Ownership has both personal and social aspects. One of the main justifications of personal property is that it is an essential material guarantee of a reasonable freedom and is an incentive to productive work. This is commonly called the profit-motive. Certainly what the ordinary man really wants is a fair distribution of private property and not its abolition. And it is his reasonable hope that he may be allowed to enjoy his property in his declining years and hand it on to his posterity.

The right to full ownership really includes two rights: the right of use and the right of disposal. I may use what I own, and others, without my permission, may not use it. I may sell, lend or give what I own, and so transfer to another my own right of exclusive use.

The proprietor or owner is the one who enjoys the full right to dispose of what is his in so far as it is not prohibited by law or harmful to others. It implies a claim to possess something as one’s own, as a due, and therefore imposes constraint (whether by way of forbearance, acquiescence, or active support) on the rest of the world. Thus if a man has a right to a sum of money, this means that someone has also the duty of paying it to him. The thing or object of this right of disposal is property, and the right of disposal itself is ownership. The same principles apply when property is held jointly by a public body or corporation, or by a trust.

Following the conceptions of Roman Law, Blackstone (Comm. I, 138) states that the right of property consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land. Ownership bestows on a person the right to dispose of a thing for his private interests as he sees fit.

Foggia must be one of the dustiest, most unattractive towns in Italy; a settlement or conglomeration of utilities dumped at one end of the great drained plain where the only cheerful sights are the trim council villas of a Fascist period housing scheme, standing each in its decent stretch of ground. Occasionally a model village can also be seen bravely starting up round a brand-new modern church.

Driving on beyond Foggia, up into the Gargano peninsula, the mountain landscape grows ever bleaker in the colourlessness of cactus, dust, stone and lime. Above, on the ridge where lie Padre Pio’s great white hospital and smaller Capuchin monastery, the mountains stretch more forbidding still.

San Giovanni Rotondo, when at last we reached it, might have been any township in a Western film, with sand and stone and dust massed into larger lumps to form human dwellings. This must be the very back of beyond, the uttermost edge of the world. Nobody surely would come here except as a fugitive—from justice, from fellow-man, from the world. For here is no single redeeming feature, no single attraction except Padre Pio, the stigmatic Friar at the little Capuchin monastery at the top of the village.

To this unprepossessing place flock visitors from all over Italy and beyond. During my week at San Giovanni Rotondo I met Americans, Britons, Latin-Americans, Swiss, French and others, but mostly Italians. Not just ‘superstitious peasants’, but Italians of every class and degree. They are all there—one soon feels—for the same reason.

It is necessary from time to time to withdraw oneself from the tangle of events and to contemplate the main trends of contemporary history. What are the most significant international happenings of recent months, and what conclusions may be drawn from them?

It is a tribute to the immense power and responsibility of the United States in the world today that Governments outside the Communist orbit almost all marked time as they awaited the outcome of the recent American presidential election. The semi-paralysis of diplomacy has continued during the interregnum between General Eisenhower’s election and his official replacement of President Truman in the White House. The reason is not far to seek. The whole scale of the rearmament effort, which has been getting under way in Western Europe during the last year, depends more than anything else upon the policy of the new President and the appropriations of the 83rd Congress. The prospects of orderly control of the Middle East and Moslem North Africa—which constitute the Achilles heel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation—depend upon the extent to which the new American Government can subordinate the sentimental anti-imperialism which is part of the stock-intrade of American politics to the solidarity of the alliance and long-range strategic requirements. In the Far East, no solution (if solution there be) can be found for the deadlock in Korea except through the leadership of the United States, which has shouldered the main responsibility for the war against the Communists and has suffered nine-tenths of the United Nations’ casualties.

In a communiqué issued after their annual meeting last autumn, the archbishops and bishops of Canada have drawn the attention of Christians to the problem of immigration. In publishing this document, their thought was first of all for Canada where the policy of racial restriction in immigration recently put into force is much criticised by Catholics, but, in its general and doctrinal character, their communiqué is applicable in a much wider field:

‘Immigration is a social fact with many aspects.

The Church does not pronounce upon technical questions concerning immigration, but she reminds all that immigration is subject to laws of morality on which legislators should base their decrees:

1. 1. The separation of families is a deplorable and disastrous condition of affairs; it is the duty of public and private organisations to make an immediate and constant effort to reunite families, when one member has already obtained permission to enter a particular country—and this especially if it is the head of the family who has done so;

2. 2. Since God has put the earth at the disposal of mankind, those countries which have unoccupied land have the duty of favouring the immigration of the inhabitants of over-populated countries;

3. 3. The policy which directs immigration services must be truly democratic and any procedure which would arbitrarily exclude citizens of a nation with a surplus population from entering the country, or refugees from a country undergoing political or religious persecution, would be contrary to the principle of true peace.’

This firm stand is echoed by a declaration of Mgr Antoniutti, Apostolic Delegate in Canada. This important statement, from which we quote, stresses the fact that the problem of migrations is perhaps the most important social problem of our time:

‘It is not the problem of the poor of which I am going to speak to you, that problem which haunted the warm-hearted St Vincent de Paul, to quote one name alone.