Until recently the majority of Catholics would have instinctively felt that the Church was on the whole opposed to capitalism. They would not have made a conscious judgment about such a thing because the majority of Catholics was hard at work trying to keep the obvious day-today demands of the Christian law in the face of a mounting antagonism from the non-Christian environment. But they would have instinctively recoiled from associating the direct moral teaching of the Church with an approval of the possession and accruing of wealth without labour and without responsibilities. They knew their Gospels too well for that, and they had often heard the Franciscan message declaring the blessings on the poor in spirit.

Non-Catholics on the other hand would as naturally have tended to associate the Catholic Church with capitalism in view of the apparent association between her ecclesiastical organisation and what had come to be regarded as traditional business methods. They had seldom heard of the social encyclicals that came from Rome and they had never read them. They thought they recognised the Church as most securely established in those countries where the peasants and artisans were most exploited for the benefit of the rich few. Today, with war between the Church and Communism at its height, there can be only a handful of non-Catholics who do not regard that conflict as implying an identification of the Church with capitalism or who, on the other hand, have read such books as Fanfani’s Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism which concludes an intelligent analysis of the question with the judgment that ‘Catholics, so long as they held closely to the social teachings of the Church, could never act in favour of capitalism’.