The Church and Capitalism

Extract

The meetings and conferences of May 1st and the coming anniversary of the encyclical Rerum Novarum make this subject one of actual up-to-date interest, because of what has been said of the Church as allied to capitalism and of the contrary statement issued in that well-known document which set all Catholic thought and action in motion against this social malady.

We refer to that economic organism, independent of and superior to business and businessmen, which arises out of the accumulation of fortune and an ever-increasing concentration of wealth, stretching over four centuries, and which has resulted in modern capitalist enterprise as distinct from that enterprise which united capital and labour. Here—according to the most authoritative scientific definition—we have ‘the reign of capital represented by money and securities, which can be quickly concentrated anywhere’; in almost every country the predominance of this phenomenon as a basic rational form of economic life’; here we see a distinct cleavage between those who provide capital and those who contribute to production solely by their work—a double-faced thing, one side of which shows a system of economic relations in which the upper classes who possess the means of production are predominant; while the other side shows an illicit function of capital, evil in its origin, disproportionate in its realisation, harmful in its effects—a veritable social cancer: the formation of a non-specific cellular proliferation, its continuous and progressive growth governed by laws of its own, differing from those of normal tissues, independent of the organism in which it grows and develops, and on account of this independence and expansiveness, parasitic and deadly.

The teaching and attitude of the Catholic Church concerning this fearsome phenomenon, as in respect of peace and against war, may be seen throughout history.