#third positionist

Catholicism, while intrinsically a universal spiritual creed, is not a universal temporal creed, like Capitalism and Socialism. Again, the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ claiming to implement Church Social Doctrine are at odds with tradition; they are a modernist heresy. Yet this modernist heresy now goes to the top of the Church hierarchy, until Social Doctrine is rendered as a Socialist banality in the interests of globalisation: ‘The fact that he is a citizen of a particular state does not deprive him of membership in the human family, nor the citizenship in that universal society, the common, world-wide fellowship of women and men’, stated John XXIII in 1963 in the midst of Vatican II. There is a spiritual gulf between the outlook Leo and that of modernist Popes, in that traditional teaching regards attachment to one’s homeland as part of a sacred birth-right that should be maintained, while the modernists scramble to be in the forefront of open borders in the name of a nebulous ‘humanity.'

Rerum Novarum is not an apologia for capitalist exploitation; it is the answer to it, of more value than Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, or the works of Lenin or Trotsky. Leo, when addressing strikes and the increasing violence of the labour movement, as injurious to both proprietors, the trades and the social order, clearly stated that the causes are most likely to rest with social injustice and that these must be addressed a priori: ‘The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed.' Human beings should not be used as ‘mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.’

One might hope that since 1891, or 1931, a lot more about economic function had been learnt. Yet no economic proposition like the raising of the minimum wage causes such an outcry of hardship from employers, other than the outcry from both employers and employees when there is a suggestion that welfare benefits be raised in accord with rising costs of living. If production is not consumed, then it is pointless, and this cannot be done with insufficient purchasing power. The Socialist answers: raise taxes. Again, the problem of production and consumption and the lack of purchasing power, the problem of distribution, is not solved.