One of the things we know about the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is that he doesn’t like bankers. Another is that he has given a good deal of thought to the question of social sin – a trickier concept than personal, individual failings. A third is that he has been profoundly influenced by the social teaching of a nineteenth century pope, Leo XIII, as expressed in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. It’s available online, just twenty pages long.
That encyclical is a curious document to read now: some of it feels anachronistic (if you like women bishops, you’re going to hate the bit about fathers as the natural rulers of families), much feels self evident. It starts off with a ringing denunciation of the prevailing social disorder of the time and its effects on the labouring poor: ‘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.’
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It goes on, however, to declare in unequivocal terms, the natural human right to private property (‘the practice of all ages has consecrated the principle of private ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity with human nature’), and the folly, for workers as well as the wealthy, of any attempt to replace it with collective state ownership.
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