Giants in CST: Msgr. Ryan on Property

“The Doctrine of Property”

All the great radical movements for industrial reform involve the institution of private property.  Socialism would abolish private ownership of the instruments of production; the Single Tax system would substantially abolish private ownership of land.  Public ownership of such things as railroads, telegraphs, and municipal utilities would restrict very considerably the scope of private ownership, and even such milder proposals as profit-sharing and labor participation in management would cause a redistribution of the existing powers and functions of ownership.

The relations between capital and labor and the manner in which the product is distributed are what we find them today mainly because our industrial system is based upon a certain form of private property.  The instruments of production are owned and managed by private individuals and organizations.  The conditions and terms of employment and the distribution of the industrial product, are likewise determined by the fact that capital is private property, not the property of the State.  Both these matters are arranged by agreement between the workers on the one hand, and the owners of capital on the other.  Hence, both capitalist and laborer are vitally interested in the institution of private property.  The former prizes the institution as a means of livelihood and a source of social and industrial power; the latter is no less keenly interested, although in a somewhat different way, and for somewhat different reasons.  The worker wishes to own his wages and the things that his wages will buy, and he frequently desires to restrict the social and industrial power which ownership confers upon the capitalist.

All the efforts of revolutionists and reformers for the abolition or for a reorganization of the system of private property, and all the disputes between labor and capital concerning employment conditions and the distribution of the product, assume that there is involved an ethical principle, a principle of justice.  To the supreme principle all make their final appeal.  Inasmuch as the Church is the teacher and interpreter of morals, in economic no less than in the other relations of life, her doctrine of property is of the highest importance.

The founder of Christianity is sometimes represented as a revolutionist, a communist, or at least as one who did not believe in private property.  No such claim can be substantiated by any fair study of the Gospels.  Christ nowhere condemned the private ownership of goods as unjust or unlawful.  Probably the nearest approach to such a declaration is found in His reply to the rich young man who asked what he should do in order to have life everlasting.  When Christ enumerated the principal commandments, the young man replied:  “All these have I kept from my youth, what is yet wanting to me?”  The answer of Jesus was:  “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast and give to the poor….”  In these statements Our Lord drew quite clearly the distinction between what is necessary and what is of counsel.  The young man was not required to divest himself of his goods unless he wished to be perfect, but he was not commanded to be perfect.  Moreover, the fact that Christ counseled the young man to “sell” his goods, shows that He did not regard private ownership as unlawful in itself.  Had He meant to teach such a doctrine, He would have required the young man to give away his goods, not to convey the title of ownership to another by a sale.  The young man could not have sold what was not his.  Again, Christ became a guest in the house of the rich man Zacheus, and assured him, “this day is salvation come to this house.”  Zacheus had said, “Behold, Lord, the half of all my goods I give to the poor.”  Christ did not command him to give away the other half as a condition of salvation.

Our Divine Lord, did, indeed, emphasize the dangers of riches and denounce the rich in severe terms.  “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Nevertheless, He immediately added:  “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  The rich man who had rejected the plea of the beggar Lazarus is pictured in hell.  The poor widow who contributed two brass mites to the treasury is praised above the rich men who had given of their abundance.

What Christ required was not that men should refrain from calling external goods their own, but that they should make a right use of such goods.  He declared that salvation was to come to the house of Zacheus when He heard that the latter was in the habit of giving half of his wealth to the poor.  In His description of the last judgment He promised heaven to those who would feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and clothe the naked.  These are only a few of the Gospel indications that Christ made the right use and distribution of private property one of the most binding and important of his commandments.

There is another element of Christ’s teaching which has a very important bearing upon the doctrine of property.  That is His insistence upon the intrinsic worth and sacredness of the human individual, and the essential equality of all human persons.  From the fact that every human being has intrinsic worth, it follows that he has a moral claim upon the common means of life and of livelihood; from the fact that all persons are equal in the eyes of God and equally destined for eternal life, it follows that they have equal claims upon God’s earthly bounty for at least the essentials of right and Christian living.  It is true, indeed, that Christ nowhere formulated these propositions in the terms just used; nevertheless, they are a correct rendering of his teaching on these subjects.  Because of this teaching, St. Paul could adjure Philemon to take back his runaway slave, Onesimus, “not now as a servant, but instead of a servant a dear brother.”  Christ’s teaching concerning the intrinsic worth and the essential equality of all human beings has important implications, not only with regard to spiritual goods and welfare, but also with respect to all things necessary for Christian living, including access to material goods.  These implications have been recognized and applied by the authorities of the Church from the beginning until the present hour.

The most radical application of the doctrine of equality was made by the first Christians of Jerusalem who sold their individual possessions and “had all things in common, …and divided them to all, according as everyone had need.”  This was the Christian Communism which Socialists and other extremists sometimes point to as exemplifying the normal and necessary Christian attitude toward property.  However, this contention is unsound, for two very good reasons.  First, the arrangement was entirely voluntary, as we see from the words of St. Peter to Ananais:  “Whilst it remained, did it not remain to thee?  And after it was sold, was it not in thy power?”  Here is a clear indication that none of the early Christians was morally bound to contribute his private property to the common store.  In the second place, there is no evidence that community of goods was continued more than a few years among the early Christians.  Apparently, it was due to the peculiar condition of the faithful in Jerusalem, and possibly to the first fervor of new converts.

It is in the writings of some of the great Fathers of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries that we find the most striking recognition of the claims of all men upon to bounty of the earth, and of the obligations of proprietors to make a right and social use of their goods.  St. John Chrysostom exclaimed:  “Are not the earth and the fullness thereof the Lord’s?  If, therefore, our possessions are the common gift of the Lord, they belong also to our fellows; for all the things of the Lord are common.”  Speaking to the rich of his day, St. Basil declared:  “That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry; that coat which you preserve in your wardrobe, to the naked; those shoes which are rotting in your possession, to the barefooted; that gold which you have hidden in the ground, to the needy.”  According to St. Augustine:  “The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor.  They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.”  St. Ambrose declared that God intended the earth to be “the common possession of all,” and that “the earth belongs to all, not to the rich.”  In the words of St. Gregory the Great:  “When we give necessaries to the needy, we do not bestow upon them our goods; we return to them their own; we pay a debt of justice, rather than fulfill a work of mercy.”  St. Jerome quoted with approval a saying that was common in his time:  “All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain.”

While very few subsequent writers or teachers of the Church used quite such strong language as that just quoted, they all taught the same doctrine in substance.  According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is right that property should be private with respect to the power of acquisition and disposal, but that it should be common as regards its use; the abundance of the rich belongs by natural right to the poor; the order of reason requires that a man should possess justly what he owns, and use it in a proper manner for himself and others; and finally the man who takes the goods of another to save himself from starvation is not guilty of theft.  When Cardinal Manning, some thirty-five years ago, reiterated this doctrine of the right of the starving man to appropriate alien goods to save himself from starvation, he was denounced as an anarchist by some of the newspapers of that day.  These journals showed that they were ignorant of the traditional Christian teaching of property rights; they knew only a false ethics of property.

According to the Christian conception, and according to the law of nature and reason, the primary right of property is not the right of exclusive control, but the right of use.  In other words, the common right of use is superior to the private right of ownership.  God created the goods of the earth for the sustenance of all the people of the earth; consequently, the common right of all to enjoy these goods takes precedence of the particular right of any individual to hold them as his exclusive possession.  To deny this subordination of the private to the common right, is to assert in effect that nature and nature’s God have discriminated against some individuals, and in favor of others.  Obviously, this assertion cannot be proved by any evidence drawn either from revelation or from reason.  The fact that the State sometimes violates this order, exaggerating the privileges of private owners to such an extent as to deny the common right of all the general heritage, merely shows that the State can sometimes do wrong.

Nevertheless, this common right of property, the right of use, is not a sufficient provision for human welfare.  Men need not only the general opportunity to use goods, the general right of access to the bounty of nature, but also the power of holding some goods as their own continuously.  They require the power of excluding others from interference with those goods that they call their own.  Without such a right and such powers, personal development, personal security, and adequate provision for family life are impossible.  All this is evident with regard to those things which economists call “consumptive goods;” that is, those goods which are necessary for the direct and immediate satisfaction of human wants; such as food, clothing, shelter, household furniture, and some means of amusement, recreation, and moral, religious, and intellectual activities.  The necessity of private ownership in these articles is not denied by anyone today, not even by Socialists.

As the term is ordinarily understood, private ownership means more than ownership of consumptive goods.  It embraces more particularly productive goods, the natural and artificial means of production; such as lands, mines, railroads, factories, stores and banks.  Today, all these are owned by private individuals or by corporations.  With regard to this kind of private property, the Catholic Church, especially through Pope Leo XIII and his successors, has laid down positive and specific doctrine.  Socialism, that is, State ownership of all the means of production, was condemned by Pope Leo XIII as detrimental to the working people and to society, and as contrary to the natural rights of the individual.  According to the Catholic doctrine, therefore, the right of the individuals to acquire and hold in private ownership some of the means of production is in harmony with, and required by, the moral law of nature.  The institution of private ownership, even in the means of production, is declared to be necessary for human welfare.  Therefore, the State would injure human welfare and violate the moral law if it were to abolish all private property in the instruments of production.

However, care must be taken not to exaggerate the implications of this doctrine.  All that it asserts is that the institution of private property in some of the means of production is morally lawful and morally necessary; all that it condemns is the contradictory system which would put the state in the position of ownership and manager of all, or practically all, natural and artificial capital.

Therefore, the Catholic teaching does not condemn public ownership of what are called public utilities, such as railroads, telegraphs, street railways, and lighting concerns.  It does not even condemn public ownership of one or more of the great instruments of production which hare not included in the field of public utilities.  For example, it has nothing to say against State ownership of mines, or State ownership of any other particular industry if this were a necessary means of preventing monopolistic extortion to the great detriment of the public welfare.  Where the line should be drawn between State ownership of industries which is morally lawful and State ownership which encroaches upon the right of private property, cannot be exactly described beforehand.  The question is entirely one of expediency and human welfare.  In any case, the State is obliged to respect the right of the private owner to compensation for any of his goods that may be appropriated to the uses of the public.

Another caution concerns the actual distribution and the actual enjoyment of private property.  While the Church opposes Socialism, it does not look with favor upon the restriction of capital ownership to a small minority of the population.  Indeed, the considerations which move the Church to oppose the Socialist concentration of ownership, are an argument against a concentration in the hands of individuals and corporations.  Every argument which Pope Leo XIII used against Socialism is virtually a plea for a wide diffusion of capital ownership.  The individual security and the provision for one’s family which a man derives from private property, are obviously benefits which it is desirable to extend to the great majority of the citizens.  It is not enough that private ownership should be maintained as a social institution.  The institution should be so managed and regulated that its benefits will be directly shared by the largest possible number of individuals.  Therefore, Pope Leo XIII declared explicitly that it is the duty of the State “to multiply property owners.”

Therefore, those ultra conservative beneficiaries of the present order who see in the Church’s condemnation of Socialism approval of the existing system with all its inequities, are utterly mistaken.  They have missed the fundamental principles and aims of the Church’s teaching.  The Church advocates private ownership indeed, but she does not defend the present unnatural and anti-social concentration of ownership.  She is interested in the welfare of all the people, and wishes that all should share directly in the benefits which private property provides. 

So much for the right of private ownership.  The duties of the proprietor occupy a no less important place in the Christian teaching.  In general, they are a limitation upon the right of property.  The right is exclusive as regards other individuals; that is to say, it excludes others than the proprietor from exercising the essential control which is conferred upon the proprietor.  As regards God, the right of the proprietor is limited.  Neither Christian teaching nor sound philosophy regards this right as absolute.  The private owner is a steward of his goods rather than an irresponsible master.  It is from the pagan code of Roman law, from the virtually pagan Code Napoleon, and from the unmoral and immoral principles of economic liberalism that has arisen the pernicious doctrine that “one may do what one pleases with one’s own.”  The so-called “right of use and abuse” which has obtained such wide currency in industrial thought and practice, is in fundamental opposition to the Christian teaching.

The limitations set by that teaching to the powers and rights of the private owner follow logically from the Christian doctrine concerning the common bounty of nature, the common right of access to that bounty, and the recognition of the right of use as the primary right of property.  Some of the duties of the private owner have already been pointed out by implication in our discussion of the teaching of the Fathers of the Church.  In a general way, the obligations of the proprietor with regard to the right use of his goods may be thus formulated:  He must so use and administer his property that other men shall enjoy the benefit of it on just terms and conditions.  Only thus can the private right of property be reconciled with the superior common right of access to the bounty of the earth.  One inference from the general principle was drawn by St. Thomas Aquinas, when he declared that a man’s superfluous goods belong by natural right to the poor.  For the time and society in which St. Thomas wrote, this was probably the most important particular application of the principle.  In the present social and industrial system, with its immense aggregations of capital and its enormous numbers of people whose livelihood depends upon their relation and access to these industrial enterprises, right use of property and the sharing of its benefits “on just terms and conditions,” have different and far wider applications.  Chief among these applications is the right of a worker to a living wage, and the right of the consumer to just prices.  So much is certain.  Right use, reasonable access to the common bounty, and participation in the benefits of property on just and reasonable conditions, may also require, and sometimes they do require, the recognition of labor unions, sharing by the workers in industrial management and in profits, and the limitation of rates of industrial interest by the State.

In any case, the general principles are clear:  The earth is intended by God for the children of men; individuals or corporations that have appropriated any portion of the common bounty to their exclusive control and disposition hold it subject to this primary and fundamental social purpose; therefore, they are morally obliged to administer it in such a way that all who live by it, or depend upon it, shall enjoy the economic opportunity of a reasonable and normal life.

Although Pope Leo XIII condemns State ownership and management of all the instruments of production, he did not reject State regulation of private property.  On the contrary, he laid down a principle which would give to the State all the power and authority which any reasonably person could desire over industrial relations, and for enforcing the limitations of ownership:  “Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers or is threatened with injury which can in no other way be met or prevented, it is the duty of the public authority to intervene.”  This principle would justify legislation of many kinds for a better use of private property and for a wider distribution of its benefits.

The Christian doctrine of property is sufficient, on the one hand, to protect the common interest and claims of all human beings, and on the other hand, to safeguard all the reasonable rights of individual proprietors.  The evils which have existed and still exist in connection with private property are not inherent in the institution, as that institution is understood and defended by the Christian teaching.  The most dangerous enemies of the institution are neither the exponents of the Christian teaching nor the social reformers generally, but those extreme upholders of the present day system who cling to an autocratic and irresponsible theory of ownership which is as inconsistent with human welfare as it is contrary to the ideals of democracy.

• Msgr. John Ryan, The Quarterly Bulletin of the Meadville Theological School, April, 1922.  As in J.F. Leibell, Readings in Ethics, p. 583-592.