A lot of people talk about Catholic Social Teaching (CST) in the same way they talk about Theology of the Body; that is, they seem to read what the others write; they don’t seem to scrutinize the original texts very closely.
I am no expert; these musings are not going to be footnoted or anything because they are just that, musings. The people I reference — the commentators — are just the general ones I see in published (online and print) arguments. They will know who they are by how inattentive they have been to these fundamental truths. Their inattention leads them to conclusions that are not compatible with freedom and the preservation of the true worth of the family: what ought to be its imperviousness to monetization.
So: the three things I notice that are not included in discussions that reference CST in the context, especially, of public policy proposed in the name of said teaching but along feminist/leftist lines (however “soft”):
FIRST — What or who is the subject who provides the just wage?
Those who reference CST, especially so-called “soft” feminists wishing to reconcile the perceived good of women working with a vague sense of needing, after all, to protect the family, fail to note the unspecified subject in papal documents.
Much of what is written occurs in the passive voice. When it’s said that the family must have a living wage, most have a certain sense that the role of the government is being discussed, but in the texts it’s by no means explicit all the time. Today our public discourse is immersed in partisan politics. The commentary on this subject tends to immediately assume the subject — who insures a just wage — is the state — and specifically the administrative state.
But not every Catholic has interpreted it this way in the past. I urge the inquisitive reader to pick up a copy of The Red Horse by Eugenio Corti. This epic masterpiece (a best-seller in Europe in its day, a work of historical fiction penned by a veteran of the war on the Eastern Front) has a moving section in which the enterprising Italian factory owner ponders his duties in this matter.
For him, the moral imperative towards the people his decisions affect touches his conscience. In short, Corti depicts him as regarding himself as the subject indicated by CST.
I generally do not find that our contemporaries see the dangers or impracticalities of turning to the state to remedy the difficulties of the family. They seem unaware of the lessons of history; the tyranny of a bureaucracy bent on creating its own notion of equality isn’t a condition familiar to them.
Perhaps we don’t have a good enough idea of conscience today and how our moral leaders can call us to act in accord with it, as opposed to resorting to force, coercion, and political power to try to achieve a goal.
In Corti’s book, the factory owner, formed in his Catholic faith, sees himself as bound in justice to take into account his profitability and the well being of his workers. He is a moral actor and knows himself to be so because, the novel makes clear, the Church and the village make him so, not by force but by being a community of faith, searching out God’s law and will.
It’s difficult to have a fruitful discussion about a just wage if we don’t specify from whom. To be sure, the state’s role is to insure peace and freedom, so people can arrange things in a fitting way without interference. I support policies that keep the government in this role.
If forming and appealing to conscience seems quixotic or ineffective, one should consider how unproductive (not to mention bloody) using power to redistribute wealth has turned out to be.
SECOND — Who has the right to the just wage?
Commentators on CST do not seem to notice that the just wage is the prerogative of the father of the family. Perhaps because contemporary English translations default to substituting so-called “inclusive” language, this distinction doesn’t come through to them.
But our tradition is that the father provides and protects. I know this is controversial, but that’s silly. (There is no question that the whole world until the 70s thought as much. Yes, even though very often family life included the mother contributing to the financial stability of the family business or farm. Let’s try to think outside the box made by our tight political control of speech.) The just wage is due to him as provider of his family, not to him and also, separately, to the woman in her own role as wage earner. (To be sure, it’s implicit that a woman, a widow say, supporting a family ought also to receive a just wage.)
People don’t consider that this is what CST teaches because of our indoctrination in putative equality between the sexes, but traditional thinking centers on complementarity, not opposition, between man and woman. It sees the family as a whole, with the husband as the head, not as a sort of partnership where both husband and wife have a claim on society to live out their aspirations in the public sphere.
As Pius XI writes in Casti Connubii, the natural order of things, on which society must organize itself for the good of all, is normatively a wife and mother who makes the home and nurtures and educates the children. The man, with his physical strength (and its stability) and outward direction, provides and protects. Mind, this is the norm, the proper purview of policy. Of course life has exceptions and so on, that’s not the point.
He further instructs that where this model is abandoned, the woman quickly loses what he calls “her throne” and becomes a wage slave. Elites aside, this prophecy has certainly come to pass.
Thus, any discussion of just wage in light of CST needs not to treat the sexes with spurious equitability. Men and women approach work differently where they both pursue it.
This truth is well known (though suppressed). True Catholic teaching takes nature into account and doesn’t create an abstract goal and then force nature to conform. Nature does not, in fact, change, not without violence.
THIRD — What is a just wage?
Those who use CST to recommend proactive, social engineering government policies don’t seem to realize what the traditional Catholic considers “a just wage.” Their definition (when they provide it; usually it’s assumed) reflects the ideology of a society oriented to family life arranged on the basis of two incomes: a consumerist idea informed by the prosperity of America in the late 20th Century and the feminist acquiescence to viewing women as economic units.
They neglect to consider that this idea has no upper limit; there is nothing one couldn’t wish to have, after all; nothing one would willingly deprive oneself of.
The traditional Catholic view is this: basic necessity in a simple life. It recognizes differences among classes and people in general. It accepts the reality that some will indeed be prosperous and some will be less so, but all should have the means to sustain life. It doesn’t seek equity, nor is it motivated by envy.
The model for this just wage is the Holy Family, not the people down the street in the larger McMansion than yours. Our Lord chose to be born into a poor family, but of course the poverty was not abject. They weren’t beggars. St. Joseph provided, but they could also do without, as when they fled to Egypt. Their life was humble — and it was not funded by taxpayers.
Justice demands that good Catholics insist on protecting all hard-working families from policy-makers who don’t understand these simple principles embedded in Catholic thought about natural and divine law.
As Joseph Pieper says in The Four Cardinal Virtues, there is and can be no “machine” to set a just society in motion. In the end, it always comes down to the person and his conscience, the community and its attentiveness to God’s Word. Anything else is socialism, the inevitable soaking of the poor to fund the rich. Very unjust.
I would love to see a discussion of how to rescue our nation from its current thralldom; a discussion that includes these bedrock principles of Catholic thinking about the family and its hierarchy and needs.
I am beyond frustrated with the hijacking of our tradition in the service of a socialism with more than a whiff of demanded obedience, on the assumption that these thinkers are conveying what our Church teaches. They do not, and I for one don’t want to stand around while the family is subjected to an even harsher tyranny than it already endures. Nothing is worse than being betrayed by your own side.
Very very good, a lot of excellent points. Unfortunately what drives the conversation at present will have to be the fact that fewer and fewer people think in terms of the family unit, with more opting to avoid marriage and children (though sometimes one without the other). “Rugged individualism” was an ideal in the early 19th century, and we’re still sucking the fumes. Constitutional principles don’t help much, so advocates of real CST may be that reedy voice in the wilderness for a while, I fear.
This is a really good reminder that defrauding workers out of just wages is one of the four sins that “cry out to heaven” (James 5:4).
Sadly some of the worst offenders though are actually “professional catholic” employers (schools, parishes, organisations etc) which take undue financial advantage people’s good will and faith commitment so perhaps there is a vested interest in misconstruing this issue as a “government problem” :p