Thomas said that the fundamental objective of natural law is that the good be done, and evil avoided. In its economic dimensions, this approach is guided by the biblical understanding that God gave the earth to all human beings in common.
The law codes of the Hebrew Bible, defended by the prophets, established a comprehensive system of economic security and restoration based on the principle of the earth being a common gift.
This included provisions for the control and remission of debt, the release of slaves, and the periodic return of alienated lands in order to restore family stability and prevent concentrated wealth. For Thomas, private property was notably an integral feature of the common good, but it had a twofold nature of private possession and common use. Although seemingly a bold departure from the dominant laissez-faire ethos of the period, the interventionist thrust of Rerum Novarum was in fact deeply rooted in Catholic thought.
The National Catholic War Council had been formed in , and when the Council received accreditation as an official government war agency in , many Catholics began to see the importance of having a national organization to represent their views in the corridors of power.
There was a growing sense that Catholic teaching was convergent with American ideals, and, even as President Wilson signed the armistice ending the war, conversations had begun about how to continue the work of the war council in another form.
As McShane stresses, this connection was meant to align the new age of social reconstruction with the spirit of the great emancipator. The program contained a set of immediate reforms, including the establishment of a legal minimum wage, public housing for workers, labor participation in industrial management, and social insurance for illness, disability, unemployment, and old age, funded by a levy on industry.
That summer he published a commentary on Quadragesimo Anno in the American Ecclesiastical Review , highlighting its important contributions. Charged with negotiating fair wages, hours, prices, and business practices, the councils would replace pure market forces with mandatory bargaining.
The development of Catholic thought over the decades before Quadragesimo Anno was dramatic. Yet without the transcendental perspective of Catholic teaching, the natural-right defense of business domination would not have been so dramatically weakened during the Progressive Age, as Franklin D. Roosevelt would implicitly acknowledge in an important speech toward the end of his first presidential campaign.
Title I of the act created government powers to establish and enforce sectoral business codes for setting wages, hours, bargaining rules, and fair business practices the act was thrown out by the Supreme Court in Ryan was appointed to a three-person advisory panel of the National Recovery Administration, the agency that implemented the law, and he was subsequently a fixture in other counsels of the New Deal, serving on numerous committees and also publicly defending Roosevelt on many fronts.
Then, famously, in a national radio speech late in the presidential campaign, he defended the president against charges of communism issuing from the Union Party campaign of William Lemke. The populist radio priest Charles Coughlin formed the Union Party to challenge Roosevelt in , and it was feared that he would succeed in his goal of engineering a massive diversion of Catholic votes from the Democratic ticket, throwing the election to the Republican Alf Landon.
Catholic social teaching had revolutionized the moral landscape of capitalism, not only by reinforcing the progressive critique of laissez-faire constitutionalism but, more importantly, by stealing the thunder of higher-law reasoning and restoring its communal roots.
It was a turning point that made the welfare state morally necessary and, because of that, politically possible. Crucially, however, he obscures what actually happened to the common good in that era.
Sexual freedom, extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism did not merely replace the common good as a normative framework. It shifted the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached individual of liberal philosophy, regardless of economic position or need.
The individualistic social liberalism that came to dominate decades later clearly weakened, and in some ways fundamentally attacked, the familial and communal understanding of rights that shaped New Deal social policy. The protection of the family and the home from economic tyranny was no longer a certain or even desirable policy objective in an era of individual liberation marshaled against the traditional culture of family and community. Not coincidentally, as the common good disappeared from the discourse of rights in the s, big business re-established its dominance in American politics, and families and communities received no new protection from the government even as older protections came under attack.
The family living wage paid by a substantial majority of U. Although many mothers initially went into the work force willingly and happily, in search of more variety and accomplishment in their lives, today a majority of working mothers do not view employment positively.
According to survey data reported by Public Agenda in , 80 percent of mothers would prefer to stay at home with their children if they could. Of course, the profound lack of employer and government support for working mothers in the United States contributes to this attitude; how much so is a central point of contention between conservatives and feminists.
The resulting extraordinary changes in family life have gone almost completely unaccounted for in American economic policy. Instead of helping families, government power helped big business extort more hours for less pay and less security, and it did so without any interference from the discourse of rights.
Reviving a secular version of the common good does not make it a strong defense. It will not guide us from chaos to community. The common good commands objective change in the balance of economic power. It is not a unifying force but one that divides right from wrong by a unifying standard. It is a faith with poor friends and wealthy enemies. Within the last 30 years, the struggle between the common good and competing principles of property right and economic efficiency was enjoined again, by a resurgent ruling class.
While they cannot succeed in returning to the good old days of laissez-faire constitutionalism, they have succeeded in stalling and, in some respects, rolling back the legislative progress secured in the s. Catholic teaching recognized the evil that arose from releasing individuals from the moral law. In the background to the New Deal, its whole thrust was to replenish that moral law in binding force against destructive economic power.
It was aborted again as the spirit of Lochner was reborn in the Reagan-Bush era. Ryan and King and the millions they helped had little doubt of what was at stake. Has abandoning their faith profited justice in the decades since? Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support.
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