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Catholicism, Capitalism Communism CATHOLICISM, CAPITALISM or COMMUNISM BY Rev. Jeremiah C. Harrington, A. B., S. T. D. Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics at the St. Paul, Minnesota Seminary With a Preface by Rev. John A. Ryan, D. D., LL. D. Professor of Moral Theology and Industrial Ethics at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C., and Director of the Department of Social Action of the National Catholic Welfare Conference With an Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram, Litt. D., LL. D. With an Epilogue by Gilbert K. Chesterton ST. PAUL: THE E. M. LOHMANN CO. 1926 5 Nihil Obstat: JOHN R. VOLZ Censor Deputatus Imprimatur: +AUSTIN DOWLING Archbishop of St. Paul St. Paul, March 4th, 1925 Published January 1926 2 CATHOLICISM, CAPITALISM OR COMMUNISM DEDICATION To RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT. D., LL. D. Whose eminent services in the cause of Mediaevalism first moved us to study a period of Christian Civilization, Of which Leo XIII wrote: “That nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be knowv in the ages that have yet to be.” This Volume is inscribed In Admiration and Gratitude. 3 Author’s Note The thesis defended in this book is that the free development of Catholicism is the real cure for our social and industrial ills. We do think that the abuses of Capitalism are as dangerous as Socialism or Communism. The Church does not condemn Capitalism any more than she never condemned slavery, yet the influence of Catholicism was the diminution and ultimately the abandonment of slavery. The two could scarcely permanently co-exist together. Capitalism is a comparatively new economic system but we believe that the influence of the Church will be the gradual diminution and eventually the abandonment of Capitalism, because the spirit of the Catholic Church and the spirit of Capitalism cannot permanently co-exist together. What will be the nature of the system that will supersede Capitalism? It will not be either Socialism or Communism, but what several Catholic writers have called Distributism. This is a system in which the great majority of men will own and control some private property. Slavery and Paganism went along together. Capitalism and Protestantism have gone along together. Catholicism and Distributism went along together during the great thousand years of Christendom. Both are coming back and will go along together again perhaps for another and a greater thousand years. The real battle of our time is not between Capitalism and Communism, but between Catholicism and social and industrial anarchy. When the battle is over the economic system will be either Leonine or Leninine. The author wishes to thank all those who have been saying and writing such nice things about the contents of this book. Especially does he wish to thank the clergy of our own Archdiocese almost every one of whom has already purchased a copy. The advance sales of this edition we are pleased to say will make a second and much larger one necessary very soon.1 JEREMIAH C. HARRINGTON The Saint Paul Seminary June 1st, 1925 1 Editor’s Note: A second edition of the present work never was realized due to the author’s untimely death in 1926 at the age of 44 years. 4 Introduction It is significant that the two great manifestos in the new Crusade for the redemption of the holy places of Christian society are the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII and the Pastoral Letter of the American Hierarchy enunciating a Social Reconstruction Program. Significant but, in God’s good time, inevitable. It was the Catholic Church that directed the organization and controlled the destinies for seven hundred years, of the only just and righteous social and economic system history has recorded. It was cold and bitter enmity of the Catholic Church that fostered and made operative the un-Christian industrial and financial organism that has held sway for the past century and a half. It was the Catholic Church which, when the time had come, was bound to reassert its changeless principles and assume the leadership of the new crusade. Before the era-making pronouncement of the Holy Father there were many precursors, not all of them Catholics, but the great Bishop of Mainz will always stand first because of his priority in time and the enormous concrete results that followed his apostolate. The archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Manning, comes close in honor, with Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland continuing the tradition in the New World. It will not do, however, to forget the non-Catholics in England who without the inspiration of a living Catholicism, yet raised the standard of revolt and preached a desperate and derided cause even when the power of the industrial tyranny was at its flood. There were many, from Robert Dale Owen in 1825, onward to William Morris, but two only need mention here, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and John Ruskin, the first because of his great and measurably successful labors for the amelioration of the condition of the women and children slaves of British industrialism, the second because though like Lord Shaftesbury he was totally ignorant of Catholicism and therefore its enemy, he nevertheless enunicated in language unmatched for fire and eloquence, many of the fundamental principles concerning economies that the Catholic Church had been chiefly instrumental in formulating in the early Middle Ages. Meanwhile the new system was breeding revolt amongst its own tools and instruments concurrently with its own phenomenal rise and mastery, and the moment of its own apparent victory over all opponents and all predecessors saw the outbreak in many places of what was frequently no less than armed rebellion. The theories of the idealists flowered and faded in futile Utopias; the passionate resentment and righteous anger of the great prophets like Ruskin seemed only to 5 CATHOLICISM, CAPITALISM OR COMMUNISM have issue in art-movements of little force or permanence; even the valid pro- nouncements of Popes and bishops, when they resulted in definite action produced little more than parties and factions that lost their usefulness and significance in political and diplomatic activity. Only the outraged proletariat seemed to function with any degree of vigor and endurance, and here the leadership was such, the following such, that labor-unionism, after winning its victory, became increasingly selfish, tyrannical and unjust, merging into, or creating as a by-product, communism, syndicalism and bolshevism, the rampant and revolutionary engines of a calamitous class-consciousness, functioning without regard to Catholic truth, Christian ethics or even the most rudimentary principles of human conduct. It was, and is today, a case of warfare between two bitter, uncompromising and generally unscrupulous antagonists, a warfare over so fundamental a factor in life that if it runs its course it can have but one issue and that the definitive ending of an era of civilization that from its beginnings about the end of the XVth century has lasted nearly five hundred years. Since the issue was joined about a century ago, there has been no lack of efforts at compromise and accommodation. In an ever-increasing number men have come forward and measures have been devised all to the end of finding a solution of an issue the fatal possibilities of which have only revealed themselves in all their significance during the last five years. With the ominous International on the one hand working through Russian bolshevism and its agencies in nearly all the countries of the world towards confessed red revolution and an ultimate dictatorship of the proletariat, and on the other desperate empiricists of a hundred different types hunting for a formula that would satisfy both combatants, a formula to their minds necessarily legalistic and essentially secularist and highly specialized in its nature, the contest has gone on without abatement and with a steady increase in the victories won by the proletarian forces. A final victory by either side, as matters now stand, would be fatal for neither is conditioned by fundamental principles of even-handed justice or directed along lines of righteousness. Anger and selfish interests control, not charity and wisdom and sense of brotherhood. The peace of communism as dictated from Moscow would be the peace of ultimate death; the peace of capitalism as dictated from New York and London would be the peace of slavery and the Servile State. Already both Italy and Spain have escaped almost by a miracle from following the path of Russia, but the same forces that so nearly worked their downfall are operating elsewhere with renewed intensity. These efforts are now chiefly towards the East, for the reverses in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Balkans have called a halt and the tempers of Great Britain and Ireland in Europe and the United States on this side the ocean, are correspondingly not favorable to this sort of thing. This is particularly true of America, where labor has held and is generally holding a 6 CATHOLICISM, CAPITALISM OR COMMUNISM position of strong and rational good sense, under the sane and vigorous leadership of men like Gompers and Green. Humanly speaking, the danger of an anti- Christian communism either here or in England or Germany, is practically non- existent, and it is equally true to say that a return in any of these countries to the capitalistic dominance of half a century ago is quite as remote a possibility. It is not to say however that the matter is settled and all is well. The righteous and beneficent social and economic and political condition that must be the aim of all good men, such a system as that which held during the great five hundred years of the Mediaeval synthesis, does not obtain, and though conditions are measurably better along every line than they were when Bishop Ketteler made his pronouncement at Fulda or Leo XIII issued his Rerum Novarum, or even the four Bishops of the Catholic Hierarchy gave to the world their Program of Social Reconstruction, still a false situation exists, and will, until Capitalism and Labor cease to function as separate and antagonistic entities and become merged in one corporation where the interests of each are conserved in liberty and co-operation.
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