The Church and Labor

The six tracts are The Church and Labor The Church and Working Men The Church and Working Women The Church and the Working Child The Church and Labor Unions The Church and Social Work Let us consider this: "The fierce struggle which convulses modern society, the struggle between wealth obstinately clinging to privilege, and poverty challenging that privilege in passionate indignation, has raised questions of the profoundest moral consequence, questions affecting the lives and the consciences of every individual in every nation. Liberalism on the one hand and Socialism on the other have formulated codes of doctrine which are completely opposed to God's law, and which the Church is imperatively called on to condemn and combat. "Liberalism, perhaps the more dangerous of the two, exaggerates the importance of individual liberty. It regards man as in the first place naturally good, and in the second, naturally impelled to improve his circumstances. It therefore demands full liberty for him. It expects that the result will be the improvement of the individual and at the same time the improvement of society, the aggregate of individuals. Its general tendency is to consider each man as a being apart from others, detaching him from his social life and abstracting from his social relations. "Against this the Church teaches that condemned by such liberty is utterly subversive of the Church. human society, that it leads to anarchy. She teaches that man has duties, natural and essential duties to his neighbour; that man is to attain his final happiness by acts which have an effect on those surrounding him; that these acts call for moral control, and that this moral regulation is all the more necessary as man's nature is vitiated and inclined to evil. She teaches that man is called on to fulfil his numerous obligations as a member of the various natural and necessary societies in which God places him, the family, the city, the nation; that he is subject to the authority which directs each of these societies to its proper good; she teaches that it is her prerogative to declare men's duties to each other in these societies, and the moral rcla tions of these societies one to the other. Human freedom thus limited by social obligations becomes true liberty."