Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens: A Contradiction?

[StudentMI]

So I’ve been reading up on the social doctrine of the Church and I’m worried I found a contradiction between the two encyclicals in the thread title, namely on the role of property.

In 64. of Laborem Exercens, St John Paul II wrote about private property, “Christian tradition has never upheld this right as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.”

All well and good. But in Rerum Novarum, in numerous places, Leo XIII describes private property as a human right, and even says in 46., “We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”

If property is sacred and inviolable, how can it not be held as untouchable? I’m not proposing the texts contradict each other, but asking, do they?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

No. Pope Leo XIII is talking about the basic right to private ownership. St. John Paul II is starting from the assumption that this right exists and then expanding on it to say that owners should be good stewards and should not hoard or be greedy.

It’s like the US Constitution says you have a basic right to free speech but then the law expands on it to clarify that you have to utilize your free speech right at a reasonable time, place and manner.

 

[Crocus]

Good summary. Nicely put Tis.

@StudentMI, do a search on both encyclicals for the word property, to see how it is referenced. I think the encyclicals need to be read 2 or 3 times in full, to begin to properly picture all the related concepts in an organized fashion.

In your OP, you mean #14 not #64 of Rerum Novarum.

 

[tafan2]

Leo XIII never said that we have a basic tight to ownership of private property. He never said that we had the right to do absolutely what we pleased with our property nor that we had a basic tight to ownership of any given property or of unlimited ownership of property.

Catholic countries in Europe had various types of land reform in the 19th century. I do not know of the Church opposing any if these reforms on the ground that any given private property ownership was inviolable. The right itself is inviolable, but not a particular instance if ownership.

The right if private property is subordinate to the common good of society.

 

[StudentMI]

Thanks for the replies. I did find this in Rerum Novarum.

“The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether.”

So the two views aren’t as opposed as I worried they were.

 

[Genesis315]

JPII is talking about the primordial principle of the universal destination of goods: in general, the whole world was created by God for the sustenance of all men.

As St. Gregory the Great put it:

Those who neither desire what belongs to others nor bestow what is their own are to be admonished to consider carefully that the earth out of which they are taken is common to all men, and therefore brings forth nourishment for all in common. Vainly, then, do those suppose themselves innocent, who claim to their own private use the common gift of God; those who, in not imparting what they have received, walk in the midst of the slaughter of their neighbours; since they almost daily slay so many persons as there are dying poor whose subsidies they keep close in their own possession. For, when we administer necessaries of any kind to the indigent, we do not bestow our own, but render them what is theirs; we rather pay a debt of justice than accomplish works of mercy. Whence also the Truth himself, when speaking of the caution required in showing mercy, says, Take heed that you do not your justice before men Matthew 6:1. The Psalmist also, in agreement with this sentence, says, He has dispersed, he has given to the poor, his justice endures for ever Psalm 112:9.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/36013.htm

This is why, in extremis, it is not stealing for a starving person to, say, take a piece of fruit from an orchard that belongs to another.

It is a natural right to own property because it is generally necessary for each person to fulfill their vocation with the freedom proper to their dignity. It cannot be completely subsumed by the state, as socialists and communists claim. This is what Leo XIII is addressing. But, as Leo XIII himself notes, the state can levy reasonable taxes to support its service toward the common good.

 

[Crocus]

For, when we administer necessaries of any kind to the indigent, we do not bestow our own, but render them what is theirs; we rather pay a debt of justice than accomplish works of mercy.

This (quoted from St Gregory the Great) is so often what is forgotten or ignored: that the debt is first to be paid, then works of mercy may be rendered.

as Leo XIII himself notes, the state can levy reasonable taxes to support its service toward the common good

 

[Vouthon]

St. John Chrysostom (Hom. in Lazaro 2,5, cited in CCC 2446)

Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs

The responses to your query thus far have been very well-informed and made strong substantive points.

I would just like to supplement them a little as regards the Patristic and medieval Decretist/Scholastic sources relied upon by modern papal social encyclicals, including Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens.

Taken in isolation by itself, out of context, Pope Leo XIII’s seemingly ‘unqualified’ endorsement of private property as a natural right is discordant with the church’s sacred tradition, which has always circumscribed and subordinated the right to acquire private possessions of any kind to the a priori universal destination of goods under the natural law. That being so, Pope St. John Paul II’s explanation of this social doctrine is the more complete and technically comprehensive of the two.

As you’ve since conceded, however, when interpreted in the context of the wider argument he was making in Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII actually didn’t contend that the right to private ownership was absolute or unlimited in nature. On the contrary, he recognised that the sovereign state had an equivalent right to regulate and limit the use of private property in the interests of the common good. The extent of such regulation is, of course, a matter for prudential judgement which may legitimately vary depending on the material situation in a given society.

This makes the Catholic doctrinal stance concerning private ownership very different from the Lockean liberal concept of the enlightenment era, which is enshrined today as a pillar of free-market, capitalist economics and state collectivist ideologies like Soviet Marxist-Leninism. Pope St. John Paul II overtly claimed as much in another of his encyclicals Sollicitudo Rei Socialis : “ The tension between East and West is an opposition… between two concepts of the development of individuals and peoples, both concepts being imperfect and in need of radical correction… This is one of the reasons why the Church’s social doctrine adopts a critical attitude towards both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism .”

Pope St. Paul VI was therefore correct to have highlighted in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio that, “certain concepts have somehow arisen out of these new conditions and insinuated themselves into the fabric of human society. These concepts present profit as the chief spur to economic progress, free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right, having no limits nor concomitant social obligations. This unbridled liberalism paves the way for a particular type of tyranny”.

The origins of this doctrine are Patristic. Pope St. Gregory from the fifth century A.D. has already been cited by another poster but many more quotations from the Church Fathers could be adduced.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

St. Cyprian of Carthage, in On Work and Alms (from the early third century CE) explains that by divine dispensation in nature, prior to any human allocation or acquisition of private possession, all things are common:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050708.htm

“For whatever is of God is common in our use: nor is any one excluded from His benefits and His gifts, so as to prevent the whole human race from enjoying equally the divine goodness and liberality. Thus the day equally enlightens, the sun gives radiance, the rain moistens, the wind blows, and the sleep is one to those that sleep, and the splendour of the stars and of the moon is common. In which example of equality, he who, as a possessor in the earth, shares his returns and his fruits with the fraternity, while he is common and just in his gratuitous bounties, is an imitator of God the Father.”

(Cyprian in Schaff, 1994, Vol 5)

In his Commentary on Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy (fourth century A.D.), St. John Chrysostom writes:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230612.htm

But is not this an evil, that you alone should have the Lord’s property, that you alone should enjoy what is common? Is not the earth God’s, and the fullness thereof? If then our possessions belong to one common Lord, they belong also to our fellow-servants. The possessions of one Lord are all common. Do we not see this the settled rule in great houses? To all is given an equal portion of provisions, for it proceeds from the treasures of their Lord. And the house of the master is opened to all. The king’s possessions are all common, as cities, market-places, and public walks. We all share them equally.

Mark the wise dispensation of God. That He might put mankind to shame, He hath made certain things common, as the sun, air, earth, and water, the heaven, the sea, the light, the stars; whose benefits are dispensed equally to all as brethren. We are all formed with the same eyes, the same body, the same soul, the same structure in all respects, all things from the earth, all men from one man, and all in the same habitation. Other things … He hath made common, as baths, cities, market-places, walks.

St. Ambrose of Milan in his De Nabuthae (On Naboth), written in the second half of the fourth century, explains that due to the universal destination of goods coming first under natural law, that the superfluous wealth of the rich belongs by debt to the poor:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3408.htm

Not from your own do you bestow upon the poor man, but you make return from what is his. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you appropriate to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich; but fewer are they who do not use what belongs to all than those who do. Therefore you are paying a debt, you are not bestowing what is not due …

How far, O ye rich, do you push your mad desires? Shall ye alone dwell upon the earth? Why do you cast out your consort in nature and claim for yourselves the possession of nature? The earth was made in common for all, both rich and poor.

(Ambrose, 1927, 83, 47).

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

The last of the Church Fathers in the Latin West, St. Isidore of Seville, summarised this Patristic teaching of his forbears around 630CE in his Etymologies and teased out its implications:

ii Divine laws and human laws 1. All laws are either human or divine. Divine laws are based on nature, human law on customs. For this reason human laws may disagree, because different laws suit different peoples. 2. Fas is divine law; jusrisprudence (ius) is human law. To cross through a stranger’s property is allowed by divine law; it is not allowed by human law.

Natural law (ius naturale) is common to all nations, and, because it exists everywhere by the instinct of nature, it is not kept by any regulation. Such is the union of a man and a woman, the children’s inheritance and education, the common possession of everything, a single freedom for all, and the right to acquire whatever is taken from the sky, the earth, and the sea.

(Isidore in Barney, 2006, p. 117)

In the above, St. Isidore reiterates the Patristic consensus that, by natural law, everything is held in common. Yet, equally, he claims as a part of the same natural law a right of “acquisition”.

It is this right to a share in the universal destination of goods which Pope Leo XII calls the “natural right to private property” but it doesn’t mean the exact same thing as what secular enlightenment liberalism means by private ownership, because natural law only dictates that every person is entitled to what he needs to survive and live comfortably.

If ‘acquisition’ is made, by human convention and custom, to operate in a manner that contravenes or inhibits “the common possession of everything” by denying a needy person their right to a share in the necessities of life that another person hoards in superfluity or abundance, then this natural law right overrules the unjust superfluity of the rich person which is owed as a debt to the needy poor person.

The implication, as St. Isidore clearly states, is that “to cross through a stranger’s property is allowed by divine law” which is to say, taking what one needs from the superfluous wealth of the rich, in a situation of dire need, is not “theft” in God’s eyes even if human law so dictates.

In the Decretum Gratiani, the 12th century compilation of canons that became the church’s code of canon law until 1917, the canonist Gratian reiterates that ‘by natural law all things are common to all people’ (citing, in support, the Acts of the Apostles) and that the differentiation between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ is a product of ‘customary and enacted law’ (Gratian, 1993, p. 24). In part two of the eighth distinction, he cites a number of canonical sources (including St. Augustine of Hippo) to substantiate his claim that ‘whatever has been either received in usages or set down in writing is to be held null and void if it is contrary to natural law’ (Gratian, 1993, p. 25).