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Toby Terrar, “A ‘Preferential Option for
the Rich’: Moral Theology among English Roman-Catholic Gentry during the Civil
War Period of the 1640s.” This article originall appeared in NST: Nature,
Society and Thought (Minneapolis), vol. 4, (no. 1/2, Jan./Apr. 1991), pp.
127-150.
Liberation theology in recent years
has helped turn social justice doctrine in some sectors of the Catholic
community on its head. For example, the U.S. National Conference of Catholic
Bishops' Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on
Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, (1986, paragraphs 52, 54)
states that "the preferential option is for the poor," not the rich:
Though
in the Gospels and in the New Testament as a whole the offer of salvation is
extended to all peoples, Jesus takes the side of those most in need, who in
biblical terms are the poor. The example of Jesus imposes a prophetic mandate
to see things from the side of the poor. . . Our action in behalf of justice in
our world proceeds from the conviction that, despite the power of injustice and
violence, life has been fundamentally changed by the entry of Jesus into human
history.
A look at the history of Catholic
social teaching is helpful for an appreciation of the advances represented by
this seeing things "from the side of the poor." The social justice
theology taught by the English Catholic gentry and their counterparts on the
European continent at the time Catholics were first settling in North America
illustrates a group for whom the preferential option was for the rich. These
Catholic landlords and their mentality concerning social justice are the focus
of this article.
What is offered here is a paradigm
or what Max Weber (1949, p. 90) called an ideal type of the gentry thinking. An
ideal type is a simplified version which accentuates certain elements of
reality without giving nuances and subtleties. The gentry beliefs outlined here
were also shared by many Protestant gentry and were rejected by some Catholic
gentry, especially the agrarian "improvers," and those clergy who
identified with the ordinary Catholics. And as would be expected, the Catholic
laboring people, who composed a majority of the Catholic population, were often
at odds with the gentry and their beliefs. It is in the nature of ideal types
not to be full or unique pictures, but they are employed by scholars because
they are a useful tool in getting at reality. There was probably no single
individual that embodied every aspect of the type outlined here, and even if
there were, this article makes no pretense at being a full, well-rounded social
history of the gentry. Nevertheless the ideal type discussed here, it is
argued, is fruitful in showing a tradition which is under attack by liberation
theologians and against which the Bishops' pastoral took a stand.
It could be argued that it is
anachronistic to judge the seventeenth-century gentry on the basis of a
twentieth-century idea about wealth distribution. In defense of the present
approach, it should be noted, first, that there was not a single aspect of the
gentry's theology that did not receive criticism from seventeenth century
laboring people and those among the gentry who identified with productive
labor. The term liberation theology is recent, but the content has probably
been around since the beginning of class exploitation. Seventeenth-century
English "liberation theology," as reflected in the works of those
like Thomas White, Edmund Bolton, and Henry Holden, is the subject of a
separate article. To label as anachronistic an effort to find a lesson for the
present from history and to reduce history to antiquarianism is to reject what most
historians have been doing since the time of the Ancient Greeks, Romans, and
Hebrews.
Secondly, in defense of the present
approach, it would be an anachronism not to judge the seventeenth-century on
the basis of wealth distribution. During the McCarthy period pressure was put
on the universities, the church, the media, the trade unions, and the political
parties to gloss over class differences and wealth distribution. Some people
lost their jobs, some were put in prison, and nearly everyone was censored on
the issue. The fear and ignorance which this brought is still sometimes a
problem. The seventeenth-century gentry and those who opposed them were not
inclined to censor themselves when discussing class and wealth distribution. To
do so today would be anachronistic.
In addition to the issue of being
anachronistic, it might be contended that much of the evidence here as to
gentry beliefs is from the pamphlets of their clergy. Perhaps the clergy and
the gentry thought differently. It is accurate that there were differences both
within the gentry and within the clergy and between some of the clergy and
gentry. One sector of the clergy in the north and west of England identified
with and ministered to the ordinary Catholics to a greater or lesser degree. But
there was a larger sector of the clergy who identified with the gentry and
became in-house chaplains to them. Two-thirds of these clergy were from gentry
families themselves and their ministry was confined to the districts and the
gentry families within which they had been raised. It could still be contended
that these manor-house chaplains thought differently than the gentry. But those
who have studied the relationship, such as Christopher Haigh, whose findings
will be quoted in this article, do not reach this conclusion.
In contrast to the ideal type to be
discussed here, the traditional historical treatments might lead one to believe
the seventeenth-century English Catholics were the persecuted poor and their
social justice theology took a stand in favor of the poor. Typical titles are Troubles of our Catholic Forfathers (Morris 1877) and The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell
(Caraman 1966). They emphasize that English Catholics were denied civil rights,
such as the franchise, the right to attend universities and practice in the
professions, and that they were subjected to special taxes and onerous fines,
and that their clergy were jailed, deported, and even executed.
Since at least World War II some
Catholics have shifted away from this "siege" history. Recusancy
fines were a reality for some Catholics, but studies by Peter Newman (1979,
148-149) and Hugh Aveling (1970, p. 87) have shown that, because of partial
conformity and the unwillingness of local officials to enforce the penal laws
against their neighbors, persecution for religion was a relatively unimportant
aspect of Catholic existence. Newman (1979, 149) remarks that the view "of
all Catholics as committed suffers in the cause of the faith is one more myth
that the history of the Catholic community can do without." Most Catholics
were laboring people and for them economic justice was the problem. The
"persecution" was more often that conducted by Catholic and
Protestant landlords against the Catholic and non-Catholic tenantry. The
vehicles of such persecution were economic institutions, the law, education,
and theology.
The teaching of contempt for labor
and laboring people that was reflected in gentry theology was part of the
persecution. In some instances the contempt was blatant, as when landlords and
their clergy ridiculed tenants as "base-born and lowly," called labor
a vile activity, refused basic ecclesiastical services to the them, and advised
gentry sons and daughters against marrying them. The contempt, however, was
probably mainly embodied in doctrines that diverted laboring people from their
political rights and economic justice. These doctrines taught that God had, in
present-day terms, a "preferential option for the rich." These doctrines
included the idea that God had established the landlord system, that it was a
virtue for a small number of landlords to monopolize the land and draw away
much of the annual wealth produced by the tenantry, and the idea that
disobedience or rebellion against the established order was sinful.
This article is divided into four
parts. The first part will mention the economic basis of the gentry's theology.
That is, it will show the degree to which the Catholic gentry profited from the
established order. Then follows a description of their economic theology--their
teachings about themselves (second part), tenants (third part), and economic
justice (fourth part).
ECONOMIC
BACKGROUND. The Catholic gentry or "quality" as they sometimes
designated themselves, were a numerically small but economically significant
sector of the Catholic community in seventeenth-century England. They were also
part of the larger English landlord system. In this system they owned most of
the land. Through birth and connections at court they also had monopolies on
the stewardship of crown leases, patents, and a hand in manufacturing, foreign
trade, and mining.
At the beginning of the seventeenth
century a relatively high percentage of England's land was monopolized by 75
peers (dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons). The peerage was established
by law as a separate order and confined to about 125 families. Much of the
remaining profitable soil was owned by less than 20,000 gentry or one percent
of England's 4.5 million population (King 1936, pp. 18, 30; Holmes 1977;
Thompson 1966, 513; Lindert 1982). They took in the form of rent and the
surplus value produced by wage labor about one-third of the annual wealth
produced by tenants and labor (King 1936, p. 36; Brenner 1985, p. 31). The
non-peerage landholding families were what Edmund Bolton ([1629] 1975, p. 45)
at the time called "lower class nobility". One scholar remarks that
"the peerage in England was for all purposes at one with the gentry as a
whole," rather than "a class apart" (Laslett 1971, p. 40; see
also, Mathew 1948, p. 39).
It could be added that the Catholic
gentry during the Civil War were for all purposes at one with the Protestant
gentry, not a class apart. As Brian Manning (1973, p. 126) puts it in speaking
of Catholic Royalists:
The
Catholics who became Royalists did not do so because they were Catholics, but
for the same reason as the protestants. . . The Catholic support for the king
drew its impetus from the nobility and gentry. Lower-class Catholics, in so far
as they escaped the domination of royalist landlords, did not readily identify
their interests with those of the king's party.
An indication of just how well the
Catholic gentry were doing under the established system and thus why they
supported the crown and landlord-biased theological doctrines can be seen by
looking at the income which they received. At the top were those who sat in the
House of Lords. According to Thomas Wilson (1936, p. 52; see also, Klotz 1943,
217-219), the yearly rental income of barons and viscounts averaged about
£3,000 and of earls £5,000. This contrasted with the £5 or £10 income average
for a majority of the population. Fifteen percent (20 out of 125) of the peers
were Catholics (Gillow 1902, 1:68-70, 2:138-142, 5:515; Stephen and Lee 1922,
1:616; Newman 1981, pp. 6, 81, 113, 259, 286, 288, 331, 350, 352). Among the
lesser nobility (knights, baronets, esquires, gentlemen), Brian Magee (1938,
pp. 138-149) in an early study found a minimum of 262 Catholics. More recent
studies have found five or ten times this number of Catholic lesser nobility
(Blackwood 1978, pp. 27-28, 30, 38; Cliffe 1969, p. 186; Watts 1975, pp. 82-83;
Phillips 1974, p. 46). The rental income for knights averaged £650, for
esquires £450, and for gentlemen £280 (King 1936, p. 31; Stone 1965, p. 117).
These gentry were less than 5 percent of the recusant Catholic population
estimated at 60,000 (Bossy 1975, 188, 422; see also Magee 1938, pp. 205, 207;
Mosler 1980, pp. 259, 261).
The Catholics from the greater and
lesser nobility received the housing, nutritional, educational, and political
benefits which land ownership brought. Many of the Catholic gentry who
partially conformed to the established church attended Oxford, Cambridge, and
the inns of court, and were elected to the House of Commons (Newman 1981, pp.
7, 21-22, 92, 211, 313, 361-362, 377, 419, 441) and to lesser offices, such as
sheriff, constable, and justice of the peace (Newman 1981, pp. 73, 167, 199,
220-221, 253, 262, 263, 291, 408; Havran 1962, p. 69; Jordan 1932, p. 175;
Anstruther 1953, p. 451). They had a share in leases of crown (national)
resources, in the sale of political offices and in the royally granted
manufacturing and trading monopolies which existed on many commodities
including butter, herring, salt, beer, soap, coal and alum (Hill 1955, pp. 42,
50). Nicholas Crispe, for example, was the Catholic son of a London alderman.
He had a monopoly on the slave trade with Guinea that was said, probably with
great exaggeration, to net him £140,000 annually (Clancy 1971, 78; Crispe 1882,
1:13, 32, 34; Rushworth 1772, 4:53; Blake 1949). Another Catholic, John Wintour
held a monopoly on royal leases at Lidsey, Gloucestershire in the Forest of
Deane. These leases involved some 18,000 acres of timber, iron mills and coal
mines (Newman 1981, p. 419; Wintour 1660; Ashton 1960). The revenues from these
leases, together with his shares in fishing and other companies, were so great
that he acted as a financier for the crown during the 1630s when the king ruled
without parliamentary revenue appropriations (Stephen and Lee 1922, 21:685).
Even some of the Catholic clergy who
served as chaplains to the Royalists were beneficiaries of the patronage
system. Tobie Matthew, for example, was secretary to Thomas Wentworth
(1593-1641, Earl of Strafford) during the 1630s. As lord deputy of Ireland
(1632-1638) Wentworth led a policy of coercing the country into obedience. He
was the chief advisor to Charles I in urging similar tactics against the Scots
in 1639 (Mathew 1907, p. 325; Mathew 1950, p. 85). Another priest who served
the Royalists as a pamphleteer, Walter Montagu benefited from the patronage
system. He was the son of Henry Montagu (1563-1642), who was the Earl of
Manchester, chief justice of the court of king's bench, and head of the
Virginia Commission in 1624. Walter had patronage under the Catholic queen,
Henrietta Maria, and of the Queen's mother, Marie de Medicis (Gillow 1902,
5:73-80).
It was such Catholic lords, members
of Parliament, office holders, and monopolists who served as officers in the
royal army. About one-third of the officers in the king's northern army were
Catholic (Dures 1983, p. 86; Newman 1977, 29). Of the 500 royal officers
killed, 200 were Catholic (Kiernan 1951, 13; Lindley 1968, p. 249).
Royalist Catholic thinking was
recorded by the 149 Catholic gentry who headed the collection committee
established to help finance the royal army in its 1639 invasion of Scotland.
The pamphlet to which they all signed their names asked Catholics to donate
"some considerable sum of money freely and cheerfully" to prove their
gratitude to the king, who "so often interested himself in the
solicitation of our benefits" (Henrietta Maria, Montagu et al [1639] 1640,
p. 3; Newman 1981, pp. 40, 63, 134, 138, 374, 388.) Exhibiting the same idea,
the Catholic Thomas Brudenell (1577-1663) quoted Henry de Bracton (d. 1268) in
stating his reason for being a Royalist, "Let's keep the Crown glorious
and entire, the more one's safety and renown" (Wake 1954, 128).
Many Catholic gentry fought for the
established order not only because they enjoyed its benefits, but because they
feared their position would be reduced with a parliamentary victory. During the
1630s the crown had ruled without calling a parliament. It had relied for its
funding on illegal levies that went heavier against recusants. Catholic gentry
expected even worse would come with a victory of the anti-Catholic parliament.
Their fear was at times well-founded. When Parliament took over the national
and local governments during the first Civil War between 1642 and 1646, many
Catholic landlords were financially and politically hard hit (Stephen and Lee
1922, 5:95; Habakkuk 1969, 131). Which is not to deny that Protestants also
suffered. Typical was William Sheldon (d. 1649) a Worcestershire Catholic
Royalist. He described his situation:
In
December 1643 my house at Beoley was burned to the ground, and all my goods and
cattle plundered besides the incurable loss of my chiefest evidence and court
rolls consumed in the fire (Barnard 1936, pp. 49-50).
GENTRY
THEOLOGY. As has been noted, Catholic landlords benefited from the
existing order in which most of the people were tenants and wage workers who
paid rent to the few who were gentry. Like their political and military
activity, their religious beliefs included a defense of the gentry system.
Their beliefs were disseminated
through a network of priests, schools, and books. By the time of the Civil War
there were ten Catholic colleges and convents on the continent established and
financed through the tuition paid by the gentry for their children. Because of
the cost, most ordinary Catholics could not attend. The schools had been
operating since the 1590s and may have had as many as 1,000 students in some
years (Courtsey 1963; Guilday 1914, 1:28-29, 40, 111; Scaglione 1986, p. 62;
Williams 1986, pp. xii, 13, 42, 46). Almost 5,000 graduates became priests and
nuns in the first-half of the seventeenth century. During the 1640s, 700
graduates were serving in the ministry in England (Bossy 1975, pp. 209, 216,
227, 422). In a Catholic population that might have been as low as 60,000, this
meant there was a relatively high percentage who were formally trained in
religion.
Probate and other records of gentry
library holdings indicate that for those who did not go abroad, there was a
large quantity of English Catholic and imported Catholic imprints (Hibbard
1980, 33; Clark 1976, pp. 95-111). Their books also penetrated Protestant
libraries (Mathew 1948, p. 83). Seven hundred of the seventeenth-century
Catholic titles have recently been reprinted (Rogers 1970-1979; Clancy 1974;
Allison 1956). They were devotional, controversial, and "high
theology" works by those like Richard Smith, Lawrence Anderton, Luis Molina,
S.J., Francis de Sales, and Leonard Lessius, S.J. Except for the devotional
works, the readers were probably not ordinary Catholics but the gentry and
those among the clergy who ended up as in-house chaplains to the gentry. The
thinking of the in-house clergy, as seen in the material which they wrote and
read, seems to have presupposed and incorporated to varying degrees the
gentry's economic mentality. Christopher Haigh (1981, 146) remarks concerning
house chaplains:
The
brand of religion which appealed to illiterate peasants offered little
satisfaction for the priestly products of the seminaries, Jesuit colleges, and
reformed Benedictine monasteries, who preferred the spiritual life of an
educated household.
Sermons and conferences were
vehicles for communicating the gentry's message to the young and illiterate. A
royalist Catholic described the influence which sermons and conferences had in
forming his beliefs, "My duty to God cannot be complied with, without an
exact performance of my duty to my sovereign. This doctrine was instilled into
my youth by catechism and confirmed to my riper years by sermons and
conferences" (Anonymous 1660, p. 1).
As one would expect, the Catholic
books, sermons, schools, and priests taught that God intended landlords to
dominate over the majority. One pamphlet put it:
O you
noble men, God uses you as Adam in terrestrial paradise, he suffereth you to
eat the corn at ease, which others have sowed, and the wine which others
pressed; he causes your meat to come to your table, as if it were borne by
certain invisible engines; he holds the elements, creatures, and men in breath,
to supply your necessities (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:16).
According to the gentry's theology,
God wanted the status quo because it was a reward to them for being morally
superior to the tenant class: "Our ancestors who raised their titles upon
noble actions were men of heaven" (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:182; see
also Duby 1980, p. 67). Landlords were "types" of the heavenly
"Lord," the "image and splendor of the Lord's divinity."
Like the angels, they were a race mainly of the spirit and the intellect, not
of matter (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 3:1). They lived in the body but it was
as if they were spirits (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:301). Their blood, unlike
common blood, had a sacred aspect; the royal blood could even cure the sick
(Hanson 1970, pp. 76, 88).
The culmination of the landlord
system in the court was said to be a "type" of the court around God's
heavenly throne (Duby, 1980, p. 54; Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 3:69). Charles I
was customarily addressed by many Catholic and Protestant gentry as
"sacred" (Anstruther 1953, p. 463; Smuts 1987, 230). The priest
Walter Montagu (1654, pp. 87-88) suggested that contemplation of the English court
was a good way to learn about heaven:
From
the riches of court men may make optic glasses through which they do the easier
take the high celestial glories; and surely the sight of our minds is much
helped by such material interests, in the speculation of spiritualities.
Those
who held that monarchy derived from purely historical causes were denounced as
blasphemous (Smuts 1987, p. 230).
In the writings of the Catholic
gentry one can find the idea that God had constituted their blood a separate
race, distinct from ordinary people. This idea of a separate race seemingly
paralleled the type of racial beliefs based on national origins and color which
resulted in those of African origin not being allowed at the time to attend
various Catholic colleges and enter some religious orders (Palmer 1976, 54).
The blood which flowed in the gentry's veins was said to be the source of their
supposed beauty, impetuosity, and martial qualities. One had to have noble
blood in order to ride and control a horse well. This was the belief of the
Nicholas Caussin, S.J. who wrote The Holy Court, or the
Christian Institution of Men of Quality with Examples of those who in Court
have Flourished in Sanctity ([1634, etc.] 1970). Bibliographer Joseph
Gillow (1902, 3:195) remarks, "This work was for many years in great
favor, especially among Catholics." The following illustrates Caussin's
([1634, etc.] 1977, 1:7) racial beliefs:
Great
men have many more talents from God, for the traffic of virtues than others
have. The bodies of nobles and gentlemen are ordinarily better composed, and as
it were more delicately molded by the artful hands of nature. They have their
senses more subtle, their spirits more agile, their members better
proportioned, their garb more gentle and grace more accomplished, and all these
prepare a safe shop for the soul to exercise her functions with greater
liberty.
The history of these beliefs about
the racial superiority of the gentry went back at least to the slave system of
classical antiquity (Guibert 1964, p. 575; Wood 1978, pp. 3-4, 142). The early
Christian writers found in the libraries of and cited by seventeenth-century
landlords as authorities were themselves landlords and their dependents (Cepari
[1627], 1974, p. 347; Holmes 1982, p. 180; Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:81,
2:207, 252, 305). These included the fifth century Macrobius in Saturnalia, Pseudo-Dionysius ([1899] 1976, pp. 13, 440)
in The Celestial Hierarchy, Augustine in The City of God, and the sixth century Gregory the Great
(Pope Gregory I) in The Pastoral Care.
Probably the leading authority on
the superiority of the gentry and related issues was Thomas Aquinas who was
himself from a gentry family (Weisheipl 1974, pp. 7-8, 15-18). The Council of Trent
(1545-1564) had sparked a revival of interest in him (Schroeder 1941, p. 176).
Some clergy, such as those in the Society of Jesus, were required by the
constitution which established their order and the plan of studies for their
schools, that is their Ratio Studiorum of 1599, to
made Aquinas's theology the norm. The Ratio
stated, "It is not enough for the professor to state the opinion of
learned men and reserve his own; he must either defend the views of Aquinas or
omit the question entirely" (Fitzpatrick 1933, p. 164; Donohue 1963, p.
78). All students in the Jesuit colleges apparently had a copy of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Cepari [1627], 1974, p. 337). Aloysius
Gonzaga, S.J., the son of a nobleman, was held up as a model student for
English students. His biographer stated that he kept no other book except those
by Aquinas and that a holy picture of Aquinas was the object of his devotion
(Cepari [1627] 1974, pp. 258, 284). Aquinas summarized for the thousands of
English Catholics, who studied in the continental schools, the earlier Greek,
Roman, and Christian writers. In his Summa Theologiae
(1268-1273), for example, Aquinas quoted Gregory the Great 400 times (Baasten
1986, p. 5).
Aquinas's economic message centered
on maintaining the existing order; this was heaven's first law (Aquinas 1935,
pp. 32-33, bk. I, chs. 1-2; Scarisbrick 1974, p. 27). Landlords collected the
rent as "God's elected stewards of His goods" (Aquinas 1964,
41:221-224, pt. 2a-2ae, q. 117, art. 1, ad. 1). Heaven was the ideal that
should be imitated on earth, a place both of contemplation (mental prayer, the
"beatific vision") and of military orders of angels, but not of
productive labor (Aquinas 1964, 14:126-127, pt. 1a, q. 108, art. 2; ibid. 41:222-223, pt. 2a-2ae, q. 117, art. 2, ad. 2;
Aquinas 1902, p. vii; Aquinas 1961, bk. 1, sect. 30; Loyola 1951, p. 45
paragraph 98; Persons [1582, etc.] 1970, 41:95-96, 510). The further from the
material, the closer to God. Robert Bellarmine, S.J. ([1616] 1970, p. 166; see
also, Kuntz 1987, p. 111), a widely read Thomistic theologian of the period,
commented:
Things
are so much the more noble, and eminent, by how much the more pure, and more
abstracted from matter. This we see first in corporeal things: for water is
superior to earth in nature, because purer. On the same account, air is
superior to water, fire to air, and heaven to fire. We see the same thing in
spiritual things. For the understanding is superior to sense, because sense has
a bodily organ, which the understanding needs not. The understanding of an
angel is superior to that of man, because man needs the ministry of imagination
and fancy, which an angel does not. Among angels, those are of a superior rank,
who understand most things by the general species. God, only is a pure act, and
stands in need of nothing without himself, neither organ, imagination, nor
species. No, not the presence of any object without himself, but his essence
itself is all things to him. . . On these accounts I say the divine nature is
most high and sublime, and God can by no means have an equal.
In the pamphlets written and
translated by the seventeenth-century gentry, both Catholic and Protestant, the
heavenly order was held to resemble the Platonic ideal--changeless and
motionless. This was the point of the Catholic royalist army officer, Vivian
Molyneux, in his translation of A Treatise of the
Differences between the Temporal and Eternal (Nieremberg 1672, pp. 52,
228, 261, 371). Prayer and religious practices, and even public service,
meaning ruling and soldiering, were compatible with the Platonic ideal, but not
manual labor. God himself and the angels were warriors. Catholic gentry like
Garrat Barry praised themselves for "their excellence of war-like
virtue," what one critic calls "heroic laziness" (Barry [1634]
1978, intro. pp. 2-3, text p. 1; Gurevich 1985, p. 259; Nieremberg 1672, p.
364). Many of the Catholic officers in the royal army had earlier been
regularly employed as mercenaries in the Catholic army of Spain (Gillow 1902,
1:76-77; Parker 1972; Newman 1981, pp. 41, 88, 102, 153, 214, 341, 354, 401).
Gentry participation in sports such as horse racing, hunting, and fishing was
described as virtuous because it was a preparation for war (Persons [1596]
1824, p. 31; Duby 1980, p. 54).
VIEW OF LABOR.
In their theology the gentry believed God had made the existing order. In this
order, landlords were those for whom God had a preferential option; God had
less love for tenants. Laboring people were intended to have little or no role
in society. The authority for such theology went back to the early writers such
as Pope Gregory the Great, who had taught that God made producers lowly. God
did this in order to punish them for being sinners. Gregory in The Pastoral Care, wrote that tenants were predetermined
to evil. It was because of their propensity to sin that they had to pay rent:
Sin
(culpa) subordinates some to others in accordance with the variable order of
merits; this diversity, which arises from vice is established by divine
judgment. Man is not intended to live in equality (Gregory 1950, 11:60, part 2,
chapter 6).
In
another work Gregory remarked, "Nature begets all men equal, but by reason
of their varying merits, a mysterious dispensation sets some beneath others.
This diversity in condition, which is due to sin, is rightly ordained by the
judgment of God" (Gregory 1844, 21:22). Gregory was from a Roman landlord
family. Even as pope he resided on his family's property and owned slaves
(Phillips 1985, p. 60).
It could be argued that Gregory did
not have a negative attitude toward laboring people. What he meant was not that
laboring people were sinners and landlords were sinless, but that both were
sinners. Laboring people were not being punished because of particular sins
they had committed. Sin had destroyed the natural order, which made laws and
hierarchy necessary. Wealth and power were given by God only to provide charity
and justice. Another argument in defense of Gregory is that poverty was
considered a holy condition and the poor were thought to be better positioned
for salvation than the rich.
There are several problems with
these arguments, assuming that either Gregory or those who quoted him held
these positions. First, whether landlords were regarded as sinners or not,
Gregory and those who followed him had a negative view of labor, which was
attributed to sin and its punishment. Gregory also had a negative view of
laborers, who he calls sinners. Gregory and his class lived off the labor of
others. One is not surprised that he would claim God had designed it that way.
A second problem concerns the idea that wealth and justice were thought to have
been given by God only to provide charity and justice. As will be seen shortly,
landlord charity and justice was equated with a preferential option for the
rich. Their charity and justice itself were testimony to their low regard for
laboring people. As for the argument that poverty was considered holy, that was
not the emphasis that Gregory and those who quoted him put on it. Sin was
Gregory's explanation.
Besides Gregory, the
seventeenth-century gentry found in the other esteemed writers, such as
Augustine, Aquinas, Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD), Pope Gregory VII
(1020-1085, Hildebrand), and John of Salisbury (d. 1180), that the origin of
productive labor was in the Fall, in sin, in the devil, in evil, and in
biblical characters like Cain, who was ignoble to his brother and Noah's son
Shem, who was a "churl" to his father (Abbot [1623] 1970, pp. 22-23).
The existing order was both punishment for sin and a way to occupy laboring
people and keep them from further sin (Aquinas 1956, p. 173, q. 8, art. 7, ad.
17; Aquinas 1935, pp. 53-60, bk. 1, ch. 6). Augustine (1948, 2:324, bk. 19, ch.
15) in City of God Against the Pagans wrote,
"The prime cause of servitude is sin, which brings people under the
dominion of others, which does not happen save by the judgment of God, with
whom there is no unrighteousness, and who knows how to award fit punishments to
every variety of offense." A Catholic pamphlet commented about the Adam
and Eve origins of labor and laboring people:
The
world was as yet in her cradle, and man was no more than borne, when God making
a place of justice of terrestrial paradise, pronounced against him the sentence
of labor and pain, and afterwards wrote, you shall eat your bread with the
sweat of your brow (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:100; see also Matthew 1647, p.
1).
Just as collecting the rent,
contemplation, and living "idly and without manual labor" were Godly
and "spiritual" in the pamphlets of the gentry, so productivity and
manual labor were contemptible. The more productive a person's trade, the lower
was the person's spiritual worth. At the bottom in Aquinas's (1964, 41:126-127,
pt. 1a, q. 108, art. 2; see also, Aquinas 1915, bk. 1, sec. 30) widely taught
hierarchy were the most productive, the agricultural laborers (laborantium in agris), whom he called vile people (vilis populus). Above them were merchants. Neither of
these were honorable people (populus honorabilis).
A pamphleteer in following the logic of the early writers divided creation into
three types of existence: vegetable, animal and intellectual. The existence of
producers was vegetable and animal (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:120; see also,
Plato 1578, 266 a-d; Aristotle 1952, 98 IbIff). Canon law prohibited
tenants (villeins) from becoming priests. Clerics who engaged in plowing and
other manual labor were subject to excommunication. Such was "unbecoming
their state" (Rodes 1982, p. 48; see also Bouscaren 1966, p. 449, canon
987, p. 118, canon 142).
The Royalist contempt for labor and
laboring people during the Civil War was demonstrated by their use of the term
"roundhead" for their opponents. Roundhead referred to shorn,
bullet-headed apprentices. Apprentices were thought to be of low worth by the
gentry. For some Catholics, including clergy, the slander of working people was
habitual. Illustrative were the theological writings of Robert Persons, S.J.
(1546-1610). He was something of a Jesuit archetype. One of his methods of
teaching was ridicule. Persons (1602, 82:95-96) called John Mush (1551-1613)
"Dr. Dodipol Mush" because Mush was not university educated but the
son of a "poor, rude serving man." Thomas Law (1899, p. xxx; see
also, Southwell [1595] 1953, p. 7) commented on the regularity with which such
language against laboring people appears in Person's writings:
The
scorn and ridicule with which Persons seemed to regard low birth and poverty,
and his habit of taunting his opponents on that score, are notable features in
his method of controversy.
A consequence of this anti-labor
moral theology for seventeenth-century Catholic working people was that their
needs were less well served by the clergy than were gentry needs. What one
critic said at the time about the preference of the Jesuits for the gentry
applies with equal force to the secular and other clergy of the period:
The
Jesuits are used to fawn upon men of noble birth, especially if they be rich.
They look not after the cottages of the poor, nor minister their help to them,
be they ever so much in need (Bagshaw [1601], 1889, p. 105).
Recent
studies have been critical of the historical tradition that glorified the
gentry as having been a positive factor for English Catholicism. Christopher
Haigh (1981, pp. 138, 145) remarks:
The
Catholic gentry, the second group of heroes of the Persons' version of English
Catholic history, arrogated to themselves an inappropriate share of the
clerical resources of the post-Reformation mission. The gentlemen have been credited
with ensuring "the survival of the faith" and so they did, but their
faith, at the expense of everyone else's!
The idea that subjects follow the
religion of their ruler was cited by the gentry and their clergy for focusing
the ministry on the well-born. In this they cited as authority the argument of
Gregory the Great and the landlords' clergy for a millennium. It was, as Paul
Meyvaert (1966, 24) points out, the age-old justification, in a Christian
version, of Roman imperialism, the natural subordination of barbarians to
Romans, as slaves to freemen. It turned up "dismayingly often" in the
heroes of the gentry (Meyvaert 1966, 23). Ministering to landlords, it was
said, would filter down to the tenants. Some of the gentry did allow their tenants
and neighbors to hear mass when priests visited or were resident at their
estates. Haigh contends, however, that these gentry were the exception,
especially in the south and east of England, where most of the priests and
gentry were concentrated. (Haigh 1981, 133). Judging from the gentry's
theological prejudices and the actual results, most had little concern for
filtration. They saw laboring people as worthless and did not want them in the
church.
LANDLORD
SOCIAL JUSTICE The doctrine that God's preferential option was for the
rich was embodied in the gentry's system of economic justice. They taught that
the existing order was just and perfect, resembling the heavenly order willed
by God, and therefore unchangeable. In the pamphlets which they purchased for themselves,
wealth was said to came from God, a windfall (Salvian of Marseille [1618] 1973,
pp. 75, 82). It did not come from laboring people, who were censored out of the
picture. God produced wealth and directed its re-distribution from the tenant
to the landlord.
Frequently found in gentry libraries
were classical texts that reinforced the status quo, such as Aristotle's Economics, Xenephon's Economist,
and Plutarch's Conjugal Precepts. These writers
advised landlords to govern their tenants justly, which meant "strictly
and firmly." Tenants were to be kept at a subsistence level. Otherwise, so
it was believed, they would not work (Furniss [1920], 1965, p. 121). Surplus
wealth belonged to the landlord. Masters were to look after their servants in
sickness and old age, but they were not to be indulgent or allow themselves to
be "robbed" or imposed upon (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 2:209).
The classical authorities condemned
agrarian reform measures. During the period of the Roman Republic between 510
and 27 B.C.E, the plebians, that is the tenantry and small farmers, had been
subjected to state laws which gave landlords nearly unlimited rights. The
landlord monopoly was said to be part of the natural law. The people, as they
themselves complained were "nominally lords of the earth, while not
possessing one lump of earth" (Jonkers 1963, p. 119). For hundreds of
years they fought for and sometimes achieved agrarian reforms (lex agraria), such as those enacted during the
tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus (133 B.C.E.). These aimed to redistribute land
to the producers. Machiavelli, a landlord, had called the lex agraria the first cause of the destruction of the
Roman Republic (Machiavelli 1663, III, 24, I, 37).
As would be expected, it was not the
writings of Rome's agrarian reformers that was emphasized in the
seventeenth-century Catholic schools but those of landlords who had fought
reform. One does not find on reading lists the Acts of the Apostles, which
taught communal ownership, but rather Livy's (1659, II, 41) Ab urbe condita, and Cicero's (1930) three consular
orations, De Lege agraria contra Rullum. One of
the lessons in these works seems to have been that the ordinary people could be
fooled into acting against their own interest if there was sufficient rhetoric
involved (Jonkers 1963, p. 147).
The Roman and canon law, like
Gregory in the sixth century and Aquinas in the thirteenth century were used,
perhaps inaccurately, by the gentry as authorities for the view that landlord
property rights were based in natural law and thus part of God's law and not
susceptible to agrarian reform measures (Aquinas 1964, 42:133, pt. 2a-2ae, q.
130, art. 2, ad. 2; Aquinas 1964, 37:17; Aquinas 1964, 47:5, pt. 2a-2ae, q.
183, art. 1; see also, Bouscaren 1966, p. 449). In these same authorities were
injunctions directed against at the rich to give generously to the poor. In
some periods, these injunctions did bring a cumulative redistribution of
wealth, but it was in the direction of the clergy and monasteries and not of
the producers. By the seventeenth century the Catholic gentry were not
infrequently living on or owning property that had been confiscated during the
sixteenth century from the monasteries and hierarchy.
At best gentry theology taught the
landlord to redistribute wealth in a superficial way. Economic justice for much
of the gentry did not involve agrarian reform measures such as the elimination
of primogeniture, entail, and perpetuities, but token acts such as almsgiving.
The scholastic authority Domingo de Soto at the University of Salamanca
following the teaching of Gregory the Great, Salvian of Marseille, and Aquinas,
condemned efforts to address economic inequality, saying removal of the
indigent from the streets results in grave spiritual harm by denying the faithful
the opportunity of practicing charity (Soto [1545] 1965, pp. 117-118, 121;
Flynn 1989, pp. 94-95, 97; Todd 1981, p. 341; Salvian of Marseille [1618] 1973,
pp. 99-100, 111). Contrary to the thinking of laboring people who resisted
their impoverishment, Aquinas had said that poverty was inevitable and could be
an opportunity for virtue (Aquinas 1964, 47:211, 2a-2ae, q. 188, art. 7; 1a-2a,
q. 4, art. 7). Monastic landlords set the norm for almsgiving by doling out in
alms as little as three percent of the revenue which they received from their
tenants and perhaps a similar amount of less formal charity. (Scarisbrick 1984,
p. 51).
As described in seventeenth-century
pamphlets, Catholic almsgiving was characterized by "rationalized
kindness," such as funeral almsgiving, feast day donations, and giving
succor to a ritual number of poor, usually twelve. One pamphlet advised the
gentry:
If you
wish to magnify charity toward persons necessitious, cast your eye upon Anne of
Austria, Queen of Poland. She was accustomed to serve twelve poor people every
Monday. This was the very same day she yielded her soul up to God. When she had
scarcely so much left as a little breath on her lips, she asked that she might
once more wait on the poor at dinner, and that death might close her eyes when
she opened her hands to charity (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 3:91).
Such
charity was inefficient and little adapted to material needs. It was meant to
satisfy the conscience of the landlord, not to address the issue of wealth distribution
(Aquinas 1964, vol. 34, pt. 2a-2ae, q. 32, art. 10, ad. 3; ibid., pt. 2a-2ae, q. 31, art. 3, ad 4; ibid., pt. 2a-2ae, q. 32, art. 9, and art. 10, ad. 1;
Gillow 1902, 5:76). In practice, as administered in the local English parishes,
poor relief was considerably more efficient than that recommended in the
pamphlet literature.
Another aspect of gentry economic
justice which tended to sooth consciences without redistributing wealth was the
doctrine of "just" price. The just price was equated with the current
free market value of goods. Aquinas (1964, vol. 38, 2a-2ae, q. 77, art. 4; see
also Aquinas 1956, quodlibet, q. 6, art. 10) wrote:
In a
just exchange the medium does not vary with the social position of the persons
involved, but only with regard to the quality of the goods. For instance,
whoever buys a thing must pay what the thing is worth whether the person buys
from a pauper or from a rich person.
In
this passage, according to scholars such as John Baldwin (1959, pp. 27-29),
Aron Gurevich (1985, p. 277), and Jacques LeGoff (1988, p. 291), Aquinas
accepted that the market set the price for "what the thing is worth."
Aquinas insisted only that poor and rich both receive the same market price.
This ignored the unequal economic position of poor buyers who were forced to
pay the same price as landlords. The "just price" market system meant
the price was set by the buyers with wealth, those who could outbid the
non-wealthy. It was a system of rationing in which the gentry kept a monopoly
on consumer goods similar to the one they had on land. Barry Gordon (1975, p.
178) comments on the injustice of Aquinas's just price doctrine:
Aquinas
does not confront the issue of the relationship of commutation and
distribution. . . There is no guarantee that the achievement of justice in
pricing will ensure justice in distribution.
The gentry seem to have found
Aquinas a convenient authority because his just price theory ignored wealth
distribution. It emphasized commutative, not distributive justice. Commutative
(from commutatio or transaction) justice was the
classical Greek and scholastic term for the government of relations of
individual to individual. Distributive justice was the term for the obligation
of the community to the individual. As Gordon (1975, p. 159; see also, Bartell
1962, 354) puts it, "Because he related economic analysis mainly to
questions of commutative rather than distributive justice, Aquinas offers
little by way of insight into the theory of income distribution." Aquinas
(1949, bk. 4, d. 17, q. 1, art. 1, gla. 1) in one of his earliest works, Commentary on the Sentences (of Peter Lombard), did
concur with Peter Lombard, for whom commutative and distributive justice were
linked together by one general end, the transfer of the necessities of life.
However, by the time he started writing the Summa
Theologiae 16 years later, Aquinas followed an approach more acceptable
to the established order. No small part of the established order was the
clerical hierarchy, which was Europe's largest proprietor. It had a
self-interest in not changing the system of wealth distribution.
It can be argued that the doctrine
against usury, if it had been strictly followed in the medieval or
seventeenth-century period, would have resulted in a more equitable distribution
of wealth. Even assuming it did have a positive effect in an earlier period, by
the seventeenth century it was not a subject for consideration in gentry
literature.
In place of just wealth
distribution, gentry theology, like that of at least some of their Protestant
counterparts, offered laboring people the doctrine of obedience, not
resistance, to the established order. One must suffer one's "cross and
passion" in life with humility, self-denial and meekness (Hathaway 1969,
p. 104; Mollat 1986, p. 263). The chief offense was pride, as manifested by
ambition for the wealth and life style of the landlord. God's will for the
tenantry, said one writer, was the "old simplicity, both in apparel, diet,
innocency of life, and plainness of dealing and conversation" (Persons
[1596] 1824, pp. 220-224, 256-257; see also, Scarisbrick 1974, p. 27). Robert
Persons wanted to restore the system of feudal servitude and destroy the
tenants and artisans who had bettered their economic circumstances. Thomas
Clancy (1964, p. 42; see also, Clancy 1959, 20) remarks on Persons' landlord
prejudices:
As for
the commons, their economic welfare was to be made the responsibility of their
feudal lords. In England there was great inequality among the members of the
third estate. . . It was said some gave themselves the airs of gentlemen. This
social mobility was to be stopped.
The doctrine of obedience received
attention in the marginal notes of the Douay version of the Old Testament, published in 1609 and again in 1635. This
was the English language translation for seventeenth-century Catholics. The
note to 1 Kings 8, read:
In
case kings or other princes commit excesses and oppress their subjects, yet are
they not by and by to be deposed by the people nor commonwealth, but must be tolerated
with patience, peace, and meekness (Worthington 1609; see also Aquinas, 1935,
p. 25; Clancy 1963, 7:7).
During
the Civil War the great sin according to the Douay bible norm, was the
overthrow of the established order.
Among
those who developed the theme that obedience was the way to curb pride and
rebellion were Walter Montagu in Miscellanea Spiritualia,
or Devout Essays (1654, p. 168) and Tobie Matthew in his translation of Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtue (Rodriquez
[1631] 1929, 2:165-354, 3:275-376). John Abbot ([1623] 1970, preface) in Jesus Praefigured, which he dedicated to Charles I,
called rebellion a crime. God's people in the gentry's view had four marks:
The
first is a profound humility. The second a great love of virginity. The third,
a great obedience to superiors, recommended by St. Paul to the Romans: Let
every soul be subject to superior powers. The fourth a sweetness and an
admirable patience in persecutions (Caussin [1634, etc.] 1977, 1:64; see also,
1:51, 62, 81).
Authorities
available to the gentry on the obedience doctrine were Augustine (1948, 2:325,
see also 1981, 7), Thomas a Kempis (1642, bk. 1, ch. 9), Ignatius Loyola (1959,
pp. 167, 181), and Gregory the Great (Baasten 1986, pp. 2, 22, 78). Following
Aquinas (1964, 47:113, pt. 2a-2ae, q. 186, art. 3) and Salvian of Merseille
([1618] 1973, p. 86) the possession of great wealth, as long as no pride was
taken in it, was not questioned. The issue of wealth distribution was reduced
from a material problem to a problem of ideas.
However, when laboring people
threatened gentry wealth during the Civil War, there was no talk of reducing it
to a problem of ideas. As Walter Montagu (1654, p. 223) in his Miscellanea Spiritualia put it, "Death is the
creature of rebellion." To the extent they were able, the Royalists
inflicted death against those who challenged their rule. When this policy
failed, they claimed their defeat was not to be taken as a sign of their
disfavor with God, as "God's enemies receive greater external marks of his
goodness than his friends; Christ kissed Judas at his separation and struck St.
Paul at his admission" (Montagu 1654, pp. 51, 73).
As part of their Civil War effort,
Catholic landlords used the doctrine of obedience to recruit laboring to their
side. Thomas Brudenell, for example, was a Northamptonshire landlord with a
history of enclosing common land to the disadvantage of the tenantry. He (Wake
1954, p. 128, see also, p. 124) wrote in 1640:
Let
every soul be subject to the higher powers, for who resisteth power resisteth
God, and ex consequentia who rebels against kings doth so against God and
purchases damnation.
The theme of Jesus as meek and
obedient was standard in the prayers, hymns, form of confession, meditations,
examination of conscience, and litanies that were published in the
seventeenth-century Catholic prayer manuals. These manuals were in daily use in
the country houses of the landlords (Crichton 1984-1985, pp. 158-159). Gentry
catechisms, sermons, and conferences had a bias for monarchism. This form of
government, according to Aquinas (1935, p. 88; see also, pp. 39-41), "best
assured stability of power, wealth, honor and fame" for landlords. Those
saints who were the objects of gentry devotion included no less than twenty canonized
kings (Smith [1627] 1970, 54:3). It might be contended that the gentry were for
monarchy because they had no other choice. This ignores, first, that since the
Conquest there had been a continuous and often successful English Catholic
tradition of resistance to the "Norman yoke," especially in the north
and west of England (Hill 1954, pp. 21-23). Second, the history of the
anti-monarchical communes in Spain, Germany, and Italy, of the republics in
Italy, not to mention the Greek and Roman examples, were also available for
consideration (Wadsworth 1652).
Along with obedience went the idea
that existing economic relations were a testing ground to be endured in order
to make amends for sinfulness and earn heavenly life. Because suffering was
willed or permitted by God as part of his plan, it could not be changed. The
landlord order was not the cause of suffering. Laboring people should accept
the situation with patience. This "testing ground" doctrine had been
incorporated by Loyola as a foundation for the spirituality of his religious
group (Segundo 1987, pp. 44, 46, 49).
The book titles published by
Catholic gentry give an idea of the testing-ground, virtue-of-suffering
theology which they contained. Tobie Matthew ([1630, etc.] 1970) translated A Treatise of Patience and wrote A
Missive of Consolation, sent from Flanders to the Catholics of England
(Matthew 1647). Henry Arundell (1679) authored Five
Little Meditations in verse: . . . (2) Persecution No Loss; (3) On the text
"God Chastiseth those whom He Loves"; (4) Considerations before the
Crucifix; (5) Upon the Pains of Hell. Richard Mason (1644) produced Brother Angelus Francis, The Rule of Penance of St. Francis.
Richard Verstegan (1601) wrote Odes in Imitation of the
Seven Penitential Psalms and translated Mental
Prayer Appropriated to the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Verstegan
n.d.). The "Office of the Holy Ghost" was a prayer which found
continuing favor in gentry devotions (Smith [1627] 1970, 54:32).
These writers held that laboring
people should have no hope to make the world decent or struggle against the
existing order. It was the tenant, not the world, that was being tested.
Montagu (1654, 2:70, 73, 161) in his Miscellanea
Spiritualia maintained that contempt for the world was a virtue. Another
pamphleteer offered a litany about the world's unredeemable nature:
This
world is so vain, so deceitful, so troublesome, so dangerous; being it is a
professed enemy to Christ, excommunicated and damned to the pit of hell; being
it is (as one father said) an ark of travail, seeing it is a grove full of
thorns, a meadow full of scorpions, a flourishing garden without fruit, a cave
full of poisoned and deadly basiliskes; seeing (as Saint Augustine said) the
joy of this world has nothing else but false delight, travailsome labor, seeing
it has nothing in it (as St. Chrysostome said) but tears, shame, labors, terrors, sickness, sin, and death
itself; seeing the world's repose is full anguish, its travails without fruit
(Persons [1582, etc.] 1970, pp. 510-511).
In their thinking, landlords equally
with tenants were to be obedient. But being obedient to an order that served
their interest had a different significance for them. Similarly they had to
endure suffering, such as sickness, old age, and death. But the suffering did
not include economic injustice: the appropriation of wealth produced by their
labor and a theology which claimed that God had a preferential option for the
appropriator. Aron Gurevich (1985, p.242) remarks, "In a class society,
the commandment `Thou shalt not steal' protected property in a way that was
much in the interests of the "halves."
CONCLUSION.
This article in its four parts has presented an ideal type reflecting the mentality
of a sector of the seventeenth-century English Catholic gentry. The point in
discussing their beliefs is not to muckrake but to highlight and contribute to
the advance that liberation theology represents in making the preferential
option be for the poor. The first part of the article outlined how Catholic
landlords did well under the crown and were well represented in the royal army
during the Civil War. Catholic gentry beliefs on some points may have differed
from those of their Protestant counterparts. But excluding the Catholic and
Protestant improvers who had a positive view of the productive process, there
was unity concerning their economic theology. Catholic gentry beliefs were
disseminated by their priests, schools, sermons, and books. The second and
third parts of the article discussed the belief that God had a preferential
option for the landlord system. It was said to be a virtue to live idly and
without labor, while laboring people were held to be vile. The gentry was meant
to live well off the labor of their tenants. In the fourth part the idea that
landlord economic justice did not involve a distribution of wealth to those who
produced it was touched upon. Tenants were to be obedient to the established
order.
The non-Catholic Royalist, Francis
Osborne (1656, pp. 19-29), was a cynic about religion but saw a use for it in
promoting Royalism. He wrote in his Political Reflection,
"The clergy perform an important function, provided they keep close in
their doctrine, to reason of state. Nothing is so likely as a sanctified
policy, to maintain so much probity." The Catholics studied in this
article may not have been cynics, but the use to which they put their religion,
the pursuit of narrow self-interest, with little regard for truth or social
justice, did not differ from Osborn.
Robert Brenner (1985, p. 13) in his
study of Civil War England discusses the landlord-tenant relation and the idea
that to the extent it was "primarily one of taking" it was
"inherently conflictive." This article has suggested that within the
Catholic community, the reflection of landlord economics in theology was part
of the conflict mentioned by Brenner. Along with theft of the wealth they
produced, and armed suppression, went a theology of class contempt. The
American Catholics and their bishops, in choosing to "see things from the
side of the poor," have turned such theology on its head.
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[1] The
attack being waged by liberation theology against the tradition outlined in this
article involves the de-mystification of theology. It was noted that some
Royalists denounced as blasphemous those who held the monarchy derived from
purely historical causes. (Smuts 1987, p. 230). Similarly liberation theology
is sometimes denounced by what might be called theological Royalists because it
takes an interest in the historical nature of theology. The U.S. bishops in
their pastoral on the economy were up-front about the historical roots of their
theology: 33 million Americans (15 percent of the population) live in poverty
according to the U. S. government and 30 million more are in poverty "by
any reasonable standard" (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1986,
paragraph 15). "The poor sleep in our doorways" (National Conference
of Catholic Bishops 1986, paragraph 172). The bishops are landlords with all
the instincts that belong to their class. But the poor are too many, too vocal,
and as the bishops state, too geographically close to be ignored. The bishops
decided to see things from the side of the poor not because of mysticism, but
because of the obnoxious presence of God on their doorsteps.
The Roman establishment, which in
the past has taken a lesson from the American church, as in the case of Rerum Novarum in 1891, could do likewise now. Like the
American bishops, John Paul II is a landlord with the normal instincts and
theology of his class. Centesimus Annus (One
Hundred Years), which John Paul (1991, p. 586) published on May 1, 1991 to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum,
celebrates the collapse of the communist movement in Poland. At the same time,
the encyclical expresses fear about the return of the movement because of the
unemployment and economic insecurity resulting from the policies of the
Solidarity government. The English Catholic weekly, The
Tablet, discusses the unbalanced approach which Centesimus
Annus takes in failing to acknowledge the achievements of the Polish
communist movement (Anonymous 1991, p. 531). These achievements included the
right to a job, to an old-age pension, to disability benefits, to free health
care and education, and to housing that cost no more than 5 percent of one's
income. These rights were achieved in the post-war period under conditions of
poverty resulting from the war's destruction far worse than at present. These
achievements were made not at the expense of the poor but in part at the
expense of the capitalist and landlord. The landlords included the Polish
hierarchy, which lost one million acres of land (Piekarski 1978, p. 69). The
bishop of Lvov, for example, was forced to give up his 14 landed estates with
10,000 acres.
During the last 40 years of working
class domination, the Polish bishops did not have to step over the bodies of
the unemployed poor sleeping on their palace door steps, because the palaces
and other housing had been divided up so that everyone had a roof over their
head. This preference for the poor having a roof over their head was apparently
not liked by some sectors. John Paul II (1991, p. 585), not unlike Robert
Persons, S.J. concerning the achievements of seventeenth-century laboring
people, remarks in his encyclical that the communist achievements were
"detrimental" to the poor and "a remedy that was worse than the
sickness." One wonders how many of the 30 million Americans without health
care would label as detrimental Poland's comprehensive medical care, despite
any of its shortcomings.
In addition to learning a lesson
from the U.S. bishops' pastoral about their desire to give the poor who sleep
on their doorsteps a preferential option, the pope could learn several lessons
from his own country. First, even from the landlord perspective, the Polish
workers' movement was generous to the clergy and hierarchy. Not being allowed
to live in palaces may have initially injured the hierarchy's notions of its
dignity, but the hierarchy were eventually allowed to own 14,000 buildings,
including 45 seminaries, by 1977. This was twice the 7,000 buildings they owned
in 1937. The pope's encyclical states that his anti-communism does not stem
from "seeking to recover former privileges" (John Paul II 1991, p.
589). One wonders if the hierarchy did not have more privileges from the
working people than it had had previously.
A second lesson the pope might
consider from his own country is that long before the communists controlled
Poland, Catholic religious orders there had benefited from a type of socialized
health care, housing, education, nutrition, and collective ownership of
corporate property. The younger children of the gentry sometimes entered
religion because that was the place they could have economic security. Why
socialism only for the clergy? Why should the Roman establishment counterpoise
itself to the social revolutions as they occur from time to time throughout the
world? Why did the pope have to insist on the expulsion of Nicaraguans like
Fernando Cardinal from their religious orders (Cardinal 1985, 21:1).
An explanation for the pope's
unbalanced views in Centesimus Annus is that the
paradigm outlined in this article, despite its over-simplifications, has some
truth to it. There were seventeenth-century gentry Catholics who believed the
rich had a preferential option, and that belief still hangs on in some sectors
of the the church. The one mention which Centesimus Annus
makes concerning the preferential option for the poor is to state that the
option is "never exclusive or discriminatory towards other groups"
(John Paul II 1991, p. 589). Put in less subtle terms, there is no preference
for the poor in the Roman establishment's theology.
Anonymous
1991 "How to Read the Pope's Encyclical" in The Tablet
(London). May 4,
1991.
John
Paul II, Pope
1991 Centesimus Annus in The Tablet (London). May 11, 1991.
Piekarski,
Adam
1978 The Church in Poland: Facts, Figures and
Information.
Warsaw:
Interpress.
Cardinal,
Fernando
1985 "Why I was Forced to Leave the Jesuit Order" in National Catholic Reporter. Kansas City.
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