Socialism and the Pope

XI. to repeat that platitudes of Pope Leo XIII. to a world steeped in even deeper misery and destitution than that to which the Vatican addressed itself in 1891? Is not all this solemn pronouncement, where nothing is attempted and still less accomplished, just a solemn sham?

Pope Pius XI. speaks of the mutual products of Capital and Labour, and invokes, with approval, the formal words of Pope Leo XIII.:-

"It is not possible to have capital without labour, nor labour without capital."

We hope this dictum is not supposed to be infallible. For it is very bad political economy. Capital is merely the stored-up product of human labour-power, and is, therefore, robbery. In any case why must capital be the appropriation of the few, and labour be the condition of the many? What bearing has this relationship of man to man upon the question of wealth-production?

We fail to see the necessary bearing of the actual circumstance of the human beings concerned upon the platitude enunciated by Pope Leo XIII., and repeated by Pope Pius XI., as an apology for a social and economic inequality which it neither explains, nor examines, nor excuses.

Speaking in London, at the Albert Hall, in 1908, Archbishop Maguire, of Glasgow, made short work of this nonsense of Pope Leo XIII. as to the relationship of Capital to Labour. The Archbishop declared that the working-men would come to rule the world.

The following year, in another lecture, the Archbishop summed up the position in these trenchant terms:-

"It seems almost incredible that in wealthy England so much destitution should exist, and still more that vagrancy and mendacity should so prevail. It may well be asked-Is this the grand total result of the wisdom of our legislators, the efforts of our philanthropists, the Christianity of our Churches, that our streets are infested with miserable creatures from whose faces almost everything purely human has been erased, whose very presence would put us to shame but for familiarity with the sight? Poor wretches! filthy in body, foul in speech, vile in spirit. Human vermin! Yes, but of our own manufacture, for every individual of this mass was once an innocent child. Society has made them what they are, not only by a selfish indulgence in indiscriminate almsgiving, but by permitting bad laws to exist and others to be so administered as to crush the weak and wreck the lives of the unfortunate."

In 1909, the Catholic Truth Society issued a revised pamphlet on Socialism by the Rev. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. The Jesuit father condemned a Socialism that

"Involves a transfer, sudden and probably violent, of all capital to the State, and apparently without compensation to the sufferers by the change."

Why should there be compensation? How can there be compensation if the wealth is socialized?