Social Doctrine and the Right – Part 1

When a society is perishing, the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.

— Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)

‘Social Justice Warrior’ has become a term of ridicule and mirth in recent years, used to describe sundry liberals and leftists who jump aboard every feel-good cause provided by the think tanks and foundations of Soros, Rockefeller, Ford, and a multitude of others.¹ However, there was a time when ‘social justice’ referred to social issues from a totally different perspective. ‘Social justice’ meant the implementation of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

If the ‘Right’ looks for the basis of a social doctrine then it needs to step well over all the modernist excrescences, including Free Trade, Enlightenment, Social-Darwinism – all of the dominating doctrines that emerged not only from the Jacobin Revolution, but from the time of the Reformation. The Catholic Church remained (albeit not immune from modernism) the only significant repository of the West’s traditional ethos, and it is from the Church that the social doctrine of the Right could be reformulated, regardless of one’s personal religious background.

Perhaps the largest organisation using the term was Father Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), founded in 1934. His programme was based on the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum: the just wage, wide distribution of property, as opposed to its concentration under both capitalism and socialism; the right of group association; and control of the banking system.² His magazine was named after that very term, Social Justice.³

Father Coughlin, Canadian born, but maintaining a distinctly Irish ascent, and the fighting manner of an Irishman, sought to implement in the USA at the time of the Great Depression those doctrines of his Church that had been formulated precisely to confront the crisis of the modern world engendered first by the liberal atomization of the French Revolution (and tracing it back further, the triumph of oligarchy over the Church during the reign of Henry VIII), then by the Industrial Revolution. All these revolts undermined the spiritual authority in their own ways, and with the rise of industrialisation, created a reaction – Socialism.

What the Church saw in capitalism and its Socialist offspring was a two-headed hydra with a body marked by Godlessness and materialism. The Papal authority sought to address the issues that were becoming daily more acute: driving Godlessness was the misery generated by an unjust economic system that had embraced Mammon and restored the Golden Calf.

Catholic Social Doctrine is regarded as having been formalised by the encyclical of Pius XIII, Rerum Novarum, in 1891, and explicated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, having brought together the traditions of the Church from over the course of centuries. As such, these two encyclicals in particular, in codifying the Social Doctrine of the Church, reflected the traditional – Medieval – ethos of European society prior to its destruction by the Reformation, Enlightenment and Industrialism.

When Coughlin, originally a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, saw through the bogus character of the New Deal, and the bankers behind it, he confronted the ‘money changers’ in Washington and Wall Street, and the Communists on the streets, first with his radio hour, which reached millions from his Shrine of the Little Flower Church, Royal Oak, Michigan, then mobilising his mass-following into a movement that, had he not been betrayed by his own Church superiors, might have changed history.⁴ In addition to the NUSJ, the Christian Front was organised among young followers to sell Social Justice on the streets, and fight off the Communist opposition.

Throughout the world the papal encyclicals on Social Doctrine inspired movements from the so-called ‘clerical-fascism’⁵ of Dollfuss’ Austria, Salazar’s Portugal, Franquist Spain, Vichy France, and Getúlio Vargas’ ‘New State’ of Brazil; to the ‘Distributist movement’, whose most notable exponents were Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. The Catholic publishing house in Belgium, Editions Rex,⁶ under the direction of Leon Degrelle, became the Rexist movement.

Social Justice and ‘Liberation Theology’

Today the Church continues to discuss and activate what it continues to call Social Doctrine. As in keeping with the epoch of ‘modernism’, the Church has been a victim of what it once stood against as a mighty bulwark: Liberalism, and the hitherto anathematised doctrines of the French Revolution. As will be seen below, Church Social Doctrine was systematised by the papal encyclicals of Leo and Pius to provide a way beyond Liberalism (including capitalist economics) and Socialism. As is relatively well known, the triumph of liberalism within the Church is marked by Vatican II (1960-1965).⁷

A major aspect of this subversion of traditional Social Doctrine is ‘Liberation Theology’. As will be seen, the papal encyclicals on Social Doctrine specifically state that no Catholic can be even a ‘moderate Socialist’. The encyclicals provide a total doctrine for the re-organisation of society as the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ on Earth. Yet for certain clerics, the theology and heritage of the Church was insufficient. As with much else in the Church, there is a movement to ‘modernise’, and this ‘progress’ obscures the gems amidst the muck of the modern world against which the Church had stood. To some priests there was a need to add Marx. Hence ‘Liberation Theology’ was born in Latin America and spread throughout the Church. In the name of ‘progress’, adding Marx to Social Doctrine bastardised the purity to the point of rendering Catholic social action as banal as everything else about the modern world.

‘Liberation Theology’ was formulated by Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Dominican priest in Peru. He was viewed suspiciously as a Marxist by the Vatican, but now he is embraced. A 2015 Guardian report commented:

Gutiérrez was the founder of a progressive movement within the Catholic church known as liberation theology, and while he was never censured in the manner that some of his philosophical compatriots were, there were often rumblings that Gutiérrez was being investigated by Pope John Paul II’s doctrinal czar, a German cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger who would later become Pope Benedict.⁸

It might be noted that this lack of formal censure seems to have been much more charitable towards these crypto-Marxists than the actions taken against Archbishop Lefebvre. The Guardian proceeds:

But when the 86-year-old Peruvian arrives in Rome this week as a key speaker at a Vatican event, he will be welcomed as a guest, in a striking show of how Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – has brought tenets of this sometimes controversial movement to the fore of his church, particularly in his pronouncements against the blight of poverty and the dangers of capitalism.⁹

Again we see fallacious and ignorant assumptions. ‘Pronouncements against the blight of poverty and the dangers of capitalism’ are not an innovation of Liberation Theology; they are at the core traditional Social Doctrine. That such assumptions can be made indicates the extent to which this tradition has been buried and compromised. The Church did not need Marx or the ‘Declaration of the Right of Man & The Citizen’ to formulate its doctrine. It had a legacy of centuries, and something called The Holy Bible. Presumably names such as Charles Coughlin and Denis Fahey are best forgotten as the real heretics in modern times.

In its height in the late 1960s and 1970s, liberation theology – a distinctly Latin American movement – preached that it was not enough for the church to simply empathise and care for the poor. Instead, believers said, the church needed to be a vehicle to push for fundamental political and structural changes that would eradicate poverty, even – some believed – if it meant supporting armed struggle against oppressors.

… But since his election as pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis’s insistence that the church be ‘for the poor’, and his pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology movement and incorporate it within the church. Experts point, too, to Francis’s decision to name Oscar Romero, the iconic Salvadoran archbishop who was assassinated by rightwing death squads in 1980, as a martyr as another sign of the resurgence in liberation theology.¹⁰

It is not correct to call Liberation Theology a distinctly Latin American movement. It reached throughout the world, and is evident today in the layman’s newspapers of the Church when discussing social issues.

The papacy’s ‘pointed criticisms of capitalism and consumerism have gone a long way to rehabilitate the liberation theology’, according to journalistic wisdom, but it is precisely this criticism that should have ‘gone a long way to rehabilitate’ not modernist excrescence, but the Church’s own teachings that had something real to say on ‘capitalism and consumerism’.

What Pope Benedict said of liberation theology in 2009, that it had produced ‘rebellion, division, dissent, offense and anarchy’, is now called a ‘misunderstanding and wrong application of this theology’. The ‘misunderstanding and wrong application’ is Liberation Theology per se; and not only a ‘misunderstanding and wrong application’ of Social Doctrine, but a total bastardisation and subversion.

Jung Mo Sung, a prominent liberation theologian in Brazil, says the church has turned a page on liberation theology precisely because Francis understands that the church’s mission is not just to announce God to a world of unbelievers, ‘but to a world marked by an idolatry of money’. ‘In this sense, we can say that part of liberation theology has been elevated to the doctrine of the church’, Sung says. He attributes this shift to the alarming increase in global inequality and the personal experience of the pope, who has worked in some of the poorest communities of Argentina.¹¹

If ‘Francis understands that the church’s mission is not just to announce God to a world of unbelievers, “but to a world marked by an idolatry of money”’, then it is because Pope Leo wrote Rerum Novarum at the end of the 19^th century; not because modernist clerics have stumbled on Karl Marx and thought of him as an update of Jesus Christ. But one looks in vain for a doctrine beyond platitudes in the modernist theology, where once there were analyses of the banking system – that the Church had for centuries condemned for ‘usury’ – and whose practitioners Dante had consigned to a hellish inferno; where the works of banking reform advocates such as Arthur Kitson and C. H. Douglas were consulted by Father Fahey et al. in explaining how Social Doctrine might be applied to the modern world.

‘Another theologian who studied under Gutiérrez, Michael Lee of Fordham University, said Francis is “open” to liberation theology because he understands the social and economic structures that “dehumanise people”’.¹² One might have hoped that the papal authority would have consulted the Vatican Library for the works of Denis Fahey and encyclicals of his predecessors rather than assuming that modernist liberals have had an epiphany that the Church must suddenly rebuke ‘social and economic structures that “dehumanise people”’. Perhaps they are also on the verge of inventing the wheel or discovering fire.

Pius XI, in his commentary on Rerum Novarum, was unequivocal:

If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.¹³

Social Justice and Libertarianism

To the libertarians of the bogus ‘Right’, Social Doctrine is anathema, because it is an intrusion on the liberty of commerce between individuals. In a condemnation of left-wing ‘social justice warriors’ Jeff Lipkes, a columnist for the libertarian online journal, American Thinker, states that ‘the original social justice warrior’ was Father Coughlin, ‘the most notorious American anti-Semite of the 1930s’. Lipkes, in an impressive ignorance of history, ridicules the connection Coughlin made between bolshevism and international finance, which was quite well known at the time:

The alliance between the ‘banksters’ (Coughlin coined the term) and the Bolshies may have seemed unlikely, but it only demonstrated how devious and relentless the Jews were in their efforts to destroy Christianity and the West.¹⁴

Lipkes, as a libertarian of the pseudo-right, (with emphasis on the pseudo) refers to libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek in defining ‘social justice’ as a ‘mirage’, that the very notion of ‘society’ is an imposition. Lipke writes:

As Hayek points out, the impersonal process by which markets allocate goods and services and reward performance ‘can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen, and depend on a multitude of circumstances not known in their totality to anybody.’ Laws originally attempted to make the process fair and efficient, though there would always be an element of luck. ‘Social justice’ means fixing the results. The criteria will always be arbitrary.¹⁵

But Likpes’ real problem with Social Justice is that it might impact on Jews:

The pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower, now a basilica, had just as much right to define what is meant by ‘social justice’ as any leftist. In fact, like most fascists and many anti-Semites, Coughlin was himself a leftist originally, a staunch supporter of the New Deal (‘the New Deal is Christ’s Deal’) until he discovered that several of Roosevelt’s close advisers were Jews. He remained an avowed enemy of capitalism, and he urged the government to set wages and hours and factory outputs. It was as an enemy of capitalism, and of communism, that he wanted to curtail the activities of Jews. In the name of ‘social justice,’ Jews can be disenfranchised, deprived of civil rights, dispossessed, expelled, and murdered. The social justice warriors of the BDS movement want to do precisely this for Jews living in Israel. The slogan ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ means nothing else.¹⁶

Hence, the subject becomes Judaeocentric. It was not so however for Coughlin. The NUSJ was open to everyone agreeing with the policy points, mainly on banking reform. It so happens that the lads selling Social Justice on the streets were attacked by Communists, Jews and Jewish-Communists. It is superficial to analyse Coughlin’s demands for monetary reform as predicated on a desire to eliminate Jews; likewise his rejection of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Perhaps Lipkes is one of those who sees opposition to usury as intrinsically anti-Semitic? Lipkes knows not of what he speaks when he equates the Social Doctrine of the Church, the legacy of centuries, with the ‘Left’. Had Pope Leo gone Bolshie? Or Thomas Aquinas? The raison d’être of Rerum Novarum was to posit the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth against the materialist hydra of liberalism and socialism. The pseudo-right however arose under the same Zeitgeist as Socialism; they both perceive matters in a similar manner. ‘The next time you run across the cant phrase “social justice”, think about Father Coughlin, and remember that the rights for which SJWs demonstrate are paid for with other people’s money and other people’s blood’.¹⁷ Social Doctrine is equated with both Leftism and Nazism and hence with genocide. The pseudo-right sees a connection between Nazis, Leftists and traditional Catholicism. The pseudo-right is the heir to Jacobinism, from which arose both market liberalism and communism; Catholic social commentators such as Denis Fahey saw the connection, as did Leo III and Pius XI. A luminary of the pseudo-right, David Horowitz, a prime mover of Islamophobia, also attacks Pope Francis as ‘not only a communist, but a sexual predator’.¹⁸ ‘The communist Pope just cannot keep his mouth shut’.¹⁹ A columnist for Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag writes:

Anyone with eyes knows that the proliferation of capitalism over the past two decades has lifted a billion people out of dire poverty – and in coming decades is projected to rescue another billion from pauperism – but Francis robotically slams global capitalism, or ‘globalization’ as the Left calls it, foolishly blaming markets for poverty. Markets, not handouts, accomplish humanitarian feats that the Roman Catholic Church could never, ever hope to match.²⁰

… and this stuff is called ‘right-wing’ by media pundits and academia.

Social Doctrine

Social Doctrine was codified by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum in 1891, and explicated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno 1931. It is notable that Leo’s encyclical was subtitled ‘Rights & Duties of Capital & Labour’; while the title of Pius’ encyclical means ‘In the 40^th Year’, meaning that it was forty years since the publication of Rerum Novarum, and significantly it is subtitled ‘Reconstruction of the Social Order’.

The primary elements of Social Doctrine are:

1. The organic state – the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth.
2. The family as the most elementary unit from which the social order proceeds.
3. Solidarity before class conflict (Socialism) and individual atomisation (Liberalism).
4. The rights of association (e.g. guilds) .
5. Subsidiary – that issues are best dealt with by associations at the closest level, rather than by remote central authorities.
6. Distributism – the widest distribution of private property, as opposed to its concentration through Socialism or oligarchy.

Contra Socialism and Liberalism

Leo XIII promulgated Rerum Novarum against a deepening background of social dislocation, materialism and greed arising from Industrialism; and the rise of the oligarchy and the bourgeoisie since the Reformation. He saw that the Labour movement was a justified reaction, but with the doctrine of Socialism, what was being offered the proletariat was nothing other than the appropriation not only of capitalist wealth but of the bourgeois ethos, where man was reduced to animal desires devoid of spirit, and separated from God, whether in the name of dialectical materialism or of profit. Leo stated of the situation:

That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy.²¹

Pius XI in Quadrasgesimo Anno explained the background for Leo’s encyclical forty years previously:

For toward the close of the nineteenth century, the new kind of economic life that had arisen and the new developments of industry had gone to the point in most countries that human society was clearly becoming divided more and more into two classes. One class, very small in number, was enjoying almost all the advantages which modern inventions so abundantly provided; the other, embracing the huge multitude of working people, oppressed by wretched poverty, was vainly seeking escape from the straits wherein it stood.²²

While the modernist ‘Social Justice Warriors’ now chant about ‘white privilege’, betraying European proletarians, it was the British and other European proletarians who were the primary victims of Industrialism. One might hope that Friedrich Engels could disabuse white Leftists of any such notions with his pre-Marxian sociological study, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845);²³ but probably not. The mental, spiritual and moral decay has gone too far for such an epiphany.

With the misery and tumult caused by Industrialism and the domination of the bourgeoisie mentality, Leo pondered the situation with the counsel of learned laymen and clergy. The charitable works of the Church, while a religious duty, could not be sufficient to deal with the changes wrought by industry and money. While Rerum Novarum was received ‘with great joy’ by many, there were others, even among Catholics, who were disturbed by it, ‘For it boldly attacked and overturned the idols of Liberalism, ignored long-standing prejudices, and was in advance of its time beyond all expectation, so that the slow of heart disdained to study this new social philosophy and the timid feared to scale so lofty a height’.²⁴ Rejected was the Liberal doctrine that government is ‘a mere guardian of law and of good order’²⁵ and must not interfere in the Free Market, a doctrine that has been reinvigorated in our time and is now somehow called ‘right-wing’. Of particular importance, in the face of opposition from those states ‘plainly imbued with Liberalism’, was the need for associations of mutual aid, at times mistaken even by Catholics ‘as if they smacked of a socialistic or revolutionary spirit’,²⁶ although the basis of these associations according to Leo, quite naturally, should be of a spiritual character, as had been the guilds; Pius XI noted that a great many Catholic associations had been formed, albeit still surpassed by Socialist and Communist unions.²⁷ It was noted by Pius moreover that employers and managers had largely failed to organise their own associations, but positive signs were beginning.²⁸ Indeed, that very year, 1931, the Conférences des Associations Patronales Catholiques, was formed. This became the International Union of Catholic Employers Associations in 1949. Local associations had been formed in Holland (1915), Belgium (1921), and France (1926); preceded by others during the late 19^th century.²⁹

The abolition of the traditional association of the guilds had taken place the prior century, thanks to French Revolution, in the name of ‘the people’, and the labouring classes had been left bereft of protective associations, Leo writing:

[F]or the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.³⁰

The Catholic social order had been destroyed in the name of ‘progresses, ‘Enlightenment’, and ‘science’. The traditional religion was ridiculed as superstition, and by the Socialists as a means of keeping the working class subdued. With this attack on the Church came a disparaging of the Medieval epoch, and much has been buried that had created the High Culture of the Gothic West.³¹ What arose with the destruction of the traditional social order, through the Reformation,³² the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, each heralded as the greatest achievements of progress, was an increase in the role of the bourgeois. Leo wrote:

The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.³³

The Church knew more than any other that the decay of the West had started well before the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of Capitalism and Socialism. Those doctrines had been birthed by ground well prepared centuries earlier within secret societies such as Rosicrucianism,³⁴ Freemasonry, and Illuminism; the Church stood as the bulwark against them,³⁵ and those subversive movements in turn recognised the Church as their primary enemy. Pius XI, alluding to the decay of the traditional social order stated that it is firstly a moral question:

What We have taught about the reconstruction and perfection of social order can surely in no wise be brought to realization without reform of morality, the very record of history clearly shows. For there was a social order once which, although indeed not perfect or in all respects ideal, nevertheless, met in a certain measure the requirements of right reason, considering the conditions and needs of the time. If that order has long since perished, that surely did not happen because the order could not have accommodated itself to changed conditions and needs by development and by a certain expansion, but rather because men, hardened by too much love of self, refused to open the order to the increasing masses as they should have done, or because, deceived by allurements of a false freedom and other errors, they became impatient of every authority and sought to reject every form of control.³⁶

Here Pius XI identified the morally subversive character of what became in politics Liberalism and Socialism, proceeding from the rot at the top of the traditional social hierarchy downward. Hence, for example the deterioration of the French aristocracy, headed by the Duc d’Orleans (who, as Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, assumed he would be acclaimed as the head of a Masonic new order and lavished his money on the revolution) and the new bourgeois who saw revolution as the means of substituting their rule for that of the nobility.³⁷

The answer of the Socialists, whose predecessors in France had brought the bourgeois to power, was the appropriation of private property to the State, as if this was the panacea for modern social ills. Leo rejected the Socialist solution:

To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy.³⁸

Rather, the option is not the concentration of property in the hands of State or bourgeois, but the wider spread of private ownership, assuring that the workman and his family is self-sustaining, and that they may enjoy the fruits of their labour.

It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labour, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own. If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he pleases. …³⁹

It is the right to private property that partly distinguishes man above animal; that man through his rational being is enabled to utilise his property in ways beyond the understanding of the animal. In particular, that his ownership of property should be inalienable, and held intact for the bequest of his children; ‘to hold them in stable and permanent possession’.⁴⁰ ‘And this stable condition of things he finds solely in the earth and its fruits. There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body’.⁴¹ Man as the master of his property, acquired through his labour, does not require the intervention of others to determine how that property is used, insofar as he does not, as a social being, conflict with the rights of others, and hence he is part of a social order, as Leo makes plain subsequently, and these ‘property rights’ are not of the bourgeois type any more than they are of the Socialist type. Leo explains this in the next passage: that God has given the fruits of the Earth to man, secured by his work, but ‘not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like. … that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man’s own industry, and by the laws of individual races’.⁴²

It is an interesting aside that so far from this implying a globalised economic structure that is imposed on the entirety of ‘humanity’ without distinction, Leo refers to the differences of custom among ‘individual races’. Moreover, the work to secure the fruits of nature impresses the workman’s personality through that work, and makes some portion of it his own.⁴³ To expropriate the fruit of another’s labour is a contravention of the commandment not to ‘covet’ the property of another.⁴⁴

References