For the previous posts on this series click here.

"It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism." G.K. Chesterton in "Three Foes of the Family" found in the collection of his essays The Well and the Shallows.

Today's post: Chesterton's religion and his economics.

G. K. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, and he took the doctrines and practices of his faith seriously, including their implications.

His explanation "Why I Am a Catholic" is reprinted here. Some excerpts:

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.


If you wish to pursue Chesterton's attraction to the Roman Catholic Church, see his work The Catholic Church and Conversion which can be found here.

One of the truths, or perhaps better, one aspect of the Truth, that Chesterton wrote he heard in the Roman Catholic teaching, was economic truth. To quote at length from The Catholic Church and Conversion:

We did not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments or love of our own possessions; but we were quite convinced that social justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically. I therefore became a Socialist in the old days of the Fabian Society; and so I think did everybody else worth talking about except the Catholics. And the Catholics were an insignificant handful, the dregs of a dead religion, essentially a superstition. About this time appeared the Encyclical on Labour by Leo XIII; and nobody in our really well informed world took much notice of it. Certainly the Pope spoke as strongly as any Socialist could speak when he said that Capitalism "laid on the toiling millions a yoke little better than slavery." But as the Pope was not a Socialist it was obvious that he had not read the right Socialist books and pamphlets; and we could not expect the poor old gentleman to know what every young man knew by this time--that Socialism was inevitable. That was a long time ago, and by a gradual process, mostly practical and political, which I have no intention of describing here, most of us began to realise that Socialism was not inevitable; that it was not really popular; that it was not the only way, or even the right way, of restoring the rights of the poor. We have come to the conclusion that the obvious cure for private property being given to the few is to see that it is given to the many; not to see that it is taken away from everybody or given in trust to the dear good politicians. Then, having discovered that fact as a fact, we look back at Leo XIII and discover in his old and dated document, of which we took no notice at the time, that he was saying then exactly what we are saying now. "As many as possible of the
working classes should become owners."


Continued below.

Chesterton here refers to Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, known in English as "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor." In this encyclical the pope sketches the modern problem: the "ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century" and so in the situation of modern industrialism there is "no other protective organization" for working men. Since "public institutions and the laws have set aside the ancient religion" the "hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition" has oppressed the workingman.

Leo XIII then goes on the examine the answer commonly given to this problem: Socialism. He finds this answer lacking because it destroys the right of private property. Private property, he reasons, is an implicit right of workingmen because their wages are their own and so would be anything purchased with those wages, such as land. The State has no right to confiscate what a man has worked to earn: "Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body." And, since the family is "older than any State," it also has rights which the State cannot with justice take away. Therefore, fathers who have provided for their children in their lifetimes, have the right to transmit productive property to their children as inheritance so that the children may provide for themselves and for their own children. All of this Leo XII argues, must take place within proper moral limits That is, private property is not an absolute right in isolation, but ownership and use must conform to the divine moral order. To phrase it another way, the Right of Property is not the same as the Right of Property Use. Property must never be used in an unjust way.

The pope then goes on to argue that it is only the (Roman Catholic) Church that can provide the guidance necessary to alleviate the modern social injustice of the industrial age. Among other teachings the modern age needs to heed, is that the State is to promote Justice for All, which includes the working classes. Indeed, since the working classes constitute the majority of the population, a just and wise State cannot ignore them as it does its duty of promoting the Common Good. A related truth is that the Ruler is to rule for the benefit of the Ruled, therefore government policy must be beneficial for the working masses, which since they are poor, stand in need of the protection of the State. Another truth is that workers, precisely since they are human beings, must not be ground down and destroyed by the labor imposed on them by the greed of owners. And, since all social relations are governed by God's Justice, wages must be sufficient to allow a workingman to support himself and his family modestly. Setting or accepting wages lower than this is unjust.

And, the paragraph so important for Chesterton's affirmation of Distributism:

If a workman's wages be suffient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.

The next paragraph extols the benefits of widespread ownership, and makes it clear that Leo XIII is thinking primarily in terms of the ownership of productive land. In other words, the answer to the problems of the industrial age is to create a society made up primarily of small farmers. He also makes the point that the State should not absorb private ownership through taxation.

In order to help effect just wages and condition, and to provide charity and security, workmen should form unions. The encyclical then continues with arguments supporting the formation of "lesser societies" within the "larger society." These associations of workingmen should be Roman Catholic.

For the full text of Rerum Novarum click here.

Chesterton (and his fellow Catholic writer Belloc) then, simply are urging the implementation of Pope Leo XIII's teaching when they reject unregulated industrial capitalism in favor of an economy made of up small owners of farms and shops and manufacturing: in other words, when they urge Distributism rather than Capitalism or Socialism.

For a brief modern urging of Distributism, see this review of Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity by Peter Westmore.