The Catholic Church and Labor

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 15, 19 April 1923, Page 21

The Catholic Church and Labor

(By Archbishop Redwood.) The Catholic Church, whose Divine Founder was a carpenters has ever been known to be and ever been, the Church of the poor, lowly, and humble. And the reason of this is that she has always blessed labor as both necessary and holy. Accordingly she has always fought the battles of the oppressed workers, because of the dignity, intrinsic worth, and high destiny of human personality; and labor, however common or hard, is that human personality transformed into wealth. On the contrary, the pagan world, ancient and modern has ever despised labor as a disgrace. The Roman Empire derisively called laborers proletarii, child-bearers, exactly as to-day again the burden of propagating the face appears to devolve more- and more upon the hardworking poor. Do we not see, at every period of the past, a deca° dent civilisation producing a crop of self-styled reformers, who preach and practice the wicked doctrine of birth-con-trol or national suicide? Proletarii were the sixth and lowest class of Roman citizens. Their poor hapless children toiled day and night that those old bloated Roman capitalists might securely live in ease, luxury, opulence, and corruption. Even the sage Socrates, of all pagan moralists the greatest, even Plato and Aristotle, chief pagan philosophers, never rose above this servile standard of their heartless day and age. The Roman patricians scorned the man of no amassed fortune. Rome, like ourselves, worshipped success, and today it is a heartrending fact that, after two thousand years of Christianity, the Americans of certain circles deem poverty a crime. Who were the idols of Roman society? The rich bankers. Their power and influence were tremendous in Roman political life; and the people suffered all the evils of invisible government which modern democracy endures from the hidden influence of capitalistic plutocracy in the political arena all the world over. When Rome was poor, history describes her as a country of hardy, thrifty, self-denying people. When she grew into a vast worldpower of capitalists and armies, her citizens became avaricious, spendthrifts and licentious. Simple rural life decayed, just as it is now doing, in every industrial country; people flocked from rural honest life into the licence of the cities. Rich senatorial families swallowed up small estates and holdings. The toil of the small farm-owner was no match for the vast cheap slave labor, which drove him from the soil in despair. Have we not similar happenings in American rural life at this very day ? Why, in the last decade, the number of city dwellers has increased 16.4 per cent., while the rural population has grown but 4.1 per cent. This is actually a very disquieting problem. It bids fair to ruin America as the Roman Empire was ruined. What was the source of Rome's economic ruin? The Roman latifundia. or bis landed estates worked by slave labor. They replaced the small independent proprietors. Have we not here, in some measure, a picture very 'like the big predatory capitalistic holdings of the national resources in our.times? This system of latifundia gradually ruined the Italian peasantry, and involved in it the general destruction of the community 'Latifundia pevdidere Italiam," says Pliny, "the great estates ruined Italy." There were, indeed, in those days, some sort of trade unionists, but how sad was their lot! They were organised in the interest of State tyranny. Nothing could surpass the thoroughness of those despotic organisations. There was no personal ownership. Empires like the Roman were large servile Str.testhe ultimate .goal of all capitalistic regimes or communistic bureaucracies. What a lesson in economics is set by the pagan past contrasted with the Christian In America to day, and in other countries too, we learn, on the best authority, that there is being propagated th*> most dangerous political heresy that ever destroyed the liberties 'of a free people—it is the idolatry of the State. Wherefore, the truest and most loyal, American or New Zealand citizen is he who resists, with every weapon given him by God and nature, the intrusion of the State into the regulation of private life. To-day, as of old, it is sure to end in State tyranny; / We should add to our daily litany, "God save us from a set of misguided,

howling pseudo-patriots lay or clerical." They are the greatest plague of our public and private life. Once these sacred private rights are lost, it will be impossible to regain them. No doubt the common good demands a reasonable control, and a reasonable State ownership in certain lines, but we should be extremely cautious about putting our hand into that lion's mouth. War propaganda and war hysteria were responsible for leading many astray. They would not heed the wise and timely counsel of Leo XIII. to the Catholics of America and elsewhere, "to steer clear of all such fanatical movements." There is but one sure way towards freedom, popular prosperity and democratic industry, and this is to bring about a. social reconstruction, in which the majority shall attain to a personal ownership and control, wholly or in part, of the means of production. Certain captains of industry seem to thing that, because the Catholic Church opposes Socialism, she has pronounced an unqualified benediction upon modern capitalism. They would fain have her to function as the moral policeman of plutocracy. They forget that the late Pone Leo XIII. went so far as to declare that "a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery itself." To represent the Catholic Church as the unquestioning upholder of capitalism is to offer an insult to her genius, teaching, and traditions. <Xx>