The distorted ideas are analysed by Fr James V. Schall, S.J., that doyen of Catholic writers on Catholicism, who states that “as Lord Peter Bauer had pointed out in a biting essay on the dangerous inadequacies of ‘ecclesiastical economics’ at the time of Paul VI, the apparent re-distributionist bias of the thinking in papal social doctrine should have been rejected on empirical as well as moral grounds.”
Fr Schall continues:
“But in fact, this re-distributionist theory was not the solution to dire problems but the cause of further poverty and, in addition, of much tyranny, however good may have been the subjective intentions of those who promoted it, including the papacy.” [Reference to Peter Bauer].
“Rather than seeking to understand how and why wealth is produced, papal thinking seemed rather to suggest that the problem was of greed and the failure of the political order. The ecclesial analysis, in other words, seemed to embrace modern theories of world order that were anything but solutions to the problems the papacy itself wanted confronted.
“In contemporary ideological analysis, the so-called misdistribution of the world’s goods seemed to be explained in terms of envy by the poor alongside the moral corruption of those economic systems that did in fact produce existing wealth in the modern world. The result of such a theory was that instead of examining the many cultural, political, economic and especially religious causes of why the poor were poor, the poor were told that they were poor because they were exploited by the rich, by those who knew how to produce wealth.
“As a result of this analysis, the poor need not learn how to produce wealth but instead they should insist, even violently, that what was rightfully ‘theirs’, on the basis of some exploitation theory, be ‘returned’ to them. Such theories not only proved statistically impossible – the world needs more wealth, not a redistribution of existing wealth – but justified decades of wasted energy and effort by the poor peoples themselves seeking a false solution to their own problems and blaming theories that did work to solve their own problems.”
“The world was seen furthermore, to be divided between North and South, the rich and the poor. The most important thing was the ‘gap’ between rich and poor and not, as in fact is the case, the gradual increase of wealth on the part of everyone. The solution to this problem of poverty, however was not through the ideological systems often chosen by the poor nations themselves to be their models of development, rather it was to be found in the success of the rich.
“But this success was not primarily an exploitation or an injustice. It consisted in learning new ways of production and distribution that depended on intelligence, enterprise, and work, methods that did not in principle take away anything from anyone. These new methods proceeded from what exists, through the most basic of human resources, human knowledge and skill, to fashion new wealth. This approach was the real key to helping the poor, a key that often seemed to be understood everywhere better than in the Church.”
Does Catholicism Still Exist, p 176-177]
From Caritas in Veritate we see the core of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s “redistributist” large-scale meaning: it is through training, entrepreneurship, work and supplying, at competitive prices through trade, what others need in other countries. Additionally we see the importance of sound management – often neglected today.
