There are many attempts to make sense of the social and political crisis underway across the West. Most use the dominant left-right categories of liberal and conservative, communism and capitalism. But in this essay, Fr Olek Stirrat proposes instead the metaphysical approach of Catholic Social Teaching, arguing that rather than using the categories of atheistic materialism and self-interest, we will better understand what is going on when we ground our approach in God, and proceed from the perspective of Catholic ethics, in particular using the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.
Capitalism, Communism, and Catholic Social Teaching
Introduction
In an essay published in 1984, the American Jesuit and political philosopher Fr. James V. Schall observed that the problem of “today is the reappearance in political form of the suppressed spiritual in a highly peculiar fashion…. [T]heology is politics and politics theology.”[1] The problem is not so much whether one is a capitalist or a Marxist but the dualistic categorization that presupposes materialism, relativism, and the politicization of theology. As Guillaume de Thieulloy comments, “For the Church, the question is not about the victory of the Right or the Left, the integralists or the modernists. It is about truth and the correct understanding of the moral and political consequences of the faith.”[2] This opens up the horizon to such an extent that the fundamental question is not what political party one votes for but what political expression manifests a true Christian anthropology. It is an analysis of the horizon that shapes these categories, namely materialistic atheism and self-interest, which will be our concern, followed by a proposed Catholic response.
Materialistic Atheism
A first metaphysical dimension that undergirds the dichotomy between Marxism and liberalism, between the right and the left, and between the individual and the state is materialistic atheism. Atheism, understood as a belief system that undergirds action, is a complex reality which “taken as a whole… is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes.”[3] The uniqueness of the modern form of atheism associated with Marx is that it is not so much the conclusion of an argument or the refutation of a proof for the existence of God but a precondition for a whole system. Consider Marx’s famous passage from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 where he states that
a being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another… if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it.[4]
We see that what grounds this type of materialistic Marxist atheism is a univocal conception of being, where the creator God is on the same metaphysical plane as the creature. There is thus an extrinsic relationship between the two, which leads to competitiveness and thus a Promethean option from the creature’s perspective to reject any form of dependence upon God.[5] These types of atheists see freedom as an end in itself and man as “the sole artisan and creator of his own history. They claim that this freedom cannot be reconciled with the affirmation of a Lord Who is author and purpose of all things, or at least that this freedom makes such an affirmation altogether superfluous. Favoring this doctrine can be the sense of power which modern technical progress generates in man.”[6]
Analogous to the rejection of God is the rejection of transcendence. Joseph Ratzinger comments that the rejection of transcendence “is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow.”[7] When the creator God is removed, the creature is annihilated.[8] With the rejection of God and transcendence, humanity becomes independent and autonomous and politics is absolutized.[9] Atomization and separation, namely the inability to bring about communion, is made manifest without a binding principle beyond individuality. There is no outside authority which may shape one’s existence. The immanent and thus the visible becomes the sole measure. As a result of the rejection of transcendence, of the rejection of the invisible, power becomes the only effective currency.
Hence with atheistic materialism, transcendence and the invisible are rejected. As a result, only the visible (more particularly that which is made) is real; and power becomes the communicator of meaning. Both capitalism and socialism exemplify this play for power just in different competitive ways.
Self-Interest
This brings us to another underpinning dimension of the contemporary malaise, namely self-interest. If God does not exist, power becomes the primary currency in service of the self. In his essay, “Capitalism Produces Socialism: An Interpretation of the Thought of Pius XI,” Andrew Willard Jones sees that the increased interest in socialism today is a result of capitalism. He believes that they are two sides of the same coin. He believes that this coin was brought into existence by a shift away from structures of solidarity to structures of self-interest. The self-interest that is characteristic of both communism and capitalism breeds competition. The only difference is that competition in capitalistic terms is between individuals, whereas for communism, the competition is class-based between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Self-interest is thus intimately linked with power and is rooted in an individualistic anthropology brought about by liberalism.
An issue arises, however, when one compares these comments with Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, where he seems to defend self-interestedness by arguing for the right to private property. He claims men work in the “hope and possibility of increasing [their] resources and of bettering [their] condition in life.”[10] It seems that “Leo XIII clearly implies that society must rely on the self-interest of individuals to procure the necessities of life.”[11] There seems to be a division here between Jones’ and Leo XIII’s approach to self-interest. Is this difference reconcilable? I believe it is. The difference between the two is found not so much in the motivation of labor but in the very understanding of the self. Leo is writing at the end of the 19th century, before the postmodern turn and deconstructive tendencies of thought, which see the self through narcissistic eyes and the breakdown of mediating structures of subsidiarity such as the family. For Leo, the self was understood to be ensconced within relational structures and shaped by them. The self was not an isolated autonomous island but an embodied reality synthesizing many elements.
Thus, materialistic atheism and self-interestedness are metaphysical categories that undergird capitalism and socialism. What is the Catholic response? To take it further, what is the prescription for the metaphysical diagnosis of the contemporary malaise? A solution can be found in Catholic Social Teaching generally and belief in God, along with solidarity and subsidiarity more particularly.
Catholic Social Teaching
Catholic Social Teaching is simply the proclamation of the Gospel in the social, economic, and political realms. It is a measure that can be used to assess all socio-economic models. It presents a vision of society with necessarily different metaphysical presuppositions. Therefore, it might be the political means of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Although it may contain elements close to the left and the right, it ultimately goes beyond this shallow division. This is evidenced by its widespread criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.
In his homily delivered on November 26, 1981 in the course of a service for Catholic members of the Bundestag, Ratzinger elucidates three main principles of Catholicism in its relationship to politics. First, the Catholic Church de-deifies the state by undermining the belief that the state and, ultimately, this world are all there are. Second, the Church encourages all the goodness within a given political system. Third, the Church prioritizes the use of reason shaped by biblical ethics in setting up any political system. To summarize these dimensions, Ratzinger states that the
Christian faith has destroyed the myth of the divine state, the myth of the state as paradise and a society without domination. In its place it has put the objectivity of reason. But this does not mean that it has produced a value-free objectivity, the objectivity of statistics and a certain kind of sociology. To the true objectivity of men and women belongs humanity, and to humanity belongs God. To genuine human reason belongs the morality that is fed by God’s commandments.[12]
The grounding of politics in God is the first step to giving political stability in our time for “no ethics can be constructed without God.”[13] Even more passionately Ratzinger says that “we cannot yield on this point: without God, all the rest would no longer have logical coherence.”[14] Thus from God comes rationality and logical coherence which entails faith, understood as the “conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). The immaterial world needs to be rediscovered by a reason open to faith for “the real problem that confronts us today is reason’s blindness to the entire nonmaterial dimension of reality.”[15] With the rejection of God anything is possible. To put it in another way, with the rejection of a unifying principle, rationality devolves into “tyranny once it is sufficiently exhausted by anarchy.”[16]
This grounding of ethics in God and the priority of truth over power is alluded to by Poland’s Adam Michnik who, following the demise of European Communism in 1990, reflected that
we are the children of our Judeo-Christian culture, and we know that this culture, which recommends loyalty to the state, commands us to bend our knees only before God. We know therefore, that we should put faithfulness to truth above participation in power. We know, by reaching for our roots, that the truth of politics resides, in the end, in the politics of truth.… We reject belief in political utopia.[17]
This return to our roots, to our genealogia divina, is what will provide a basis for the response to the current malaise. This return is hinted at by Ratzinger who states that
at this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights…. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe.[18]
So we turn to the past but also look to the future with hope. And this is also part of the Catholic response. The focus on the sacramental present which encapsulates the past through memory and the future through hope, contrasts the conservative absolutization of the past and the liberal absolutization of the future.
Thus Christianity is not a political messianism, but sees politics in light of a biblically inspired ethics: “In other words, the New Testament is acquainted with political ethics, but not with political theology”[19] and “politics is the province, not of theology, but rather of ethics, which, of course, can only be substantiated theologically.”[20] If the State is founded on ethics, “man still has all his responsibilities, but what is God’s remains God’s.”[21] This grounding of ethics in God is a rejection of atheistic materialism and is exemplified in the categories of solidarity and subsidiarity, to which we now turn.
Solidarity and Subsidiarity
In his encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II defines solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”[22] Thus alongside the importance of salvation, the Church is deeply concerned not only for that which happens “after one dies” but, through the virtue of solidarity, exhorts all people to realize the common good since we are all responsible for all. It also alludes to the deeply social nature of the human person and salvation since no person seeks salvation only for themselves.[23] It is the paradigm of self-interest which grounds the capitalistic and communistic polarity that solidarity overcomes, as John Paul states,
This determination is based on the solid conviction that what is hindering full development is that desire for profit and that thirst for power… These attitudes and “structures of sin” are only conquered – presupposing the help of divine grace – by a diametrically opposed attitude: a commitment to the good of one’s neighbor with the readiness, in the gospel sense, to “lose oneself” for the sake of the other instead of exploiting him, and to “serve him” instead of oppressing him for one’s own advantage (cf. Mt 10:40-42; 20:25; Mk 10:42-45; Lk 22:25-27).[24]
The discussion on solidarity immediately entails a discussion on subsidiarity for “solidarity without subsidiarity, in fact, can easily degenerate into a ‘Welfare State’, while subsidiarity without solidarity runs the risk of encouraging forms of self-centred localism.”[25] Subsidiarity is a principle rooted in the reality of humans being social creatures and thus dependent upon others. There is a hierarchy of subsidiarity where those in institutions above are called to help those below. In other words, the highest is for the sake of the lowest. Perhaps the classic description of the concept is found in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, wherein he states that
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them. The supreme authority of the State ought, therefore, to let subordinate groups handle matters and concerns of lesser importance, which would otherwise dissipate its efforts greatly. Thereby the State will more freely, powerfully, and effectively do all those things that belong to it alone because it alone can do them: directing, watching, urging, restraining, as occasion requires and necessity demands.[26]
Both solidarity and subsidiarity undermine the liberalists point of departure in the individual rather than the family/community as well as the drive for self-interestedness.
Conclusion
The response to the politicization and economization of reality must be rooted in Catholic Social Teaching. It is important to diagnose the current cultural malaise not through the prism of categories such as capitalism and communism, right and left, but the underpinning metaphysical ideologies of materialism and relativism. The problem is not so much the choice between being a liberal or conservative but the metaphysical fault lines beneath, which provide this dualistic categorization as the only option. What we need now is to replace the metaphysical grounding of the problem in atheistic materialism and self-interest with belief in the Trinitarian God, which grounds ethics and the Catholic Church. Further, structures of solidarity and subsidiarity at every level of civil society must flourish so that charity, which is the fundamental principle of reality alongside truth, may abound.
Fr. Olek Stirrat, born in Poland, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Adelaide. He was ordained in 2022 and is currently ministering in South Australia.
This essay is published with the kind permission of the author and was first published on What We Need Now at https://whatweneednow.substack.com/p/capitalism-communism-and-catholic
NOTES
[1] James V. Schall, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval and Modern Political Philosophy (New York: University Press of America, 1984), 289.
[2] Guillaume de Thieulloy, “A French Perspective on the Retrial of Interwar Integralism,” Church Life Journal, July 21, 2021.
[3] Austin Flannery and Hoopla Digital, Gaudium et Spes; Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (United States: No Publisher, 2014), 19.
[4] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 144.
[5] See Augusto Del Noce and Carlo Lancellotti, The Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP, 2014), 203.
[6] Flannery and Hoopla Digital, Gaudium et Spes, 20.
[7] Henri De Lubac, Edith M Riley, Anne Englund Nash, and Mark Sebanc, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1998), 211.
[8] See Flannery and Hoopla Digital, Gaudium et Spes, 36.
[9] See Carlo Lancellotti, “Augusto Del Noce on the ‘New Totalitarianism,’”Communio: International Catholic Review 44 (Summer 2017): 327.
[10] Pope Leo XIII, The Condition of the Working Classes: The Encyclical “Rerum Novarum” (London: Catholic Church Truth Society, 1958), 5.
[11] J. Brian Benestad, Church, State, and Society (Cambridge: Catholic University of America Press + ORM, 2012), 59.
[12] Benedict XVI, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 151.
[13] Joseph Ratzinger, “The Renewal of Moral Theology: Vatican II and Veritatis Splendor,” Communio: International Catholic Review 32 (Summer 2005): 357-68 at 367. See also: Tracey Rowland, “Natural Law in Catholic Christianity” in The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics, ed. Tom Angier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 135-155 at 148-150.
[14] Joseph Ratzinger, “The Renewal of Moral Theology,” 367.
[15] Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Faith and Politics: Selected Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 145.
[16] Benedict XVI, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics, 226.
[17] Adam Michnik, “After the Revolution: The New Dangers to the New Democracies,” The New Republic (July 2, 1990): 28-29.
[18] Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Faith and Politics: Selected Writings, 167.
[19] Benedict XVI, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics, 204.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops, Priests, Religious Families, Sons and Daughters of the Church, and All People of Good Will for the Twentieth Anniversary of Populorum Progressio (Nairobi: St. Paul Publications, 1993), 38.
[23] See Benestad, Church, State, and Society, 104.
[24] John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 38.
[25] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 2024), 351.
[26] Pope Pius XI, On the Reconstruction of the Social Order, Quadragesimo Anno (1938), 79-80.
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