There are tax evaders in every country: the reluctance to pay taxes is deeply human. But it is believed that Italians are more prone to this vice than others. Why?
For an answer I have to go back in time, and to the figure of an old Capuchin friar of great humanity, learning, and kindness, of whom I was very fond. Now, this amiable old man, while instructing me and other young people in the principles of ethics, explained to us that smuggling and tax evasion, if they are sins, can be forgiven, since they contravene no divine law but only laws of the state.
He ought to have reminded us of Christ’s recommendation to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, as well as Paul’s advice to the Romans: “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed.” Perhaps, though, he knew that some theologians, in centuries past, had claimed that tax laws bring no obligation in terms of conscience, but only by force of sanction. Reporting today on this opinion, Luigi Lorenzetti, the director of Rivista di Teologia Morale, comments: “We do a disservice to those theologians, however, if we ignore the social and economic context that caused them to come up with such a theory. The organization of society was by no means democratic; the iniquitous tax system and exorbitant taxes oppressed the poor.”
Indeed, my Capuchin friar quoted another case, that of secret redress. To explain it in the simplest terms, workers who feel badly underpaid commit no sin if they quietly take the extra amount to which they are entitled. But only if their wage is clearly unjust and they are denied the possibility of appealing to labor laws. On such an argument, however, Saint Thomas Aquinas (in Summa Theologiae) had his doubts. On the one hand: “If the need be so manifest and urgent . . . then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.” On the other hand: “He who, by stealth, takes his own property, if this be unjustly detained by another, he sins indeed; yet not because he burdens the retainer, and so he is not bound to restitution or compensation: but he sins against general justice by disregarding the order of justice and usurping judgment concerning his own property.” Saint Thomas’s ideas about the general justice were clear and strict, and he wouldn’t have agreed with Berlusconi’s observation that it was understandable if citizens evaded a tax that was exorbitant. For Thomas, the law was the law.
Nevertheless, the Thomist conception of the right of ownership was universally more “social,” in that property was to be considered “in terms of possession” but not “in terms of use”: if I have a loaf of bread, honestly acquired, then I have the right to be recognized as its owner, but if there’s a down-and-out person near me who’s dying of hunger, then I ought to give half of it to him. To what extent, then, can evasion be regarded as hidden redress?
On a Catholic website I found a Treatise on Moral Theology, which, while it advises people to respect the law and observes that “the more healthy part of the population” pays taxes and doesn’t get involved in smuggling, it nevertheless concedes that “evasion is not regarded as an act detrimental to honor, the law itself regards it as an administrative and not a criminal offence, even though it creates a sense of moral discomfort.” So our prime minister, Mario Monti, is wrong when he says that tax evaders are thieves: they are simply people who ought to feel moral discomfort.
But the friar I mentioned earlier didn’t trouble himself with such casuistic subtleties, and limited himself to saying that tax evasion and smuggling are not mortal sins because they are “only” against the laws of the state. His position seems to reflect something he had been taught as a child, before the Lateran Treaty, that the state was bad and that no notice should be taken of it. It seems something of these old ideas has survived in the Italian DNA.
2012