As the Bishop said to the Politician (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Last October, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales published a 13,000-word document entitled "The Common Good and the Catholic Church's Social Teaching"—Thirty pages of confusion which reveal the authors have no understanding of the workings of capitalism and are totally divorced from reality.

Common Good is prefaced by Cardinal Basil Hume and was basically a statement aimed at all Roman Catholics, but the bishops, as they announced in an introduction, believe it should also be read by “anyone concerned about the future of our society”.

"The Church." claims Mr Hume."has the right and duty to advocate a social order in which the human dignity of all is fostered and to protest when it is in any way threatened. Thus the Church opposes totalitarianism because it oppresses people.” But when has the Church ever advocated the abolition of the class system and the establishment of a society in which all have free access to the benefits of civilisation? And isn't this the same Church, incidentally, which signed a concordat with Hitler in July 1933 and promised to keep schtum about the Nazi persecution of the Jews on condition Catholics were left alone?

Hume continues: "The Church denounces any abuse of economic power such as those who deprive employees of what is needed for a decent standard of life." But isn’t it the case that every employee is exploited and in general has to struggle to make ends meet? And how do we define “a decent standard of life” within the context of capitalism? He also declares that "the future of humanity does not depend on political reform, social revolution or scientific advance ... [but] ... a true conversion of mind and heart". Nevertheless, the bishops declare, two paragraphs later, when referring to the present system that so far "no social system has shown itself superior in encouraging wealth creation and hence in advancing the prosperity of the community, and enabling poverty and hardship to be more generously relieved". The same social system they speak of is one in which 800 million are malnourished, 600 million have no home, one billion have no access to clean water or sanitation, in which at least 15 million children die of hunger each year, and in which 30 wars rage at present in the name of profit.

Common Good also informs us that “the search for profit must not be allowed to override all other moral considerations” because it leads to an "ideology of consumerism". The truth is that if you endorse the profit system with its commodity production, which the Church obviously does, then you embrace the ideology of consumerism—they can’t be separated.

Work and leisure
A lengthy section of Common Good is given over to the world of work, in which it becomes blatantly obvious the authors have never participated. The Catholic Bishops believe "workers should love the work they do" and point out that they “oppose an unduly negative view of work . . . which would regard it purely as a burden of drudgery". Try telling this to an overworked security guard, a stressed-out nurse or a production-line worker who does the same routine mind-numbing job every day for a relative pittance. In reality, the majority of workers do their work not out of love for the job but because they would face home repossession or the like if they didn’t.

We are then told “workers have rights" and we’re given the usual run-of-the-mill list of terms and conditions of wage-slavery that workers have been fighting for over a century to achieve before being told that their absence leads to "a sense of alienation between a worker and his or her labour". Just when we think a bit of Marx is about to creep into the text we are then told that "an employed person is . . . not a commodity to be bought and sold according to market requirements’’. The bishops advocate employers bringing to the workforce "creative partnership" and to "regard employees as entitled to a fair share in any rewards as a result of increased profits".

Following on from this we don’t have to read far before we find the first of several attacks on Marxism. The Church, we are told, "spoke out on behalf of the poor and defenceless, especially exploited workers.The Church attacked economic determinism . . . in the form of Marxism." The bishops go on to tell us that "the defeat of Marxism in eastern Europe was a significant moment", but what existed there was nothing to do with Marx. It was state-run capitalism and not socialism or communism.

Sin and damnation
"Subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery . . . disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit rather than as free and responsible persons" are seen by the Bishops as "structural sin". However, nowhere do the bishops condemn capitalism as a social and economic system that gives rise to these "evils" and countless others. Indeed, the bishops endorse capitalism. The Church, they say, "recognises the fundamental and positive value of business, the market, private property and free human creativity in the economic sector". So they condone a system that acts as a barrier to the production of plenty, that retards scientific advance and human development, even though they admit that market forces cannot always deliver.

Catholicism is said to be "incompatible with unlimited free-market or laissez-faire capitalism which insists that the distribution of wealth must occur entirely according to the dictates of market forces”. In other words, restrained, reformed capitalism is not a sin.

Ever generous, the Catholic bishops go so far as to recognise trade unions, but they draw the line at unions fostering what they call “confrontational attitudes” and even contemplate employers being "unfairly disadvantaged by an imbalance in the relative economic strength of each side in negotiations". However, trade-union activity is “sometimes a necessary corrective to managerial policies which are devoted purely to profit . . . and they . . . must also take a responsible view of the profitability and financial viability of the employer". Presumably trade unions can strike the right balance by putting in for a wage rise when the company's making a packet but knuckle under when the bosses are screaming for redundancies. We can also assume that neither the Liverpool dockers or the sacked Magnet workers were consulted on this issue by the bishops.

The bishops believe there is such a thing as a “just wage". If employers do not pay one voluntarily, then "Catholic Social Teaching would allow the State to make them do so by means of a statutory minimum wage". That employers are out to make a profit, and that if the implementation of a minimum wage results in a cut in profitability, then unemployment could rise never occurs to the bishops.

The usual reformist attempts to solve the problems facing humanity permeates much of the Catholic bishops' thinking. When their document is not filled with hypocritical statements such as "the Gospels repeatedly warn us about the over-attachment to material riches" (does this include the Vatican?), it is punctuated with unrealistic demands upon capitalism, such as "resolving the world debt crisis" and the restriction (not a total ban) on “the promotion of arms sales to poor countries" (why not rich ones?). Not to mention the occasional absurd statement such as "it is no longer a feature of the British economy that the means for the production of wealth are largely concentrated in the hands of the few".

Little wonder, then, that the Guardian, reviewing the document could run headlines such as "Catholic Church backs Blair" (19 October) and that "Labour claims Catholic vote" (22 October). The "Christian Socialist" movement which now boasts Blair and four Cabinet and 11 other Ministers, claimed “the party can meet the challenges which the bishops set out and the concerns they expressed" (Guardian, 22 October). This is hardly surprising considering that the “challenges" the bishops set out keep capitalism intact, altering not one iota the fact that a class-divided society continues to throw up the same social problems the workers have been facing for two hundred years.

Just as the Labour Party has a history of betraying, deceiving and thwarting the ambitions of generations of workers, so too is this the case with the Catholic Church hierarchy. Indeed, at a time when the working class were beginning to understand the need for independent political organisation in the late 19th century; a time when some workers were coming to realise that their lot could only be bettered through a transition to a more advanced system of society—socialism—their efforts were to be attacked and distorted by the then Pope. Leo XIII, in the first of a series of papal "social encyclicals" entitled Rerum Noverum:

  “When socialists endeavour to transfer privately owned goods into common ownership they worsen the conditions of wage earners . . . they rob them of all hope and opportunity of increasing their possessions and bettering their condition . . . the dream of equality would become the reality of equal want and degradation for all."

Religion is one thing, reformism another. When they are mixed and fed to workers, the concoction only serves to perpetuate the misery it is purported to alleviate, becoming nothing but the solace and sedative that spreads false hope and apathy in equal measure.

John Bissett