Most people are familiar with the terms “capitalism” and “socialism,” even if they aren’t completely sure what they mean.  This causes more than a little confusion, especially when people who think they are capitalists or socialists give their understanding of Catholic social teaching.  It seems that to a capitalist, Catholic social teaching is capitalist, while to a socialist, it’s socialist.  Anyone who disagrees with either position is labeled a knavish fool, or a foolish knave.

Such confusion is singularly appropriate, for the assumptions underlying both capitalism and socialism as originally understood are remarkably similar.  Many people are even unaware that the first socialists were either themselves capitalists, or actively sought the financial support of capitalists.

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s patron and co-author of The Communist Manifesto (1848) was a capitalist, while Robert Owen, England’s first great socialist, was also one of the richest men in Great Britain.  Owen’s form of socialism was so popular, in fact, that Marx and Engels decided to call their form of scientific socialism “communism” because they felt Owen’s followers had preempted the term “socialism.”

The question we will look at today, however, is whether socialism and Catholic social doctrine, especially the Church’s teachings on social justice, are in any way compatible.

We could, of course, cite the seemingly countless condemnations of socialism that — along with the criticisms of capitalism — have been consistently reinterpreted as inapplicable to the particular situation of the (re)interpreter, or even endorsements of the very thing condemned.  Clearly that approach has not been effective, as demonstrated by the fact that condemnations have been reiterated so often.  The idea persists that social justice and socialism are different names for the same thing, and that the enemy of humanity is capitalism, by which is meant anything from the objectivist elitism of Ayn Rand to the soft, quasi-Fabian socialism of John Maynard Keynes.

Thus, it comes as a distinct surprise to many people today that socialism was not at first opposed to capitalism.  Admittedly, it quickly became so when the capitalists didn’t give the socialists the money they wanted, but the initial goal of socialism was something else entirely: the destruction or transformation of the Catholic Church and traditional Christianity.

Many people are unaware, in fact, that the original name for socialism was l’démocratie religieuse, “the Democratic Religion.”  The idea was to abolish private property, marriage and family, and organized religion.  Traditional political, domestic, and religious forms would all be replaced with a single organization that would take over everything.

To make the transformation of society more palatable, early socialists adopted the terminology and outward forms of traditional Christianity, particularly those of the Catholic Church.  They claimed that socialism is a return to the true Christianity of Jesus, Who was the first socialist.  The Christian churches, especially “the Church of Rome,” had joined in a conspiracy with the princes of the world to keep the great mass of humanity oppressed.  The desired end is not what Pope Pius XI eventually called the spiritual Reign of Christ the King in Heaven, but the establishment of the temporal Kingdom of God on Earth.

“The Kingdom of God on Earth” was and remains a virtual obsession of all forms of socialism, as Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University has noted.  This is consistent with what Henri de Saint-Simon, the self-proclaimed prophet of le nouveau Christianisme — the New Christianity (from his 1825 book of that title) — stated as the meaning and purpose of life: “The whole of society ought to strive towards the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for attaining this end.” (“Saint-Simon,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19: 14^th Edition, 1956, Print.)

The practice of taking over Christian symbols, language, and even rituals wholesale eventually drew a scathing response from none other than Orestes Brownson, a former socialist who converted to Catholicism in the 1840s.  As Brownson declared, the New Christianity, that is, socialism,

. . . rejects in name no Catholic symbol; it only rejects the Catholic sense.  If it finds fault with the actual Church, it is because she is not truly Catholic, does not understand herself, does not comprehend the profound sense of her own doctrines, fails to seize and expound the true Christian idea as it lay in the mind of Jesus, and as this enlightened age is prepared to receive it.  The Christian symbol needs a new and a more Catholic interpretation, adapted to our stage in universal progress. (Orestes A. Brownson, “Socialism and the Church,” Essays and Reviews, Chiefly on Theology, Politics, and Socialism.  New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1852, 499-500.  Cf. “Religious Union of Associationists,” The American Whig Review, March 1847, 492-502.)

As a result, the Catholic Church initially condemned socialism not for its economics, but for its theology and philosophy, which resulted from what Pius XI condemned as a “concept of society . . . utterly foreign to Christian truth.” (Quadragesimo Anno, § 117.)  Specifically, socialism’s theory of society shifts natural rights from actual human beings created by God, to the abstraction of the collective — humanity — made by man.  This, as Venerable Fulton Sheen pointed out, turns reality topsy turvy, putting collective man in charge with God as the servant of humanity created by His own creation!

So, no, socialism can only be considered Catholic if Catholicism is first redefined so that it is no longer Catholic, or even in any meaningful sense Christian or a religion at all.  Transformed into socialism, as the French sociologist David Émile Durkheim claimed, religion becomes a social, not a spiritual phenomenon, and consists of the group’s worship of itself.