×
Search
"Revisiting Catholic Social Teaching" --Prof. Arkes in The Catholic Thing
By The James Wilson Institute •
Posted on Mar 22 2016
Prof. Hadley Arkes, writing in The Catholic Thing, discusses the Catholic Church's robust teaching on man's dignity and free will, teachings which have led the Popes of the 20th Century to consistently speak out against socialism. As Bernie Sanders sings the refrain of socialism in the present day, Catholics, as well as all Americans, may newly consider what the Church has said about this economic system.
"The prodigal son returns after he has wasted his patrimony, and his father, overjoyed, orders a feast in celebration. The older son, returning from the fields, discovers the feast in progress. He had borne his duties, and yet he had not inspired the breaking out of the fatted calf and the pricey party. Where was the justice or merit in this distribution of good things?
"But the generation of wealth may sharpen the awareness of 'income inequalities,' and we find, of all things, people young and old summoned these days to the siren call of 'socialism' by a Bernie Sanders. Perhaps old and young have lost the sense of what socialism really means with the absence of private property, and with the government in control of all modes of making a living.
"Leo XIII saw early on, and saw with an eye remarkably unclouded by romantic slogans, that socialism offered no morally fit remedy for the problem of distribution. The Socialists would transfer property to a collective or the community, and that move would 'strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of. . .bettering his condition in life.'"
Read the whole piece here.