Rerum Novarum: A Catholic Defense of Private Property

One of the most well-known documents produced by the Church in the contemporary era is Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, published in 1891.

Civil tensions and demands, and emerging market structures, did not allow papal sensibilities to ignore these impulses within what appeared to be a new social order. Therefore, the production of this document sought to construct a vision of both a cultural and economic order that could be expressed in the light of faith. This document thus marked a first and innovative social doctrine of the Church, attentive to the ennoblement of man, his individuality, and to a concept of social justice that was profoundly different from the collectivist meanings associated with it promoted by the left, past and present.

In fact, the priest, philosopher, and theologian, Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855), proposed in his The Constitution According to Social Justice (1848) a Catholic and liberal model of social justice based on a constitutional arrangement of political and social life, firmly rooted in the values of private property, rejecting any form of redistribution of wealth.

In the opening lines of the Encyclical, Pope Leo XIII condemns socialism as a “false remedy” for the new economic relationship between capital and labor:

To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community. (Rerum Novarum, 4)

To remedy these disorders, socialists, by inciting hatred of the rich among the poor, demand the abolition of property and the transformation of all private patrimonies into a common patrimony, to be administered by the municipality and the state. With this transformation of property from personal to collective, and with the equal distribution of profits and comforts among citizens, they believe the evil is radically remedied. But this path, far from resolving disputes, only harms the workers themselves, and is also unjust for many reasons, as it tampers with the rights of legitimate owners, alters the powers of state offices, and disrupts the entire social order. (Rerum Novarum, 3)

Socialist collectivization, therefore, profoundly negates human dignity and becomes an obstacle to any attempt to restore social balance, as it would accentuate social tensions, hatred, and resentment among workers toward capitalists. Indeed, Marx’s entire theory is built around a climate of violence necessary to mobilize the “industrial reserve army” to overthrow class relations and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat, the annihilation of the bourgeoisie, and the abolition of private property.

The latter, in fact, becomes the ultimate goal of human labor, the desire for good and reward that fuels the daily sacrifice of occupational commitment.

Indeed, the merchant, the artisan, the industrialist, and the producer, “if he employs his strength and industry for the benefit of others, does so to procure the necessaries of life”—in other words, he satisfies his own interests while creating a circuit of exchange that benefits all parties.

We cannot ignore Adam Smith’s words in The Wealth of Nations, 1776, the 250th anniversary of which is celebrated this year:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their concern for their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and we never speak to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

By removing property rights, socialists deprive individuals of the right to demand and invest their resources as they wish, thus also depriving workers of the hope of benefiting from their own patrimonial resources and improving their economic and social status.

Private property can only be understood in its moral and ethical foundation and with a completely divine and natural legitimacy, independent of power and sovereignty.

Property is therefore a natural right and exists as such, and as a consequence of human labor, which entitles not only the land’s fruits but also the ownership of the land itself. This, we might say, contradicts Rousseau’s paradox that all the misfortunes of civilization stem from the first man who, by enclosing a plot of land, made it his own.

God provides for man’s needs and grants him an abundance of the earth’s fruits:

God’s giving the earth for the use and enjoyment of the entire human race in no way contradicts the right of private property; for he gave this gift to all, not because each had a common and promiscuous dominion over it, but because he assigned no part of the land specifically to anyone, leaving it to the industry of men and the special law of peoples. The land, however, although divided among private individuals, remains for the service and benefit of all, since there is no man in the world who does not receive nourishment from it. (Ivi, 7).

This, then, becomes further proof, said the Roman Pontiff, that private property is in conformity with nature precisely because it is sanctioned by both human and divine laws. Considerations opposing this state of affairs are reserved for those saturated with “old utopias,” regardless of the fact that such deprivations of property, even if only partial, defraud man of the benefits of his labor, denying all moral justice, since:

What justice would this be, if another who did not labor were to take over and enjoy its fruits? (Ivi, 8)

The divine commandment also absolutely forbids the coveting of another’s property, as written in Deuteronomy:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his land, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any of the things that are his. (Deuteronomy 5:21).

Leo XIII truly feared that the socialist tendencies of Marx, Engels, and Sorel could contaminate the moral sense of consciences by instilling in governments a desire for social, political, and economic planning that would leave no escape for freedom, self-realization, and the pursuit of happiness (which Thomas Jefferson had already framed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 as a fundamental prerequisite to the limits of politics in a purely libertarian sense).

Pope Leo, wrote Michael Novak:

Understood that the new times required a new response. The old social order was rapidly vanishing and a new one was emerging […] he feared the socialist state and the futile and false idea of equality. (Novak, Adams, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is, 139).

Equality becomes a collectivist idea that seeks to level everyone downward, to the same condition of poverty or personal and spiritual anonymity. To quote an important essay by Murray N. Rothbard:

The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror, a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of individuality, variety, or special creativity. (Rothbard M.N, Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature, 6).

In Rerum Novarum, the Pope recognizes, conversely, the value of inequality and the impossibility of eliminating social differentiations from the natural course of the world and history, since they are endogenous to human nature itself:

For the greatest variety exists by nature among men: not all possess the same intellect, the same diligence, not health, not strength in equal measure: and from these inevitable differences necessarily arises the difference in social conditions. (Rerum Novarum, 14)

Differences are therefore a value in and of themselves, as each of us, in our natural human condition, has gifts, physical and intellectual abilities, capacity for strength, doses of courage and risk, aspirations, and feelings different from others. These intrinsic characteristics of the person and their character, combined with work, create spontaneously different interpersonal externalities and are the basis of the social differences that have always accompanied the history of humanity on Earth.

Always remembering that the normal and natural condition of humanity is poverty, and that wealth is, if anything, an exception, a positive escape from poverty through the tools of work and innovation that reward market players as winners in a win-win competition and better servants of consumers.

The Marxist idea of social class, which traverses history through society in a conflictual dialectic between enemies, is an ideological prerogative that has fomented distortions and rather violent interventions aimed at overturning these class relations.

The ultimate goal of the revolution would, in fact, be the seizure of power by the “industrial reserve army,” to use Karl Marx’s expression, which would annihilate any vestige of bourgeois existence, paving the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the omnipotence of the socialist state.

Pope Leo XIII’s profound aversion to this interpretation of historical progress is expressed in point 15 of the Encyclical, when he wrote:

In the present question, the greatest scandal is this: to suppose one social class to be the natural enemy of the other; as if nature had created the rich and the proletariat to engage in implacable combat with each other; something so contrary to reason and truth (Ivi, 15).

Pope Leo also understood that the production of wealth necessary to sustain civilizations could not have a future in agriculture, but rather in industry, and also in that set of customs and habits, and—to put it very closely in Hayek’s language—in those social norms of conduct that have, over time, enjoyed the greatest success in the experimentation of existence:

Now, the prosperity of nations derives especially from good morals, from the good order of the family, from the observance of religion and justice, from the moderate imposition and equitable distribution of public burdens, from the progress of industry and commerce, from the flourishing of agriculture, and from other similar things, which, the more they are promoted, the happier the people become (ivi, 26).

Furthermore, the State must be limited to guaranteeing such social balances, to the pursuit of private and individual prosperity. It cannot absorb the citizen and the family, but must intervene to guarantee the private property naturally inherent in human nature, since a man without property is merely an automaton in the hands of the predatory State. The law must always provide for the promotion of industry so that the poorest can also enrich themselves through work, and not through the specter of a welfare state that expropriates wealth in compliance with a disastrous and immoral redistribution. The law must therefore guarantee the growth of the number of owners of the means of production because:

If industry is encouraged among this multitude with the hope of being able to acquire permanent property, one class will gradually draw closer to the other, bridging the immense gap between extreme poverty and extreme wealth (Ivi, 35).