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’.

Though the nature, characteristics and consequences of the economic system we call ‘capitalism’ are so well known as to be taken for granted, yet when we try to frame a definition of the system it is not at all easy. There exists a multitude of definitions of capitalism: the fact that many of these are incomplete or else falsified by subjective interpretations adds to the general confusion.

To begin with, we can say that capitalism is a system; that is to say, it is the realisation in the factual order of an economic doctrine. There is a considerable amount of evidence, both in theory and practice, in support of the position which maintains that the economic doctrine enshrined in capitalism has two essential characteristics. It is based upon private ownership of the means of production and of the goods produced: its raison d’etre, its end or objective, is profit.

This second element—the accumulation of money for its own sake as the sole objective—immediately puts capitalism in conflict with Christian moral teaching. Attempts have been made to explain away this opposition by attributing it to moral failings in individuals by saying it is the capitalist spirit and not capitalism itself which is bad. There will always be individuals who sin against God and against their neighbour by the sin of avarice: these individuals flourish in any economic regime: capitalism is good in itself and must not be blamed for their existence. Such an attitude is completely shattered by Horvath in his famous book on property.

A Writer was recently rebuked in the Catholic Press for asking the question: What would have happened if every pulpit in the land had thundered against the factory conditions of the early industrial revolution; supposing the Church had said, ‘We care not one jot or title for your iron laws of Economics, we care nothing about the alleged financial ruin of the country; these are not our concern’? And the same writer withal is again reproved for his belief that de facto economic forces are more powerful than moral ones, that we are driven daily to greater and greater completeness of monopoly control, that private interest would have it so, that government supports the process, and that war speeds up its tempo. It is of course understandable that to authors and journalists, recendy busied in boosting a highly moral war, and looking for another, any doctrine of economic supremacy should be repugnant. For it must be granted that the economic argument, however true, gives a shaky moral basis for planning—whether of wars or the peace. Habitaculum quamquam miserum quomodo non palatium aequiparantur coelestium ipsimet enim aedifcaverunt....

It is not quibble but objective fact that communism and capitalism cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive. Even Lenin admitted as much when he introduced the N.E.P. Capitalism postulates distribution (however unequal) and co-operation (however unwilling). And the world has yet to witness a communism that has dispensed with capital. There have been communists and communists, Essenes, monks and nuns as well as Bolsheviks. So much for its practice. As for the theory of it, it has had other prophets than Marx.

Two conceptions of the world are struggling for the possession of the soul of man, the Christian and the Marxist. And it would seem that nothing can ever reconcile their antagonisms. The Christian vision of the world involves a triple transcendence; that of spirit over matter, of the human person over society, of God over the world; whereas the Marxist vision of that same world seems to be built on strictly corresponding negations. Spirit does not transcend matter, since it is matter itself that makes spirit; the human person does not transcend society, since man can only become truly himself in and through society; and God does not transcend humanity, since ‘it is not religion that makes man, but man who makes religion’.

Can a Christian content himself with such a rough and ready interpretation of Marxism? If it corresponds entirely to reality, then there is nothing more to be said and all doors are closed, since no possibility of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists can exist. There is a very real danger in simplifying doctrines, as theologians only know too well; and though Marxists are often guilty of crude generalisations about the Catholic position, Catholics themselves can over-simplify their assessment of the Marxist standpoint. ‘The low materialism, the shoddy history and the false messianism which made up Communist propaganda in the nineteenth century.... ‘I find these words in a Catholic manual of sociology published in recent months for use in schools. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from using rude words about one’s opponents; but it is a game that two can play, and go on playing indefinitely. And one can ask oneself: is it a game that Christians should play.

The central tenet of the distributist thesis is a wide-spread diffusion of private ownership, and perhaps our first task should be to show that property privately owned accords with the precepts of natural law. Possession of material things is a right of man, because, being created with reason and will, he is to that extent master of the material world, and the natural destiny of the latter is to serve his needs. But possession does not necessarily imply private ownership. There are, for example, communal forms of ownership. The right of individuals to possess private property is not therefore an absolute precept of natural law. But both reason and experience prove that communal ownership, as a general mode of human possession, is unsatisfactory. Aristotle calls it an occasion of strife, and it is almost inconceivable that, with human beings as they are, such a system generally applied could fail to cause constant quarrelling, interfere grievously with primary production, and weaken the bonds that unite the family.

Private ownership, provided it be equitably distributed and does not claim excessive powers, has none of these defects. Moreover the whole trend of the Church’s teaching, especially in the famous encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as in several allocutions of the present Pope, has been in its favour.

But from the starting point of wide-spread private property Distributism enters a field that comprises politics, economy, and human relationships. In this era of finance-industrialism it is revolutionary in its aims. It is in open and unique opposition to the prevalent trends of modern life.

On 4th February of this year a remarkable joint pastoral letter was published in Quebec, signed by all the bishops of the Province of Quebec, with the title The Workers’ Problem in the light ofthe Social Teaching of the Church. Second only to the United States, Canada has prospered from the application of liberal capitalism to an expanding economy. The encylical is the more remarkable in that in some respects it is an indictment of liberal capitalism. As such it was interpreted and has provoked a number of reactions from big business. It has been understood as support for the stand taken by Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal and Bishop Desranleau of Sherbrooke in the ‘asbestos strike’ of last year. Moreover it foreshadows a period of increasing strife between the Church in the Province of Quebec and the forces of capitalism which are allied with a corrupt though soidisant Christian government.

At the outset the bishops state quite bluntly that, though their country has been endowed by Providence with greater wealth than most parts of the world, there are many areas and professions where the pay is insufficient. In fact, the national wealth is far from equitably distributed and the economic system does not provide ‘for all the members of society in a stable way the material conditions that they need for their spiritual and cultural development’. This latter was declared by Pope Pius XII in 1948 to be me purpose of an economic system. Further than that, the fundamental problem of the worker in Canada has not been solved: economic and social security for himself and for his family.

For the best part of this century, the exploitation of the East by the West has been a favourite theme with pamphleteers; and as the sincerity of the pamphleteers has grown, so has the interest of the public declined. The subject, it is argued, has been flogged to death and, taking an Epicurean stand, Englishmen have added—let sleeping dogs lie. In the common mind China appears a far distant continent—another world.

The attitude is typical of Englishmen as a whole, but it is also typical of many Europeans. In America the orientation is different, because Chinese emigrés make up a considerable part of the population of the United States. Often enough Hollywood may depict the Chinaman as either a pirate or opium eater, but to the American he is a person of distinct characteristics; he may run a successful chop-suey restaurant in Greenwich Village or he may be an astute lawyer. They are not deluded by the romantic notion of film directors that he is a man capable of saying little else other than ‘Me muchee-muchee sad’. They are well aware that he may as yet prove a powerful business rival, although his methods of business will not necessarily be those of the American businessman. For part of Congress’s dilemma over recognising the ‘People’s Republic of China’ is a fear of admitting to a certain national failure. The Americans, despite their vast propaganda machine, have failed to impress the Chinese with their way of life; the Chinese have remained impervious, philosophically isolationist.