On May 1st, the world celebrated international labour day. Children were off from school and workers could stay at home to enjoy time with the family. In the Church, we celebrate a special worker: St Joseph the Worker, the adoptive father of Our Lord. Msgr. Gilbey is reported to jokingly have referred to the feast as communistic, brought into being to satisfy the communists, given that the feast was introduced in 1955 by Pope Pius XII. Readers of Don Camillo will be familiar with the clerical struggles with the communist mayor Peppone, which reflects a time of conflict between church and state throughout Europe. While St Joseph was not a communist, he and the Church remind us that the fight for a just wage and equality amongst people is not something invented by communists: the Church has a long tradition of standing up for workers.
Two of the four sins that are considered to “cry out to Heaven for revenge”, and thus of particular gravity, are defrauding workers of their wages and oppressing of the poor. These rank alongside sins such as wilful murder. This shows that care for the poor and the right of workers to a just wage are among the most pressing social issues for Catholics to consider. These commands come directly from Christ, and long pre-date any communist theorising. The German political theoretician Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) claimed that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts”, and in this sense communism derives from Christianity. But so do other ideologies, which have taken one aspect of the Truth and elevated it to a new and independent dogma. Tuth is holistic, and the Church guarantees a universal care for the world, since its very nature is universal: Catholic means universal.
One thing communism did succeed in was to place economics at the heart of politics. They never succeeded in convincing the world that communism was superior to capitalism, yet even capitalist-supporting ideologies argue from economic perspectives first and foremost. Communists, while shifting the attention to economics, realised they failed to convince people of full-scale communist economics, and so through people such as Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) they focused on culture. While a lot of communism was deterministic and explicitly atheistic, Gramsci saw the power of religion, and attempted to turn Marxism into a new secular religion in contradistinction to the Catholic Church. Putting economics at the centre of human concern is lamentable, as it is only one aspect of the human condition. The Church, again, is not merely concerned with economics. It looks to every aspect of human life – cultural, economic, political, religious, social, etc – and gives guidance as to how society ought to be structured. The Church doesn’t get involved in day to day politics and cannot give direct guidance, but it proposes principles which every society should strive to implement in their own given context. Hence, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states in point 2425:
The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with “communism” or “socialism”. She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of “capitalism”, individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor. Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice, for “there are many human needs which cannot be satisfied by the market”. Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended.
One concrete example in modern times of someone who failed to fall into modernity’s neat categorisation is Dorothy Day. Born in America in 1897, she grew up to become a communist sympathiser as a young woman. After years of social activism along with her work as a journalist, she converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty. Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement along with French theologian Peter Maurin. The movement was pacifistic, provided help to the poor, and peaceful action in support of the poor and homeless. She advocated what is sometimes known as distributism, associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, which is seen as a middle path between capitalism and communism. Whatever one chooses to call oneself, the Church reminds us of the principles that we should seek to live by and promote, and gives us a strong indication that to neglect care for the poor and for workers is a sin that can land us in eternal punishment. May St Joseph teach us both how to be good workers in our own life, and how to care for the poor.
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