If people have heard of the Catholic Social Teaching they will usually think of Rerum Novarum.
This 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII is the eighth out of nine in total. Rightly considered the masterpiece of Catholic Social Teaching, Rerum is a readable yet extremely subtle guide to the practical restoration of harmony to our disintegrating society.
In this third post on Rerum Novarum we will look at how it proposes to promote cooperation between the classes of men. It seeks to do this by
the recognition of the reality of the human condition
acknowledging the limitations of men
inflexibly defending the right to provide property
condemning excessive taxation
stressing the duties of capital to labour…
…and the duties of the working man to the common good
arguing for a distributive justice which harmonises society
Rerum Novarum is a robust defence of human dignity. Based in reality, it seeks to defend man against vice, deception and exploitation.
Correctly understood, it is a recipe for the restoration of our civilisation.
It being Michaelmas today, I include a note on the magnificent image at the top of this post1.
RESTORATION VIA RERUM NOVARUM
At the end of Rerum Novarum we are reminded that the wisest of schemes for the common good will fail if the natural order is not restored.
It may seem odd to begin with this - the end of Rerum Novarum. Yet it is important to remember that we have now suffered the total moral collapse which it foretold in 1891.
We see more severe social division in our nations today than in the civilisation before the World Wars.
After a century in which Bolshevism claimed the lives of more than a hundred million souls, the social revolution which adopted its technique has dissolved our populations into factions of universal vengeance.
There is widespread and justified resentment of a robber-baron class which has plundered our nations under lockdown and similar orchestrated crises. If the State does not restore balance to the economy and justice to society it will never recover the right to rule.
The State we are in is wicked, and in mass producing misery creates the conditions for Communist, socialist and other nihilist causes to prosper.
Rerum advises rulers, owners and workers to be mindful of their duties toward the Common Good.
This cannot be done if no one can agree on the meaning of basic words - like “good”. Or “woman”. Or “evil”.
That is why Rerum Novarum ends as it begins - by saying why our world has suffered a total moral collapse, and why nothing can improve until this has been rectified.
There is no hope for any political or economic programme, nor for the restoration of sanity and justice more generally, if there is no attempt to re-establish what is right and wrong.
Today this is more urgent than ever, as liberal “rights-based justice” has produced a State whose laws promote vice, punish virtue, and persecute the sane.
RIGHTS FOR WRONGS
Rerum Novarum applies the Catholic concepts of natural justice to identity the rights and duties of capital and labour - the owner and the working classes - or more simply rich and poor.
The war on our Christian civilisation has been so successful that practically no one notices the terms it uses are fraudulent.
Social Justice was the cause of the Church. This means the application of natural justice, which is the recognition of what is good and what is not in the sight of God.
When Rerum Novarum talks of “rights” it means natural rights, flowing from the recognition that God made Man and all things in nature.
Today, “social justice warriors” promote insane hierarchies of privilege based on claimed victim status. Modern “social justice” is simply a campaign of destructive vengeance on sanity itself, its object the annihilation of all norms.
Rights are invoked to die, to kill the unborn, to demand men are called women, to permit mass scale human trafficking, to prevent the punishment of the wicked.
Rerum Novarum predicted the process which would lead to this disordered world, which is desperately in need of rebalancing.
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