Britain is ready for a new ‘Catholic moment’
With our country in a deep political and economic crisis thinkers are once again turning to the Church for answers, says Stratford Caldecott
15 May 2009

'Casino capitalism' caused the housing bubble, which has now burst (PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images)

GK Chesterton once said: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

Chesterton implies what we all know: that the social and cultural order that Conservatives once existed to protect has long since been dismantled - and not just by New Labour. But Catholic social teaching offers an alternative to both Conservatives and Progressives. And the time may have arrived for it to come into its own. A lot depends on the long-awaited and much-delayed social encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, to be published soon. If the Pope succeeds with his usual clarity in consolidating the tradition in a way that speaks to modern people, we might well see an impact well beyond the Catholic Church.

Catholic social teaching is a coherent body of thinking - neither Left-wing not Right-wing - that has been evolving ever since Pope Leo XIII issued his critique of unfettered economic liberalism, Rerum Novarum, in 1891. That document, promoted and interpreted here by England's Cardinal Manning and dubbed "The Worker's Charter" for supporting trades unions, was a landmark in the Church's engagement with the modern world. The Industrial Revolution had created a whole new set of social problems, and these had become the seed bed for Communist revolution. Pope Leo responded intelligently both to Communism and to the excesses of capitalism, and in so doing he inspired Christian social movements all over Europe. In today's terms, he had created a "new paradigm".

In Britain, two of those movements are still remembered. The Catholic Social Guild, led by Fr Charles Plater SJ, held meetings up and down the country, and eventually founded Plater College in Oxford. The Distributist League, led by Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, promoted its ideas through the newspaper G K's Weekly. (The best short introduction to Chesterton's ideas is Aidan Mackey's booklet, G K Chesterton: A Prophet for the 21st Century, published by the American Chesterton Society.)

Both movements faded out after the War and the rise of the welfare state, not to mention the social changes and cultural confusion of the Sixties, but Distributism in particular can be seen as the ancestor of today's radical movements in defence of ecology, the family, agriculture, small shops and small communities. Prince Charles is a Distributist of sorts, though he would never use the term.

The original Distributists believed that the free householder is the foundation of a truly democratic civil society; but to be free you have to be able to stand on your own land, or at least your own feet. Simply being employed in a big firm is not enough. Hilaire Belloc identified the problem of "wage-slavery" in his book The Servile State and his analysis was echoed by Chesterton, who also noted the threat to humanity from an emerging consumerism. At a speech in Toronto in 1930 he said: "People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves."

These popular social movements resonate today, when political thinkers across the board are searching for new ideas, and the public is losing faith in the political ideologies (and politicians) that have dominated the scene recently. They appeal particularly to Phillip Blond, the Anglo-Catholic author of Red Tory and director of the Progressive Conservative Project, a project sponsored by the Demos think tank and influential within the Conservative Party.

I ask Blond what strikes him as the most urgent challenge for an economic policy-maker today. What are the ideas he wants David Cameron to latch on to? He replies: "For me the greatest challenge is how we solve the conflict between capital and labour so that everybody has a chance - through wider share ownership, decentralisation, mutual funds, guilds, co-operatives, for example - to own a little of something."

He adds: "There is more concentration of wealth in fewer hands than at any time in recent history. At the same time, real wages have declined and many people are worse off in real terms than 30 years ago. People have been offered credit, instead of increases in salary."

And credit is the crunch-point of the modern economy. We have been living in castles in the air, constructed of abstract derivatives that few understand, and debts traded as though they were equivalent to real wealth. No wonder it all came unstuck last year. The Distributists saw it coming, at least in general terms. They knew that bubbles always burst. That is why one of their main points was the importance of living with your feet on the ground.

But if Blond is a Distributist in this sense, he is also critical of what he calls the cultural "nostalgia" and the "fetishisation of the small" that many Distributists went in for.

"Sometimes business really does need to be big," he says. The key to this is a fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching that, he thinks, the Distributists made too little of: subsidiarity, the idea that power and responsibility needs to be exercised at the lowest possible level, but never at the expense of the common good. So while Blond speaks of localism, decentralisation, guilds, sustainability and microfinance, he doesn't believe that small is always beautiful. He simply wants to "broaden and pluralise our concepts of ownership, capital and exchange".

Blond is speaking at a couple of important conferences this summer. "Christian Social Teaching and the Politics of Money", at the University of Nottingham on July 9-10, will examine the market, capitalism and economics with a varied range of impressive speakers, including John Milbank and others from his Radical Orthodoxy movement, with which Blond is also associated. Immediately following this, on July 11 in Oxford, the G K Chesterton Institute is running an international one-day conference on responses to the economic crisis. Links to both conferences can be found on a new website devoted to Catholic social teaching (www.secondspring.co.uk/economy).

Pope John Paul II summarised the century of Catholic social teaching after Leo XIII in Centesimus Annus just after the fall of Communism (which he helped to bring about).

He wrote: "A person who is deprived of something he can call 'his own', and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it." But man was not made for the machine, as the Terminator movies and The Matrix illustrate. There is a universal need to build a home and a family, and this implies the right to own property. But this also implies that a way has to be found to distribute productive property and wealth widely throughout society, and to give people more control over their own lives.

The Church's wisdom seems more attractive to people today than ever before. This may be a genuinely "Catholic moment" for our society, when the economic and environmental crisis, combined with the enormous strains caused by demographic shifts and immigration, have already convinced many of us that the status quo is doomed. The world is changing, and the Church is fast emerging as the most credible source of alternative political and economic ideas. To reflect this growing popular interest the Catholic Truth Society has launched a new series of booklets on Catholic social teaching (beginning with Edward Hadas on the credit crunch and Thomas Rourke on democracy and tyranny) and when the new encyclical appears there will no doubt be a flood of publications to help people understand and apply it in their own lives.

There is only one problem. Catholic social teaching - sensible as it is (and it is a lot more sensible than anything else on offer) - doesn't work. Or rather, it won't work unless we buy the rest of the package. We can't save ourselves, as St Paul reminds the Romans: "The evil I do not want is what I do" (Rm 7:19). Politicians may raid the Vatican website for new ideas, but if they apply them in the same old way, in the same old worldly spirit, they will have gone on making the same old mistakes, and failing to correct them.

Stratford Caldecott is the editor of Sophia Institute Press and Second Spring journal