Outline of Rerum Novarum
Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) is widely acknowledged as one of the Catholic Church's most significant pronouncements on the nature of human work, and its publication provided the inspiration for the establishment of the Catholic Land Movement (CLM). For both Leo and the CLM, one of the central issues of their evolving Catholic theology of work was the apparently unavoidable necessity of employment, as prescribed in the first chapters of Genesis.
Leo XIII did examine the inevitability of work as a consequence of our Fallen human nature in Rerum Novarum, but - as much of his rhetoric reveals - this was more a result of political expediency and a desire to appeal to the labouring classes of the industrial era than any genuine sense that employment might not be immutable. Leo XIII's middle class upbringing and early immersion into Vatican diplomatic circles meant that he knew little of the harsh realities of manual work and the creeping depersonaliation of laissez-faire capitalism, but he acknowledged that society was entering a new era, and that the Church needed to comment on the rapidly developing economic and social order.
Considerations of specific political systems and solutions are almost non-existent in the encyclicals of Leo XIII - Rerum Novarum presents a generally approving stance toward capitalism but is uncompromisingly negative towards socialism and communism - a declaration which saw many left-of-centre Conservative Catholics struggling to construct a sympathetic theology that steered clear of the particular dangers of socialism which Leo warned against. Leo's principle objection to socialism was that it sought to rectify the centralization of wealth, not by redistributing it more equitably, but by placing it entirely in the hands of the state and not the individual – thereby denying a divinely inherited right to ownership.
Leo's philosophical outlook is passionately neo-Thomistic, and in response to 19th century trends towards the social solutions proposed by British Empericism, Liberalism and Kantian and Heglian idealism, he conjures a State responsible for the common good through an interventionism that favours the poor and marginalised, but that primarily protects the intellectual and spiritual integrity of its own citizens.
Rerum Novarum also introduces the principle of subsidiarity into Catholic social teaching. Although he doesn't mention by name a principle of subsidiarity, Leo is clearly concerned that certain activities of individuals (where they do not harm the common good) should remain free of state intervention, and that some functions clearly belong to individuals and not to the state. Thus, an emphasis of Rerum Novarum is that states must avoid “undue interference” in family life.
Of all the human associations that Leo XIII most wanted to protect for the undue incursion of statism, the autonomy of the Christian family was the most sacrosanct. Leo saw the family as an entirely separate state in its own right, governed over and nurtured by a benevolent and gainfully employed father. He regarded it as a “most sacred law of nature” that the father of a family see that his offspring are provided with all the necessities of life, and that his divinely inspired nature prompts him to provide his children with the means of “protecting themselves against harsh fortune in the uncertainties of life.”
Above all, Leo sought to establish through Rerum Novarum a reinstatement of Thomism, not only as the most secure philosophical and theological underpinning of a Catholic faith under threat from an increasingly secular society, but as a distinct philosophy that could offer practical and rational solutions to the “passion for revolutionary change” identified by Leo in the opening sentences of Rerum Novarum.
The Catholic Land Movement (CLM)
In the decades immediately following the publication of Rerum Novarum, economic depression, monetary collapse, and spiralling unemployment led many in Britain to look for radical alternatives to mass urbanisation and the dehumanisation of the family. The Catholic Church was no exception, and foremost among its early 20th century socio-economic theorists were the Distributists, led by Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton and the Dominican preacher Father Vincent McNabb.
Belloc had served as a Liberal MP from 1906 to 1910 but - disillusioned by the whole edifice of modern politics - had quit and set out to formulate an entirely new and radical assessment of the state of the nation and the possible alternatives. His conclusions and propositions were expounded in The Servile State, published in 1912, which argued that capitalism (defined as the ownership of the means of production by a few) was intrinsically unjust and unstable, whilst its common antidote - socialism, only reduced the working classes to economic serfdom, making them dependent upon a welfare state. The solution was to redistribute ownership of the means of production, divided “severally amongst the many”, along the lines of the medieval peasantry and guilds. Belloc described the consequent society as a “Distributive State,” from which the term Distributism arises. Two years earlier (1910) G.K. Chesterton had delivered his own damning assessment of modern life in What's Wrong with the World, in which he highlighted the congruence of oligarchical interests and paternalistic social reform, and postulated - as had Belloc - that the remedy was a restoration of “peasant proprietorship”.
Drawing directly on the observations and aspirations of Rerum Novarum, these two volumes were hugely influential within the Catholic community, and led to concerted efforts to create a practical exposition of the socio-economic and philosophical principles that they expounded.
On the 31st of May 1929 the Rev. Dr. John McQuillan, a priest of the archdiocese of Glasgow, formed the Scottish Catholic Land Association with the approval of the hierarchy, and an English Catholic Land Association began meeting the following year. The initial aim of the Catholic Land Associations was to establish training farms where trainees could learn agricultural skills, and then to set up the trainees in small subsistence farms, which they would own and manage. These Catholic communities would eventually develop into villages with their own churches and schools, by with it was believed the reconversion of England to Catholicism could be achieved.
For Belloc and Chesterton their involvement with the CLM was primarily a socio-economic experiment inspired as much by their personal and political experiences as by the principles of Rerum Novarum, though both acknowledged that any economic solution needed to embrace a return to God through a communion with the soil and agrarian labour. Belloc's personal theology was primarily influenced by St. Thomas More, to whom he paid glowing tribute in his book Characters of the Reformation, (as did Chesterton in a serialised article in The Universe Catholic newspaper in 1935). Both regarded More as a reactionary against the economic and political policies of the Tudors, and many of the arguments for a more equitable redistribution of wealth expressed by Belloc in The Servile State can be found in More's Utopia.
Chesterton was concerned primarily with socio-economic theories, but also held that it was the soul, and not the intellect, that held the key to the creation of an equitable Christian society. In an editorial in the first issue of his Distributist newspaper, GK's Weekly, Chesterton said that he believed in: “the very simple social idea that a man felt happier, more dignified and more like the image of God, when the hat he is wearing is his own hat; and not only his hat, but his house, the ground he trod on, and various other things.”
The renowned Dominican preacher Vincent McNabb, a distinguished Thomist theologian and fanatical anti-modernist, recognised in the Distributist tomes of Belloc and Chesterton a practical structure which could perfectly underpin his own developing personal theology, and their subsequent relationship equally lent to Chesterton and Belloc a spirituality previously absent in their own writings.
McNabb didn't commit his ideas on Distributism to print until 1933, in Nazareth or Social Chaos, in which he acknowledges that his ideas were directly inspired by Leo XIII's call in Rerum Novarum for society to address the poverty and disenfranchisement of the working classes, through the restoration of property, and specifically a return to the land, which he claimed was the central to the restoration of the common good.
From the outset McNabb overstepped Rerum Novarum in rejecting the inevitability of urban employment and the disenfranchisement of the individual from property and his spiritual link to the land: “Early in our thinking - and Jesus, the Messias of Jewry, was always the beginning and goal of our thought - we realised that the great Jewish movements of reformation and redemption were movements out of the complex, organised city life to the simple life with God on the land, or even in the desert.”
Inspired by the formation of the CLM, McNabb began a quasi-evangelical reinterpratation of the Old and New Testaments that revealed the divine purpose as a migration away from the cities to the land, and a spiritual escape from servile industrial employment to useful self-sufficient agricultural work, chronicled by “numerous intelligensia-led migrations away from decadent neo-pagan” cities and into communion with God on the land. If the “Isrealitish reaction” against the neo-paganism of Chaldea had given us the Hexemeron, McNabb reasoned, then the reaction against the neo-paganism of Egypt had given us the Decalogue. In each case, he observed, “reformation and inspiration” came when God-appointed leaders “shepherded their people out of decadent city organisation” and back to the land.
Turning to the New Testament, McNabb sought evidence of a similar “shepherding” in the figure of Christ, but was troubled that Jesus appeared to have set aside of the precedent of Abraham and Moses, in not having left an Ur or Memphis for the desert. Relief came from the Gospel of Matthew, where McNabb believed his convictions were confirmed: “Out of Egypt have I called my Son … Arise, take the Child and his Mother and go into the land of Israel. (Matt.11, 15–20).” McNabb's description of the moment the CLM study group discovered this particular insight gives a clear indication of the atmosphere of fervour surrounding the development of CLM theology at this time.
The study group devoted particular attention to the person of Christ, developing and promulgating a theology that re-interpreted his human existence in a specifically agrarian context. Asked by one member why Christ had not chosen farmers as his disciples, McNabb reasoned that agricultural work was of such importance that: “the Word made flesh was not minded to disturb the Divine order which made land-work the primary duty and need of beings demanding daily bread to keep them in being.” McNabb recalls that biblical confirmation of this response was provided to him in a quotation from St, Luke pointed out to him a few days later by: “one of the first band of young men who have left city life to ‘put their hand to the plough’ at (the CLM colony at) Chartridge.”
The group increasingly focused on the significance of Nazareth as the key to redemption, reasoning that if Christ had been sent there, then Nazareth must surely hold the key to what Aquinas had called “the enterprise of Redemption.” Gradually the CLM evolved an image of the Nazarene family, where “all the sanctities and authority were there in their natural soil and setting”, as the primary and divinely instituted unit of human society.
Having established both the primacy of agrarianism and family life as the humanistic basis of CLM theology, McNabb turned to the writings of Thomas Aquinas – and their reinterpretation by Jacques Maritain (who exerted a notable influence on the early development of the CLM) - to delineate the socio-economic parameters of the new agrarian communities. Primary consideration was given the freedom of the individual, and the right to self-determination and personal autonomy, and it was only through the exercise of free will that moral duties and rights were created. Drawing heavily on Belloc's conclusions in The Servile State, McNabb reasoned that: “Slavery is the evil of a being that has internal quality of free will, but has not the external condition of freedom.” This external condition of freedom, he said, was to be found principally in the ownership of property, which of itself was totemic of personal freedom and liberty.
Distinction was drawn between the ownership and rights; Belloc had argued that the right to property did not mean that a man had the right to as much as he wished, but rather to as much as he needed. McNabb went further, creating a specific theological distinction between a temporal - but ultimately ephemeral - right of ownership, and the absolute and inviolable right of ownership possessed by God: “Of God alone, who alone has full physical and moral power over everything, can we say ‘God has the ownership of A or B. All other beings have only an ownership in what they are said to own: thus, in land the nation has not the ownership but only an ownership of the land.” In this statement the centrality of Thomism to McNabb's theology is self-evident: “A man by his will possesses things. To have is nothing else than to use or to be able to use; and this only by an operation.”
On the matter of the distribution of property and goods - the centrality of Distributism - McNabb turned once again to the Gospels, which he describes as “the world's best handbook of World Economics” and in particular to the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. McNabb is struck by the departure of St. John's account from that of the Synoptics, who concur that the multitude ate until “they were filled”. John, however, uses a phrase which imbibes free will on the masses, “as much as they wanted”. McNabb regarded St. John as an exceptional mystic, who opens his commentary by affirming uniquely among the Gospel writers that true Christians are born not of the will of man, but of God. St. John's admission that the multitude took not what they needed, but rather what they wanted was, for McNabb, a burning indictment of the fallen state of humanity. McNabb reminded the CLM that Aristotle and Aquinas - that is both the pre-Christian and Christian world - were agreed that avarice was a vice to be avoided.
In Nazareth or Social Chaos he went a step further, dividing possessions into things (needs), and tokens of things (wants): “Inside the great world of things created by the will of God,” he argued, were “many worlds of tokens created by the will of man.”
In the miracle of the loaves and fishes, McNabb felt that the Synpotics had totally missed the underlying social message of the event, that only the infinite power of God could satisfy and surpass even man's greatest avarices. Equally, he saw the event as: “an instance of God allowing the human will to condition the divine will”, which he reasoned was “a deep mystical fact of the soul's relationship to God”, in which the divine will was conditioned to give by the multitude's will to receive. Out of this mystical interaction of human and divine will McNabb formulated one of the central tenets of Distributist theology, and a principle which was universally espoused by the CLM: “In a system mainly of things the average person may be trusted to limit his wants by his needs. But in a system mainly of tokens, the average person cannot be trusted to limit his wants by his needs.”
Early on in its development, the CLM determined not to seek to change society, but to desert it for the countryside. As McNabb put it: “ the revolution we need is to leave Egypt and not to assassinate Pharaoh!” The conviction that redemption and salvation lay in casting off the yoke of employment in favour of self-determination fuelled much debate, with many critics arguing that the CLM was merely replacing one form of work with an equally arduous life on the land. Thanks to McNabb's reinterpretation of the Hexemony, and the creation of the person of the worker Jesus of Nazareth, the CLM refuted this argument by insisting that scripture was full of examples of the depravity of city life, and the discovery of redemption through exodus to the land. Agricultural work performed according to needs and not wants, and performed and structured in accordance with God's natural law, the CLM believed, was the primary means of human salvation, and in this form was not a burden, but a pleasure.
This contradicted the prevailing understanding of Genesis, that Man was obliged to spend his days sweating the soil with his brow, but McNabb turned as always to Aquinas to argue that this legacy only applied to the pre-redemptive state that society was languishing in. This enslavement could be overturned, he believed, through the rediscovery of Man's natural, sympathetic relationship with the soil of the primal Eden.
In The Catholic Land Movement: It Motives, published in 1932, McNabb detailed a number of motives that he said had led Catholics in England to “leave the fleshpots of Egypt, not for the ‘milk and honey’ of the Promised Land, but that the people may go and worship God. (Ex.v1)”. The “First and Principal Motive” was “To Worship God” and McNabb has a clear vision of where God is to be found; the God of the CLM plays no part in urbanised life, takes no responsibility for the problems of industrialised society, but rather resides in an idyllic construct of a utopian ruralism.
This construct is reiterated in the Second Great Motive: “To Follow Christ”, which meant a return to the family and socio-economic principles evident in McNabb's vision of the rural microcosm of the Holy Family of Nazareth: “Only the weights and measures of Nazareth will give individuals and nations the ownership and sovereignty of their own needs,” said McNabb, “the modern world needs redemption; and redemption means a return to Nazareth. It is for this reason that over the lintel of every home and homestead we would build on the land might well be cut in stone: ‘And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them’ (Lk. ii, 51).”
The Third Motive was “Family Love”, which McNabb quantified as “the desire to restore the Catholic Family”. In his typically ebullient (and controversial) style, McNabb condemned urbanism as a phenomenon antithetical to matrimony, declaring that the “modern arrangement” of the world had put and end to the historic institution called the home.
Such was the reputation of McNabb, and his influence on the theological development of the CLM, that many of the early objections to the CLM were equally responses to the broader persona and theological outlook of McNabb himself. Whilst he undoubted brought a great sense of theological clarity and purpose to the organisation, it quickly became subsumed in McNabb's own need to justify his extreme Thomistic view of the world, and that this gave rise to an immediate unease among the British Catholic hierarchy about the theology and moral intentions of the CLM.
The CLM's first secretary, Bryan Keating, welcomed the illustrious McNabb to the organisation, but writing in a tribute work to McNabb many years later, he acknowledged the difficulties that McNabb's brand of Thomism had created for the CLM: “For many years he ploughed a lonely furrow,” said Keating, “He was regarded as a crank, an oddity, a ‘Merrie Englander’, a Medievalist. The impossible person trying to turn back the hands of the clock.” Chesterton shared this view – in an article in his own newspaper, GK's Weekly, he described Father McNabb as: “one of the few great men of our time. He is a great deal too great to be of our time” but goes on to admit also that he was “one of the more drastic and dogmatic of our group.”
McNabb had never denied the peculiarities and occasional inconsistencies of Distributism, but saw it as more of a moral anthropology than an economic theory, insisting that its economic claims proceed from anterior moral claims about the acting person and the nature of charitable community. In this respect he said Distributism was concerned primarily with the creative subjectivity of human persons, their openness to transforming grace, and their capacity for dignity through work and the ownership of an ‘appropriate’ amount of property.
This was consistent with Rerum Novarum, but McNabb and the CLM differed in perceiving wealth as a static, non-reproducible entity, that could not under any circumstances confer benefits on the poor or marginalised. For the CLM the issue was not the nature of wealth creation, but rather how the definitive sum of wealth could be more equitably distributed. This inadequate understanding of human capital and productivity led the Distributists to see economic development exclusively in terms of the cultural dangers of industrialisation, and as a threat to the imagio Dei reflected in the family unit, a theological centrality of Rerum Novarum embraced profoundly by the Distributists.
The theme of the family was perhaps the most common in McNabb's writings, and at a Catholic Land Movement Symposium in 1933 McNabb devoted his entire address to the importance of the family which, since the coming of Christ, he said: “might almost be said to be not only a divine but a supernatural institution,” and one which had become “diametrically opposed to the industrial urbanisation of society.” He declared it a central tenet of CLM theology that: “one of the most explicit motives of those who are turning their faces towards the land is the desire to restore the Catholic Family.” Whilst this pursuit of an agrarian utopia may not encouraged the disapprobation of the hierarchy in itself, McNabb's continued insistence that families had to “leave the ugliness of the town, not for the beauty of the land, but for the beauty of God's face” saw him – and consequently the CLM - become isolated from a Catholic Church that was increasingly committed, via other forms of social action such as charity work and public evangelisation, to the addressing of the urban question in-situ.
Such realignments of industrial relations remained a far cry from McNabb's clarion call to desert the cities and seek God in the only place McNabb and his CLM compatriots believed he dwelt - the land.
From the outset McNabb's theological enterprise proved difficult to implement. Bryan Keating, Secretary of the South of England Catholic Land Association admitted that McNabb's programme: “was not and easy one. Few were able to follow him by putting it into practice. Individuals and individual families left the towns for the country, but it can be said that the group settlement outlined was never realised, despite his powerful advocacy.” McNabb's aspirations received a further blow when the CLM was obliged, for reasons of pure practicality, to abandon moving whole families into the colonies, and sought instead to encourage only single, young unemployed men. Even this was not without its difficulties, as the CLM activist (and Belloc's son-in law) Reginald Jebb was to admit: “At the very outset the young Associations were faced with a double problem. It was this: the unemployed men, whom it was a first duty to assist, were townsmen usually ignorant of the elements of agriculture; thus systematic training was necessary. Secondly, money (to say nothing of land) was hard to come by, and the training of families was a very expensive business.”
Despite these substantial problems, the CLM continued to receive the support of the British Catholic hierarchy, and even enjoyed the formal endorsement of the Pope, Pius XI. By the mid 1930s CLM colonies had been established at eleven locations in England and Scotland. Several had become successful agricultural enterprises - one in particular, Ditchling in Sussex, had become a thriving creative community though the incursion of Catholic artisans such as Eric Gill, Dunstan Pruden and Hilary Peplar.
However, following a high-profile, but abortive, campaign to gain unemployment rights for CLM workers that brought the Catholic Church into direct conflict with the government, support for the CLM began to diminish rapidly. In March 1936 a renewed attempt was made to elicit formal endorsement, but as a report in the The Universe reveals, their position had only hardened. A letter sent by the Archbishop of Birmingham to the Rev. Monsignor James Dey, Rector of Oscott College, and Secretary of the Midlands Catholic Land Association, is quoted in the article: “It was resolved that the Hierarchy would not at present be justified in giving any official sanction to the Catholic Land Association and they authorised me to say this to you. This implies that the Bishops as a body will not take any responsibility for the movement, although, of course, any individual Bishop may support it in whatever way he chooses.”
Despite this setback, Monsignor Dey and the CLM continued to argue that an exodus from town to county was the only reasonable route to salvation. However other Catholic Land Associations also found themselves suffering from a sudden lack of hierarchy support, and an even more serious lack of capital.
The final blow came in 1938 when the bishops refused permission for a national collection, claiming that all the money they could raise was needed for building schools and churches in new suburban housing areas. For the CLM this was a fundamental betrayal of both their theological aspirations, and the intentions of Rerum Novarum, as Eric Gill was to observe bitterly after he had deserted Ditchling for to establish a private Dominican lay community in Capel-y-Finn in Mid Wales.
In the end the CLM collapsed due to an accumulation of reasons: securing the capital to set each person up on a holding of his own was a vast financial undertaking, and loans and donations were inadequate; government help was not forthcoming, and no groups settlements were possible. Finally, the changing position of the hierarchy on the means of addressing social inequality fatally damaged the theological centrality of the project.
A major ideological split occurred amongst the Distributists with Chesterton's enthusiastic support for the fascism of Mussolini, and from this point on Belloc also began to distance himself from an organisation that was becoming increasingly anachronistic and totalitarian. By 1939 the training farms were all closed, and only the Ditchling colony survived beyond the Second World War. Elsewhere in the world, the broader theological principles of Distributism championed by the CLM were to meet with greater success.
The poignant epitaph of the Catholic Land Movement was eventually written in 1942 by Father Vincent McNabb himself, when he dedicated a book of his political thoughts: “To the men and women of the English Catholic Land Movement who, bravely and alone, left England's cities for England's soil and whose seeming failures like winter sowings may yet be blessed by God unto autumn reapings.”
Outline of Laborem Exercens
When John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens in 1981, he acknowledged the primacy of Rerum Novarum, but was equally unequivocal in his efforts to bring a dimension of neo-liberal economics and distinctive personalism to the work question, suggesting that the dignity of the human person must be primary consideration of all aspects of human endeavor. However, two world wars, the movement of women into the workplace, the Second Vatican Council, the demise of communism, neo-capitalism and progressive globalism meant that a far more considered and theologically complex response to the changing nature of employment was needed.
John Paul II's formative experiences in the quarries and chemical plants of Cracow led many to hope that his much-anticipated encyclical on human work would both elucidate on, and substantially revise, the core conclusions of Rerum Novarum. In fact he did neither, preferring instead to create a personalist vision of man achieving self-realisation and salvation through a dignified and holistic - but nevertheless continuing - state of dependant employment. The absolute conviction – handed down from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum - that Adam's sin set the precedent for, and created the inevitability of, utilitarian toil fundamentally conditioned John Paul's thinking, as a consequence of which he reiterates Leo's conventional reading of the Hexaemeron as the central theological pillar of Laborem Exercens.
Whatever his instincts for Christian radicalism, John Paul II had to acknowledge that - for the majority of us - continued employment is an inevitability. In many ways this forms the central tension of his encyclical which, as much as anything else, is the result of the pontiff's attempts to resolve the dichotomy between his instinct that man ought to be working for himself, and the ways in which one could achieve this sense of autonomy in an employer/employee relationship. The result is the postulation of a doctrine that seeks to encourage a sense of power and self worth, whilst falling short of suggesting that it is the fact of employment, not its nature, that is at fault. For John Paul, as it was for Leo XIII, the solution to the prevailing political-economic dilemma is the establishment of an equitable model of democratic capitalism.
John Paul has claimed that Laborem Exercens is neither a commentary on - nor an endorsement of - Rerum Novarum, but is rather a sustained reflection on a radically alternative response to “fresh problems” in which he seeks to formulate new norms for a changed social situation. The centrality of his political model is advancing globalisation, and his text reflects the conclusion that the state should no longer be responsible only for the welfare of its citizens, but for the common good of the larger global community in which it co-exists. Whilst the encyclical hints at social modernism, its message remains unspecific - if generally anti-totalitarian. Central to John Paul's criticism of current economic systems is his view that society only acknowledges “work in the objective sense” (the effect of work on things produced), and not “work in the subjective sense” (the effect of work on the person producing things). John Paul is unyielding in his argument that the subjective sense of work is the more important, and he warns that overemphasis with objective work leads to what he calls ‘economism’ - which he describes as “the error of considering human labour solely according to its economic purpose”.
However, the fundamental inadequacy of Laborem Exercens is exposed in the belief that in certain circumstances men ought to allow themselves to become mere instrumentalities, and to undertake work that is “monotonous” or “alienating”. In failing to draw a clear distinction between useful work, and useless employment, John Paul confirms the long-held view that in such circumstances, the best man can hope for is to make that monotony and alienation subservient to some aspiration of working for a greater good, because work is a necessary manifestation of Fallen human nature.
This ideological construct leads John Paul II to criticise free market capitalism, but equally obliges him to reject any ideology that treats humans as mere instruments of production. Thus he is against Marxism and collectivism, but struggles badly over the concept of the ownership of private property, which he regards as a fundamental right and consequence of labour, but which he admits can equally form the basis of economic exploitation, inequality and discrimination. His resolution - widely regarded as the central proposition of Laborem Exercens - is to make the ownership of property and goods a right, but their use conditional to the common good – a proposition that clearly reveals the Thomistic roots of John Paul II's theological outlook.
Comparison and Analysis
Over the last century, the Catholic Church has continued to explore and develop its attitude toward the political-economic situation as well as its postulated social solutions. However the underlying theological outlook based around democratic capitalism has in practice changed relatively little since Leo XIII's response to the social problem.
John Paul II made a conscious effort to break new ground with his first two social encyclicals, but still shares the opposition of his predecessors to more alternative or liberal concepts of the nation and its centrality in social life. Despite the sweeping changes that have occurred in secular society, the vision of the State as the societas perfectae responsible for the realisation of the common good of all its citizens identified by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum remains a fundamental precept of John Paul II's Laborem Exercens.
Both pontiffs agree that the State should not only intervene in cases of trespass upon that good but should also actively support it by discriminating in favour of the poorest social classes. In fact Laborem Exercens specifically espouses networks of social ties that endorse the primacy of state over the individual, and create a subjective dependence of the individual and family unit on such beneficence an approach that comes dangerously close to the kind of servile statism Belloc rejected so vehemently.
On the matter of ownership and distribution of property, there is little in Laborem Exercens to suggest any direct sympathy with Distributism, though there are traces of a move away from Rerum Novarum's sympathy for democratic capitalism, towards a loosely socialist economic model emphasising the social dimension of ownership, arising out of the universal destination of created goods.
John Paul II does establish some familiar ground with Rerum Novarum in linking these arguments about ownership and distribution to an anthropological outlook that Distributists would have some sympathies with: Laborem Exercens places the social life of the individual at the centre of the human experience, damaged by sin but retaining a residual transcendental dignity which can be recovered through work and cooperative solidarity, just as McNabb saw the exodus of the family unit to the land and its centrality therein as a means of remedying the Fall and achieving its dormant, lost salvation.
Laborem Exercens falls short of the Thomism of McNabb and the Distributists, who would have been horrified to hear of a pontiff seeking to evangelise the human person continuing to live in a democratic state and working within a free-market structure. It was however precisely the kind of ad-hoc, totalitarian interpretation of earlier encyclicals adopted by McNabb and the Distributists that John Paul II was anxious to circumvent in Laborem Exercens.
Unlike Leo XIII, who wrote Rerum Novarum during an historical period when numerous social ideologies were in the ascendant, the circumstances through which John Paul II has lived have made him acutely sensitive to the dangers of ideologisation, thus he creates clear distinctions between behaviour and attitudes based on the Gospels, and behaviour and attitudes based on ideologies. For McNabb there were no such distinctions, and he would have been disturbed by the current negative stance of many of the Church's leading theologians to the postulation of utopian solutions to the social question.
The clear distinctions between faith and ideology defined by John Paul II has inevitably led contemporary theologians to dismiss the religious radicalism of McNabb and the CLM as a form of totalitarian fundamentalism, a cultural fetishism and nostalgia that McNabb had bolstered with a questionable theological pursuit of a sancta simplicitas.
A common moral anthropology between Laborem Exercens and Distributism can however be discerned in claims about the acting person and the nature of charitable community, as well as the creative subjectivity of human persons, their openness to transforming grace, and their capacity for dignity through work and property. In common with McNabb, John Paul offers a strong defence of private property, of the family, of subsidiarity, of the economic autonomy of the individual, and of solidarity. Both lay claim to a distinctive notion of community, and each deplores the emptiness of collectivism and mass culture, the indignity of welfarism, and the sterility of consumerism.
Belloc shares many ideas in common with John Paul II, who would have no trouble in recognising Belloc's Distributive State, comprising a developed and highly workable system of private and shared ownership, nurtured in small communities, and the pontiff would understand the need to remedy the servile condition. The Distributists, however, might well express a disappointment that, after the development of their own theology, and a full century in which to explore Rerum Novarum and develop Distributist and other similar postulations to the problem of social equity, Laborem Exercens calls for a more equitable functioning of the status quo, rather than any radical proposal for a return to Christian simplicity and the glorification of God through individual autonomy.
It might be easier to define the differences between Distributists and the prevailing Catholic theology of work in terms of their varying definitions of work. For McNabb and the CLM ‘work’ clearly meant the relative utopia of substantial degree of self-employment, of autonomy, enjoyment of the direct material results of labour, and insulation from the vagaries of the free market.
For John Paul II ‘work’ might well mean the rural agrarian self-determination of the Distributists, but more likely it will mean labour in the service of an employer, rewarded by what the Distributists would dismiss as the secondary tokenism of a salary. In accepting this immutability of the contemporary social order, it is perhaps inevitable that Laborem Exercens – in common with Rerum Novarum - seeks to establish a model of human dignity and salvation defined within the paradigm of a useful, spiritually fulfilled and adequately rewarded employee: “The Christian finds in human work a small part of the cross of Christ and accepts it in the same spirit of redemption in which Christ accepted his cross for us. In work, thanks to the light that penetrates us from the resurrection of Christ, we always find a glimmer of new life, of the new good, as if it were an announcement of “the new heavens and the new earth” in which man and the world participate precisely through the toil that goes with work.
In an attempt to understand the full meaning of work as a constitutive dimension of human existence, John Paul II reverts to Scripture for the prima materia of Laborem Exercens, concluding that the essence of work is not its material (objective) outcome but its subjective dimension, in which the person is the imago Dei, performing work as an expression of the vocation received from God to continuously seek transformation and salvation of self and the world through work.
In contrast to this obligation to subdue the earth as a consequence of Man's divine ancestry, the Distributists regarded work as a process that primarily moved towards, rather than outwards from, the Creator: “Distributism sets out to ensure that men and women shall have the sort of life which is not a hindrance to the worship of God but itself a worship of God: the charity and vitality of a Christian home, the dignity and responsibility of ownership, work that is really a form of making and therefore can of itself be a form of prayer - in a word, the life of an artist whose art is a song to God.”
This contrasts sharply with John Paul II's view that work demands great effort: “While it is true that man eats the bread produced by the work of his hands … it is also a perennial truth that he eats this bread by “the sweat of his face,” that is to say, not only by personal effort and toil but also in the midst of many tensions, conflicts and crises, which, in relationship with the reality of work, disturb the life of individual societies and also of all humanity.”
For Leo XIII, McNabb and the CLM, and for John Paul II, work clearly exists within various concepts of community, though McNabb's vision of small medievalist artisan and agrarian communities shut off in blissful Catholic isolation from the greater world is particularly at odds with contemporary Catholic theology.
John Paul II presents man and woman as persons that are and remain active in a community and move towards a communion with God through their endeavours and interaction with a world that is otherwise defined by Sin. It is in this imperfect world that Christian families must manifest their value in sharing in God's dominion over creation, even to the extent of fatigue, which John Paul II says is proper of human toil.
This view of humanity as willing, sentient workers in search of spiritual dignity within their given environment - which underpins both encyclicals - contrasts very sharply with McNabb's clarion call for unilateral empowerment and self determination, and his passionate rejection of the need to return to Christ through the unavoidable yoke of employment - the inherent condition bequeathed by Original sin.
Perhaps the fact that McNabb's rationale of a return to the land and a degree of personal self-determination seems even more utopian today than it did in the 1920s betrays the fact that the Catholic theology of work has progressed little in the intervening century.
In 1891 Rerum Novarum revealed a general acceptance on the part of the Catholic Church that the best that can be achieved for the human person is an improved recognition of the rights of the Christian family within society, and that - increasingly - God's purpose is to be found exclusively within this particular theological construct. A century on Laborem Exercens reaffirmed that – in this context at least - the Church's outlook remains substantially unchanged.
Perhaps the utopian failing of McNabb and the Distributists was not so much the practical difficulties of restoring an agrarian medievalism, but the misplaced conviction that Catholic theologians could be persuaded that the basic order of society might be fundamentally flawed, and that God and salvation needed to be sought in a comprehensive rejection of, and exodus from, the wage slavery of urbanisation.
Bibliography
Primary sources:
Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) The Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) The Condition of the Working Classes, First English translation 1891, and English translation of Revised Latin text, Vatican City, 1931.
Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, Laborem Exercens, (On Human Work), on the 90th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Vatican Translation from Vatican Polyglot Press, 1981.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.
Distributist Manifesto, St. Dominic's Press, Ditchling, 1934.
Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, Burns and Oates, 1912.
Eric Gill, Autobiography, Lund Humphries, London, 1992 edition.
Eric Gill, Art, Nonsense and other Essays, Cassell and Francis Walterson, London, 1929.
Father Vincent McNabb OP, The Catholic Land Movement - Its Motives, Catholic Truth Society, Southwark, 1932.
Vincent McNabb OP, Nazareth or Social Chaos, Burns & Oates, London 1933.
Father Vincent McNabb OP, Old Principles and the New Order, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1942.
Father Vincent McNabb OP, An Old Apostle Speaks, Blackfriars, Oxford, 1946.
Flee to the Fields – the Faith and Works of the Catholic Land Movement, a Symposium, Heath Cranton, London, 1934.
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The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, New York, 2001.
Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation - Historical Portraits of 23 Men and Women and Their Place in the Great Religious Revolution of the 16th Century, TAN,
G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World, Sheed & Ward, London, 1910.
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Jay P. Corrin, The Battle Against Modernity, Ohio University Press, 1981
Ferdinand Valentine OP, Father Vincent McNabb OP - The Portrait of a Great Dominican, Burns and Oates, London 1955.
Coady M.M., Masters of Their Own Destiny: The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education Through Economic Co-operation, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Paperback Edition 1980.
Cardinal Walter Kasper – Keynote Address to Acton Institute for Study of Religions and Liberty, Spring Conference 2002.
Carrie A. Meyer, Land Reform in Latin America: The Dominican Case, Praeger Publishing, New York, 1989.
Thomas More, Utopia, Penguin, London, 1975.
Aiden Nichols OP, Discovering Aquinas, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 2002.
Markets and Morality, Acton Institute, Volume 5, Number 1.
Alan Richardson, The Biblical Doctrine of Work, SCM Press, London, 1965.
George Weigel, Witness to Hope – the Biography of Pope John Paul II, Harper Collins, London, 1999.
Cardinal Stefan Wyszinski, Work, Scepter Publishing, New Jersey, 1960.
