist dictators. This guy gets it.
Marx didn't even talk about socialism that much. I wonder why?
We work; we exercise our minds, as God commanded us even before the fall. Man puts himself into his work, and so the reward of his work becomes his own, not the property of the State(Can I get a Amen? lol). Nor is this property held at the allowance of the State, reverting to the State at his decease. For, unlike the beasts, he dwells as it were above the current of time: “Man, fathoming by the faculty of reason matters without number, and linking the future with the present, becoming, furthermore, by taking enlightened forethought, master of his on acts, guides his ways under the eternal law and the power of God, whose providence governs all things.” His deeds, says Leo, “do not die out.” He makes his own “that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his individuality.” That includes the land itself.
Thus the right of private property is grounded, not in practical economics, but in the theomorphic nature of man. Are we now ready to consider the State, and laws established for the common good? By no means. It’s a symptom of our secular disease that we idolize the untrammeled individual, motivated by one hedonism or another, whether of rapacity or lust, and the State established to adjudicate among the hedonists. Such a man is less than fully human, and such a State is at once greater than a true state, as a tumor outgrows the organ it supplants, and less than a state, in that it provides at best for a tolerably managed common-evil.
Favorite part :Unchecked avarice may destroy families by depriving them of the material goods to which the workman rightly lays claim. But socialism destroys families by denying their very nature, and by usurping their functions: “The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household, is a great and pernicious error.”
Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil - Crisis Magazine
