THE SECOND SET OF BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL doctrine can be remembered as the five Rs. These designate the five rights that Catholic social teaching has recognized throughout history, through close observation of necessities for human flourishing. Declarations of human rights long antedate the contemporary world.
1. The Right to Give to Caesar What Is Caesar’s, But to God the Things That Are God’s
“Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.
(Matthew 22:17–22.)
The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated.
(Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §28.)
Natan Sharansky calls the principle about Caesar and God the “anti-totalitarian principle,” for it lays out in such stark and simple terms the reality that some things do not belong to Caesar. No government has the right to claim total power. All government is limited, by right. One very large realm of human life (among others) from which Caesar is shut out is the life of the human spirit, the human mind, the human soul. The relentless questioning of science is by right free from the control of the state. So is the life of the arts. Even more so is the free inquiry and reporting of the press, both electronic and print. The same applies to the right to free public speech.
Yet more emphatic than any of these is the right of the human conscience to respond freely and without governmental restraint or burden to the internal calling of the Lord God Creator. It is self-evident that the difference in power, intellect, and love between the Creator and the conscious and reflective creature imposes a duty of awe, even a trace of what Kierkegaard called “fear and trembling,” in the face-to-face of God and humans. Furthermore, the alert human feels, perhaps, a surge of gratitude. And if a duty toward the Creator is evident, then an individual has a right to respond unimpeded by any lesser power. The same freedom, based on an inalienable duty, has been felt by religious communities around the world throughout history. Most of the most important things in life do not come under the rule of Caesar.
That is why the freedom to exercise one’s own religious conscience is the first freedom, from which all others descend. It is called the first freedom because it most brilliantly spotlights the transcendence of each human person. Each alone must choose to accept—or to reject—the friendship offered by the Lord God Creator. No other freedom goes so deep. No other freedom is so deeply inalienable.
Woe to the human who dares to block, or to meddle with, the interior personal encounter between the Creator and his free, responsible creature.
Atheists, too, share in this liberty. No human may be compelled either to believe in God or to consent to serve God. For atheists, the problem is to discover how to establish this right on atheist grounds. Tom Paine did not believe this could be done, and sailed to France to dissuade the leaders of the Revolution of 1789 from turning atheistic. He held that they would thus undermine the very argument that grounded their own rights. They would turn their rights into preferences, a reality of a very different order indeed. For if rights do not come from God, but only from human preference, what security shall believers find in “rights,” and what security will atheists find in changeable and often fickle human preferences?
2. The Right to Worship God and Practice One’s Faith
Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, “this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name.”
(John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, §14.)
In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and purpose of life. It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience. Nor, on the other hand, is he to be restrained from acting in accordance with his conscience, especially in matters religious. The reason is that the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God.
(Dignitatis Humanae, §3.)
Thank God, for us Americans this right is enshrined within our Constitution, in the most prominent place in the First Amendment. Among those who argued most forcefully for the state’s public recognition of this right were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, George Mason, and John Adams. Suffice it here simply to quote from James Madison, whose hand and political leadership were most responsible for achieving the final wording of the First Amendment, and then its ratification by the Congress and still later by the people:
Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.1
From the beginning, then, Christianity has been a religion marked by its adherence to an inner life of conscience, in which God must be recognized in spirit and in truth, in a way no others of that time except Jews felt bound to act. When a Roman philosopher was asked to bow or burn incense before the gods, he felt no special inner conflict. All that was required of him was to go through the external motions; he did not have to believe a word of it. That option is not open to a Jew or a Christian, however. For a Jew or a Christian, what his body does, his soul must do likewise. He cannot in good conscience bow or burn incense before a false god. The First Commandment itself forbids that: “I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt not place false gods before me.” And so it has been from that time to this. Deuteronomy tells us: “Worship your God in spirit and in truth.”
Thus, the worship of God takes place in the spirit. But it is not confined to the spirit. It must be expressed in actions in the world where they will be seen, and it must at times be expressed in public. Religion is not solely a private affair, an affair of the heart. It is the inner and outward life, in the world at large, and in the eyes of other humans. Anything less would be hypocrisy. Some say, “My religion is my own private affair.” Yes and no. More than that, religion is the inner and outward life of an entire people—a people larger and more universally placed than in any one state. For Jews and for Christians, true religion is both a conviction of heart and mind, and also a transformative inspirer of public practices, whole cultures, and a distinctive (but in principle universal, freely chosen) civilization.
The whole principle of freedom of conscience and worship is a child of Judaism and Christianity as it is of no other religion or secular community. As the historian of liberty Lord Acton (1834–1902) observed, moreover, the record shows that the history of liberty is coincident with the history of Judaism and Christianity. One need not be a Jew or Christian to benefit by this liberty, to live by it, and to adopt it as one’s own. But Judaism and Christianity were the first and most enduring intellectual forces to recognize its necessity, to elucidate its grounds philosophically, and to think through the practical principles that would institutionalize it, not only in minds but also in polities.
While the principles of religious liberty are ancient, their institutionalization in the political world of the West is relatively recent. The practice of religious liberty is not yet universal. But the aspiration for it is universal, and will increasingly become acute, if only because the immense sufferings now being inflicted upon humans for the choices of their religious conscience are unbearable. Religions that countenance such barbarity disgrace themselves. By the via negativa of unbearable suffering, the cause of freedom of conscience is being written indelibly in worldwide human experience.
3. The Right of Association
In all social matters, the companionship of others is of great advantage. “A brother that is helped by his brother is like a strong city,” says Solomon (Prov. xviii. 19). “It is better, therefore, that two should be together than one: for they have the advantage of their society” (Eccles. iv. 9). . . . Again, any person who is competent to perform some special function has a right to be admitted to the society of those who are selected for the exercise of that function. For, an association means the union of men, gathered together for the accomplishment of some specific work.
(Aquinas, Liber Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem, ch. 2.)
Private societies, then, although they exist within the body politic, and are severally part of the commonwealth, cannot nevertheless be absolutely, and as such, prohibited by public authority. For, to enter into a “society” of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §51.)
In the middle of the thirteenth century, some of the faculties at the University of Paris became aware of the unusual brilliance and growing fame of the new bright lights of the orders of Franciscans and Dominicans who were flocking to teach there. The University of Paris was only then emerging on the world stage, becoming competitive with universities in Bologna (founded 1088), Oxford (1096), Cambridge (1209), and elsewhere. Alas, the secular faculties jealous of their new eminence tried to ban the Franciscans and Dominicans from the university. Naturally, these religious orders appealed their case to the pope. They thought it unjust that persons of talent could be barred from the university simply because they belonged to a religious association. Their protest, written by Thomas Aquinas, is one of the first known defenses of the natural right of association.
The argument was, as usual for Saint Thomas, brief, commonsensical, and logically set out. Human beings are not only rational animals but also social animals. For human flourishing, many associations are necessary and highly useful. For this reason, the law of association is deep in our nature. Even more praiseworthy are free associations which individuals join for common purposes. If individuals have rights, then for even better reasons do their free associations have rights, which well serve the common good. For evidence, examine the growing number of schools, clinics, and other service organizations staffed by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and others. Free associations of individuals are natural to humans; it is a natural right to form them and to work through them. Free associations are well fitted to contribute substantially to the common good. Q.E.D.
To put this in more contemporary terms: No man is an island unto himself. For human survival, prospering, and progress, we depend on others with whom we associate. This is true for progress in knowledge and beauty, in truth and goodness. But it is also clearly true in economic development and the building of cities and republics. Most important, the primary communities in which we associate are not states. Communities such as the family are much more deeply rooted in our nature than are states. Others of these primordial associations are our communities of worship, community building, and work. There are also our political associations, and our associations for mirth and play and cultural expression. Human life has always been thick with associations, but never with as many associations as in the days following the birth of democratic societies with free economies, bursting with new opportunities for social initiatives.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII dreaded the rise of the omnipotent total state. He saw the first threat of it in the materialism promoted by Engels and Marx, which left no room for the life of the human spirit or for human transcendence and personal liberty. He could think of only one opposing force to throw against the gigantic state: the thicket of free associations of every sort, and in every department of human life. Social life in associations is prior to social life in states. It is prior in time and prior in right. Thus, Leo and later popes began to stress the creative and associative powers of free adults, their capacity for initiative and for responsibility, and their ability to better human life from the ground up. The free labor unions were just one group of these associations that were dear to Leo.
A century later, Pope John Paul II called the peoples of the world, beginning in Europe, to become subjects of their own destiny, not the objects of government will. Through their associations (such as Solidarity in Poland), human persons are capable of self-determination, taking responsibility for their own destiny, becoming provident for their own flourishing, generating immense energy for change from local communities, upward and outward, to circle the earth.
The popes’ increasing reliance on associations led to their grasp of the importance of subsidiarity, and also the social need for freely willed solidarity in moral witness, concrete assistance, and mutual reliance on one another—in medical care (for example, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross) and in every other human sphere. The power of voluntary associations for bringing good into every corner of the world is immense. And those who participate in voluntary care worldwide have no problem in sharing love with all the others they meet, for it is love that moves them all.
Solidarity is a new name for caritas in a globalizing world of rapid air transport, electronic communications, and worldwide media. A massive explosion of nongovernmental associations has occurred in our time. This is what Leo XIII dreamed of.
4. The Right to Private Property
Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business.
(Aristotle, Politics 1263a25.)
Every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation. . . . And on this very account—that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason—it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use in after time.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §6.)
When the ‘sacredness of property’ is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. . . . Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all this is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with as if it concerned nobody but himself. . . . The rents or profits which he can obtain for it are at his sole disposal; but with regard to the land, in everything which he does with it, and everything which he abstains from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits, be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with the public good.
(John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.)
Although it seems to many of today’s progressives that the best way to create wealth and bring poor people out of poverty is socialism implemented through a network of government programs, human experience from ancient times until today has not borne this out. To the contrary, experience shows that personal responsibility for private property actually raises the common prosperity. It especially raises the well-being of the poor more reliably than collective ownership does. Experiments in socialism since the first winter at Plymouth in America have always come aground on the tendency of many to exert themselves no more than is necessary, especially when others exert themselves less. Socialism breeds free riders on the harder and smarter labor of others.
Testimonies to this human propensity go far back in recorded history (including the reports of Julius Caesar from Gaul and Germany), and in recent times have been refreshed by vast experience under socialist nations all around the world. Compare the prosperity of South Korea with the inertia of North Korea, West Germany with East Germany, socialist Cuba with capitalist Chile, precapitalist India and China with the rapid victories over poverty during the past twenty or so years. There are many other instances. Whatever socialist dreams may promise, human experience shows that collectivization retards economic progress. By vivid contrast, having all individuals in a nation take responsibility for their own property better raises the common good of all.
As we detail below in chapter eight, Leo XIII was particularly shrewd in his predictions in Rerum Novarum about what socialism would bring into the world, why it would cause evil, and why attempts to install it would be futile as well as destructive. Leo’s perception holds up very well when compared with what preeminent Western thinkers (in this case, even Albert Einstein) hoped for from socialism:
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.2
John Paul II reaffirms Leo XIII, after a hundred years of experience following Rerum Novarum:
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.3
The wonderful irony is that the common good suffers most under common property—and that a regime of private property produces a higher level of the common good more quickly and reliably than a statist regime.
5. The Right to a Living Wage
Equity therefore commands that public authority show proper concern for the worker so that from what he contributes to the common good he may receive what will enable him, housed, clothed, and secure, to live his life without hardship. Whence, it follows that all those measures ought to be favored which seem in any way capable of benefiting the condition of workers.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §51.)
We therefore consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.
(John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §71.)
The justice of a socioeconomic system and, in each case, its just functioning, deserve in the final analysis to be evaluated by the way in which man’s work is properly remunerated in the system.
(John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, §19.)
In the agrarian age, the vast majority of workers were fed by their land and lived in ancestral homes. One did not have to be concerned about “wages” for landowners, only for day laborers. In contemporary times, however, most workers are not the owners of land sufficient to feed their families. They do depend on wages. More and more often, households have more than one income-earner. In the United States it turns out that families with higher income tend to be supported by three or four income-earners (often their teenage and twenty-something children earn wages), whereas the poorest households tend to have no workers—mostly because they are widows of advanced age or because they are unmarried females with young children and no husband present. For a very high percentage of the American poor, no one in the household is earning wages, or someone is working only part time for part of the year. Paying a living wage does not, then, solve the problem of poverty. At the lower end, most persons are not receiving any wage.
Addressing these circumstances, economists tend to fall into at least two camps. One side argues that the way to help is to raise the minimum wage, so that those who work at or near the minimum wage receive at least a marginally better income. The other side points out that the minimum wage is poorly targeted as an antipoverty measure, since many of its beneficiaries are middle-class students or secondary earners from affluent households. They also argue that raising the minimum wage results in the disappearance of more and more low-wage jobs. Beyond a certain price for wages, marginal businesses survive better with fewer employees. Besides, a regime of higher minimum wages is an incentive for developing labor-saving machines. At toll stops on the highways, at cash registers, on the floors of department stores, one sees today fewer and fewer human workers, more and more labor-saving devices. In addition, less and less is it true that a married man’s income alone supports a household. Many millions of households are headed by single women. The greatest number of poor households tend to be exactly such households. Married-couple families are far less often poor. In more than half of those households, both husband and wife work.
In these new contexts, the definition of a living wage becomes far more complex than in earlier times. Moreover, the policies of governments have huge effects on business activity. For example, one may compare the condition of the working poor during the Carter administration (1976–80) with their condition under the Reagan administration during the next eight years. The policies of the Carter administration placed high tax rates on business and personal income, increased regulation on business activities, and failed to control both inflation and unemployment (the simultaneous occurrence of inflation and unemployment had before then been thought to be impossible). Its final record showed that, through inflation, about 30 percent of those on fixed incomes fell into poverty during the Carter years, and the numbers of the poor went up dramatically. An uncommonly low proportion of all Americans of working age could find work. Median incomes were declining. Mortgage rates for borrowing to buy a home went up to as high as 15 percent, even spiking to 20 percent; inflation soared along at 10 percent or more per year; and unemployment rose as high as 11 percent in some states. Even President Carter referred to this as a “malaise.” Candidate Reagan referred to the combined figures for inflation, unemployment, and borrowing costs as the “misery index.”
President Reagan reversed policies on almost every one of these fields. Employment soared so high that by the end of his term a larger proportion of Americans was gainfully employed than ever before in our history. The workforce expanded to accommodate millions of women, as more women found jobs than ever before. Labor shortages developed, and immigration expanded to relieve them. The numbers of the poor decreased, the median income of all the lower percentiles rose sharply. The employment rate of blacks and Hispanics and their average incomes rose to the highest levels in history. After Reagan, one cannot say that government policies have no effect on unemployment, income, labor participation, inflation, mortgage rates, an atmosphere of new job creation, enterprise, or even the launching of whole new industries, such as computers and electronics in manufacturing, cell phones, fiber optics, fax machines, genetic therapies, and countless more.
More people were receiving wages, and wages were higher (adjusting for inflation) than ever before. This record led many people to think differently about economics. It also forced a rethinking of the components of the living wage. John Paul II reflected some of these changes in his treatment of the living wage in Centesimus Annus, where he commented on the goals that need to be met in order to spare workers from being treated as commodities: “These objectives include a sufficient wage for the support of the family, social insurance for old age and unemployment, and adequate protection for the conditions of employment.”4
For myself, I would reformulate an approach to the issue of the living wage in this way. First, a good and decent society ought to aim at improving the standard of living of the poor in each decade, so that one can see measurable and admirable economic progress for the poor in each. Second, pastors, theologians, and others who think through Catholic social teaching ought to study the factors that lead to median incomes that rise in each decade, and that show higher income levels for the lowest 10 percent (or even the lowest 20 percent) of income earners. Some government policies impede this growth. Others make it more likely.
It does seem, based on the record, that political policies that encourage business activities, new job formation, new inventions and discoveries, as well as personal habits of enterprise and economic creativity, help the poor mightily. These are what enable more and more of the poor to work in the first place. Further, political regimes that measure the well-being of the poor solely by government money spent on them overlook two things: first, the fact that they accrue immense public debts to be paid off not by those who feel compassion today, but by their children and grandchildren. (Some compassion! Some self-sacrifice!) Second, they overlook the fact that they condemn the poor to habits of dependency, lack of self-fulfillment, and low economic achievement. The costs to the sense of personal dignity in the lives of the poor are immense. Besides, by this path poverty is never overcome, only perpetuated.