The Catholic Left

No good Roman Catholic doubts the importance of belief. And he has little excuse for doubt about how his beliefs apply to his relationships with God or his neighbor. Can a good Roman Catholic, then, approve of Communism? The answer is no. Can he wholeheartedly endorse free private enterprise? The answer is still no.* Diocesan study groups and Catholic labor schools are doing their best to fight Communism with something more than exorcism and epithets. Last week one of the leaders in this field, Jesuit Father William J. Smith, director of Brooklyn's Crown Heights Labor School, explained his church's position: "Business is not the property of its owners; it is a society in which stockholders and employees are social partners and must work together. Capitalism and the right to a profit the church does not condemn per se, but it does condemn unbridled free enterprise."

*In 1931, Pope Pius XI said explicitly in his encyclical, Quadragesima Anno: "Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualistic economic teaching. . . . Free competition . . . clearly cannot direct economic life. . . ."

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