PROPERTY

Some people believe the Christian ideal excludes the notion of private property. For them, Christ’s counsel to the rich young man applies to all: “Sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mt 19:21). We know that in the early days of the Church “all who believed were together and had all things in common” (Acts 2:44). Furthermore, the Church maintains that God’s creation is “the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind” (CCC 2403). Nonetheless, property is an important element in Catholic social doctrine, and the seventh commandment, “Thou shall not steal,” presupposes that private property belongs to some people by right and cannot justly be taken away.

Catholic teaching on property strikes a balance between two principles. First, created goods are intended by God for the benefit of all. The division of property under different legal systems among individuals, families, tribes, corporations, or nations can never cancel the primacy of the universal destination of goods. But, second, private property protects the freedom of persons, contributes to their dignity, and enables them to meet the needs of those for whom they have a responsibility. The seventh commandment, therefore, “requires respect for the universal destination of goods and respect for the right to private property” (CCC 2401).

This balance is often described as the social dimension or social mortgage on private property. Property cannot be used to the detriment or neglect of others in need. At the same time, historical experience shows that where property rights, properly understood, are not respected, other rights crucial to the dignity of the human person are not respected either. No society in history has for very long kept a perfect balance between these two demands of justice. But all societies must undertake the difficult task of protecting individual property and the common good.

Historical Survey • The Old Testament provides many examples of private property justly held, both household goods and land. The seventh and tenth commandments attest to the regulation of external and internal attitudes toward property. Inequality of wealth in itself was not regarded as unjust and, as in the case of Abraham, might actually be regarded as a sign of God’s approval. However, wealth tending toward monopoly or vast landholdings that excluded the poor from productive enterprises provoked prophetic denunciations.

In the New Testament, Christ associates with rich people, and he and St. Paul remind them of their obligations to the poor. But rarely does Christ advise anyone to abandon private property. The rich young man of the Gospel seems to have fulfilled the law in its general injunctions, but he remained unsettled in his heart. For people like him or for those entirely devoting themselves to God’s service in various ministries, forsaking private property may be a means to an end. Otherwise, the early Church seems to have relied on wealthy members to provide meeting places and support for its activities in various cities.

Among the great early figures of the Church such as Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215), Cyprian (210-258), Ambrose (c. 340-397), Jerome (c. 343-420), and Augustine (354-430), the dangers of wealth were emphasized. In an ideal world before the Fall, some thought, property would not have existed. Religious communities in particular were encouraged to hold things in common. Especially as the Church became a full moral agent in society instead of an embattled sect, however, temperate use of property in a fallen world seemed a good stance between the sinful impulse toward limitless acquisition of things and political enslavement under state ownership and disposition of persons. Such a use requires a legal system that both governs in the name of the common good and permits access to material goods for all.

St. Thomas Aquinas gave a different interpretation that has become the classic Catholic expression of how property is to be regarded. Thomas, unlike the early Fathers, thought property a natural human institution for using God’s gift of creation, in the sense that property is a lawful addition to the state of nature that leads to human good. He seems to believe that private property would have existed even had there been no Fall, since property helps man (who is both body and spirit) express and realize his full nature.

Private property, says Thomas, is necessary to human life for three reasons. First, people are more careful in procuring what they need for themselves if they alone are responsible rather than a large number of workers. Second, greater order results when an individual fulfills a particular task. Confusion stems from expecting everyone in a community to bear vague responsibility for each thing. Third, greater peace reigns when each person is content with his own. Thomas observes that “quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed,” presumably a reference to religious communities (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 66, a. 2).

In using private possessions, each person is to treat them not as his own but as common. People may buy, sell, or give away what belongs to them as they wish. But these universal features of the market must always have a concern for the good of all. In some circumstances, it might be extrapolated, access to the market will distribute goods in a way that is roughly just. In other circumstances, laws may be needed to prevent fraud, monopoly, destitution, etc. St. Thomas even allows (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 66, a. 7) that in absolute need it is permissible to steal, since the goods that are private still retain their universal destination for all. But such cases are rare; all other possibilities must be exhausted, and there must be respect for all moral laws.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern industrial conditions called for some further developments in the notion of property and its social responsibilities. The great age of industrialization seemed to be leading toward an impoverishment and exploitation of wage workers. Industrial workers living in cities began to outnumber traditional agricultural workers, who more and more left the land as industrialization also made farming more productive with far fewer hands. The resulting social dislocation received poignant literary treatment from writers such as Dickens, Balzac, and Zola. Some solution to what appeared to be the excessive concentration of capital in a few hands and the growing misery of workers seemed demanded.

In many instances, the national state seemed the logical instrument. The older medieval notions of the social dimension of property had been somewhat weakened and, in a few cases, denied by early modern capitalist thinkers. Though this history is complex, there is a common confidence in the good effects of private property per se in writers as different as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Mill. One way to read the history of socialism and communism is as a moral reaction to the imbalances thought to have emerged from capitalist industrialism. Since only the national state seemed in a position to meet the growing economic crisis, the state had to take over what Marx called the “means of production” in order to restore social responsibility to property.

Since the collapse of Marxism in the late twentieth century, the notion of state ownership of the means of production or extensive state direction of economies to guarantee the common good has fallen into disrepute. In theory, some industries may have to be owned by the state in order to fulfill common obligations or protect against too great an accumulation of private power. But, given the demonstrated ability of modern market democracies to produce wealth and care for the poor without resort to tyranny, the presumption today is in favor of responsible private ownership under the proper legal conditions.

Recent Church Teaching • The Church was instrumental in developing some idea of how both property and social responsibility might be exercised in modern conditions. The great modern tradition of Catholic social doctrine, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical On the Social Question, Rerum Novarum, attacked head-on the exploitation of workers by a small group of owners. Leo argued, with Aquinas, that property was a good necessary to the full development of the human person, and that therefore workers, too, needed a just wage sufficient to care for their families and other dependents. In what seemed a bold stance at the time –largely at the prodding of American Catholics – he declared the right to form labor unions to be a natural right that deserved state protection. All this was meant to reorient the Marxist claim of the inevitable class struggle between capital and labor toward a Catholic vision of the complementarity of rights and duties for both owners and workers in the just society.

Pius XI took a further step in this direction with his On the Fortieth Year, Quadragesimo Anno. Issued in 1931, the fortieth anniversary of Leo’s earlier encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno faced a very different situation than the one that had existed toward the end of the nineteenth century. Then, revolutionary movements were brewing in several parts of the world. By the 1930s, communism was established in Russia, Fascism took root in Italy and Spain, and Nazism had come to power in Germany. Each was a response – a disastrously wrong one, in Pius XI’s view – to some of the problems Leo had foreseen.

Property must always be recognized as having a social dimension, argued Pope Pius, but that did not give the state the right to usurp all decision-making functions. Thus he introduced the notion of subsidiarity into papal analyses. Briefly, subsidiarity means that the level of society that is closest to a social issue and capable of dealing with it should do so. Decentralization of governments was important to prevent totalitarianism, whether of the communist or Fascist type. But even more important, said Pius, was the need to empower subsidiary institutions such as families, neighborhoods, and private organizations. Each of these institutions had a God-given freedom and responsibility. To remove power from them and place it in the hands of the state was contrary to the divine order.

In the 1980s, a similar principle emerged during the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Social theorists began to see that “civil society” – that is, private institutions controlling property, productive enterprise, and expenditures – was not only freer than totalitarian systems but, properly formed and understood, might actually restore a better balance between the empowerment of subsidiary institutions and the social dimension of the uses of property.
A special problem had arisen in the modern world over the nature of property held by the modern corporation, which is often not only a large national entity but an influential international one. This problem itself has been changing with changing conditions in technology, communications, and international trade. But a few general principles may be examined here.

Contrary to some modern social criticism, there is nothing inherently wrong with the establishment of a corporation as a legal person to achieve certain social and economic ends. Such practices have roots going back to the medieval and even ancient worlds, and they permit the coordinated and legal action of large charitable causes as well as business enterprises. Nor does the large accumulation of capital in an enterprise present a moral problem per se. The moral questions about corporations arise from two large factors. First, does the relatively weak and distant ownership of stockholders, who are dependent on managers for information and action, allow for a proper moral control of property? Second, are powerful corporations, operating sometimes across several continents, properly regulated so that any negative effects on society of otherwise legitimate business activities get legal attention and redress?

Some of these questions have relatively simple answers. A factory that is excessively polluting the environment may be required, either by its stockholders or by government, to take measures to reduce pollution or compensate the community for the damage. This means that reasonable laws (i.e., laws not so strict that the pursuit of unrealistic standards of environmental purity renders economic activity impossible) must exist to enforce the social dimension of the industrialized use of property.

A more complex situation arises when corporate property extends over several nations. In such instances, not only are environmental regulations more difficult to establish and enforce because of the multiple jurisdictions, but variations in local working conditions and wages also raise complicated issues. In a country like the United States, there are strict laws about child labor, a minimum wage, safety conditions, and so forth. In many developing countries, child labor, to take one example, is not in itself exploitative but is an economic necessity. Also, local wages are naturally less than in developed nations; and any attempt to require equal wages in developed and undeveloped societies would mean no new economic enterprises would be introduced into poorer nations.

The standard Catholic belief in the social dimension of property should provide some guidance, even if it is incapable of always finding a single answer to these complexities. Shareholders and managers have an obligation to consider in prudence how they may best combine a wish to make productive and beneficial use of unoccupied labor with the moral requirement to foster quality education, better hygiene, higher standards of living, and fuller respect for all dimensions of worker development. Such considerations are not simple. They must be guided by prudence as well as justice and charity.

The Duties of Christians • In our time, then, the possession of property calls for some searching moral analysis and personal effort. For the most part people who own moderate amounts of property and use it productively and legally are performing a public service, whether they create goods, provide services, or offer jobs to others. They should not be hampered in their activity unless public authorities can demonstrate a serious social evil arising from their possession and use of property that calls for a serious social response. It has been the experience of the past two centuries that economic liberty leads to societies that are prosperous and free at the same time, if moral values are respected.

Pope John Paul II pointed out in The Hundredth Year, Centesimus Annus, his 1991 encyclical on the centenary of Leo’s first social encyclical, that distinctions are required when we try to determine whether any given “capitalist” system of property is fulfilling universal human moral requirements in our time. He states: “If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative. . . . But if by ‘capitalism’ is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative” (42).

Few Christians today must personally make decisions on that scale. They must be aware of them, however, in their political decisions and personal acts. For those in the prosperous developed countries, the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31) may have great relevance.
Christ nowhere in the parable condemns the rich man for possessing wealth. He seems to have acquired it in ways that Christ thinks do not need comment. But his use of his possessions – for feasting and fine clothing – while the poor man languished at his gate, sent him to hell. In our time, we would consider charity in such circumstances good, but even better helping Lazarus to find productive work, acquire property, and realize dignity of his own. Our problem is magnified in that often the poor man is distant in another country and we can do little. Yet our obligations remain, and we must make sure that our possessions, even when justly acquired and rightly used, do not make us complacent and blind to those to whom, in justice and charity, we owe a debt in our use of property.

See: Common Good; Detachment; Evangelical Counsels; Liberation Theology; Social Doctrine; Stealing; Stewardship; Subsidiarity; Universal Destination of Goods; Work; Works of Mercy.
Suggested Readings: CCC 2401-2449. Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 69-72. Leo XIII, On the Social Question, Rerum Novarum. John Paul II, On Social Concerns, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis; The Hundredth Year, Centesimus Annus. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 105, aa. 2-3 and II-II, q. 66. R. Charles, The Social Teaching of Vatican II, pp. 299-312. M. Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Robert Royal




Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.

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Last Updated: Sunday, April 01, 2001 01:25:11 PM