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UNIVERSAL
DESTINATION OF GOODS God created
the world both to show his glory and to provide the human race with the
various things it needs. Each human person is God’s creature and was
intended by God to receive his necessary share of created goods. Though
the things of the world have, through human institutions, been parceled
out into various forms of property, in the last analysis even property
rights and the commandment against stealing may give way to the
requirements of the universal destination of goods that is God’s will in
creating. The concept
of the universal destination, however, must be properly understood. In
recent centuries, under the impulse of ideologies such as socialism,
property rights were denigrated as opposed to God’s universal will. This
is misleading at best and usually wrong. For the most part God’s will in
these matters is accomplished through the principle of subsidiarity,
whereby individuals are responsible for themselves, families for children
and dependents, associations for members, and so forth. A society as a
whole or the world community may choose to aid those who are not being
served by subsidiary institutions. But private property and subsidiarity
of jurisdictions are important, both because they distribute the goods of
the earth in a generally just way and because they empower individuals and
human groups to play their role in God’s creation. If the
universal destination meant a centralized distribution of goods, it would
soon lead to totalitarianism. At absolute need, individuals or groups, or
even whole societies, may have the right to appropriate property that has
been unjustly kept from them and to which they have an immediate and
life-threatening need. But this can only be done if all other moral
prohibitions are observed (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,
II-II, q. 76, a. 7). In recent
years, the universal destination has also been used to warn about
degradation of the environment, which may become, in effect, an unjust
appropriation of goods God has also intended for future generations.
See:
Common Good; Environment; Preferential Option for the Poor; Property;
Revolution; Social Doctrine; Stealing; Subsidiarity. Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.
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