Pope Paul's Strictures on Capitalism

N othing in Pope Paul's "On the Development of Peoples" has provoked more comment than §37, on demography. Running a respectable second, however, is § 26, on liberal capitalism, together with a few related sentences in §§33 and 58. The Communist press was jubilant over what it called the Pope's anticapitalism. Typical was the headline over the encyclical story in Rome's Communist daily, L'Unita: "The Crisis of Capitalist Society in the Social Encyclical of Paul VI." On the other hand, the business-minded press was perplexed and critical. Under the title "A Blessing for Secular Error," the Wall Street Journal dismissed the encyclical as an "entirely worldly analysis." It did not believe that the Pope's "warmed-Marxism" would be of much help underdeveloped countries.

Such reactions, revealing an egregious ignorance of the Church's social teaching, must have been very disconcerting to the Holy See. Rome has a long memory and a passion for consistency. In discharging their teaching role, the Popes do, of course, sometimes break new ground. More often, responding to the changing world about them, they offer fresh applications of traditional teachings. But in all cases, they keep traditional doctrine prominently in mind, as anyone who consults the copious footnotes in their documents can attest.
 
There is nothing new whatsoever in Pope Paul's criticism of a system that "considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that ... has no corresponding obligation." That is the classical description of "a type of capitalism" that Leo XIII condemned in 1891 and that every successor also condemned. In Mater et Magistra, Pope John refers to the "prevalent view of the economic world" at the time Leo wrote. "It denied any connection between the laws of economics and those of morality. According to it, the only motive of economic activity was personal profit. The supreme rule regulating relations between economic agents was to be found in uncontrolled free competition. ... Government should be carefully restrained from any intervention in the economic field."

Another feature of the system was an exaggerated individualistic concept of private property. As Pope John says, Leo defended the right of property, but he also insisted that a social function is "embedded in its very nature," and on that account owners could not exercise their right solely for their personal benefit, ignoring the common good and the just claims of others.

Obviously, then, Pope Paul is merely repeating Leo's rejection of liberal, or laissez-faire, capitalism. That is all he is doing also in §33, where he declares: "Individual initiative alone and the free play of competition could never assure successful development." And that is all he is doing, as well, in §58, where he insists that the rules of free trade must be modified for the benefit of poor nations.

To speak of this as Marxism, warmed over or otherwise, is nonsense. To regard it as an attack on capitalistic systems as we know them today is equally silly.