Letter to the Editor
I am responding to the article in the February 25 issue “Socialism and private property”.
I believe this is incorrect and misleading information.
What is described in the article is actually Communism.
I know people who live in socialistic countries. They do own their own property.Many services that benefit all people are run by the government, such as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, energy for electricity, care of roads and streets.
There are still privately owned businesses such as hotels, motels, clothing stores, restaurants, home goods stores.
Perhaps someone could clarify the difference between Socialism and Communism.
When I visited friends in Austria, they took a dim view of some Americans who don’t understand the difference.
I am in favor of educating people so they do know the difference.
Jeanne Bauhs
Response
Hi Jeanne, thanks for your letter. You raise a great point. “Socialism” is one of those terms that is used by different people in different times and places with a wide range of meanings.
In Pope Leo’s time, it was more or less synonymous with Communism.
And since the article was commenting on Pope Leo’s encyclical letter on the rights of workers, I used the term in his sense, although I was careful to point out what he meant by it, which was the abolition of private property.
After the time of Pope Leo XIII, socialism split and went in two different directions.
A more extreme form developed called Communism, which advocates unrelenting class warfare as a means of abolishing private property.
A moderate form developed in the other direction, which, in the words of Pope Pius XI, “not only professes the rejection of violence but modifies and tempers to some degree, if it does not reject entirely, the class struggle and the abolition of private ownership” (Qadragesimo Anno 113).
Pope Pius goes on to acknowledge that the more moderate forms of socialism in fact come very close to Christian principles of social justice, even including things like state control of certain kinds of property that cannot be entrusted to private individuals without danger to the general welfare.
However, although faithful Christians and moderate socialists today may share many common goals in working towards a more just society, socialism and Christianity remain fundamentally incompatible at a deeper level.
For according to the Christian Gospel, the ultimate purpose of all human activities is the glory of God and the joy of Heaven; whereas socialism treats material and economic well-being as the most important things.
That’s why he concludes that “no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist” (120).
Dr. John Joy
Office of Evangelization and Catechesis, Diocese of Madison