This is not a matter of charity. Rather, it is a matter of justice. Our
current system gives a lot to the owners of choice land and the owners of
scarce or needed natural resources. I'm not arguing that they've violated
any laws; they are playing by the rules! But our rules are just plain wrong!
We need to correct them, so that we collect from those who currently are
permitted to privatize what are rightly our common resources, the annual
value of those resources.
See how fully adequate is the cause I have pointed out. The most important
of all the material relations of man is his relation to the planet
he inhabits, and hence, the “impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of
his Creator,” which, as Bishop Nulty says, is involved in private
property in land, must produce evils wherever it exists. But by virtue of
the law, “unto
whom much is given, from him much is required,” the very progress of
civilization makes the evils produced by private property in land more wide-spread
and intense.
What is producing throughout the civilized world that condition of things
you rightly describe as intolerable is not this and that local error or minor
mistake. It is nothing less than the progress of civilization itself; nothing
less than the intellectual advance and the material growth in which our century
has been so preeminent, acting in a state of society based on private property
in land; nothing less than the new gifts that in our time God has been showering
on man, but which are being turned into scourges by man’s “impious
resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator.” ...
The discoveries of science, the gains of invention,
have given to us in this wonderful century more than
has been
given
to men in
any time
before;
and, in a degree so rapidly accelerating
as to suggest geometrical progression, are placing
in our hands new
material
powers. But
with the benefit comes
the obligation. In a civilization
beginning to pulse with steam and electricity, where
the sun paints
pictures
and
the phonograph
stores
speech, it will
not do to be merely as just as were
our fathers. Intellectual advance and material
advance require corresponding moral
advance. Knowledge and power are neither good
nor evil. They
are not ends but
means — evolving forces that if
not controlled in orderly relations
must take disorderly and destructive forms.
The deepening pain, the increasing perplexity,
the growing discontent
for which, as you truly say, some
remedy must be found and quickly found, mean
nothing less than that forces of destruction
swifter and more terrible
than those that have shattered
every preceding civilization are already menacing
ours — that if it does not
quickly rise to a higher moral
level; if it does not become in
deed as in word a Christian civilization,
on the wall
of its splendor must flame the
doom of Babylon: “Thou
art weighed in the balance and
found wanting!” ... read the whole letter