title: The Worker in Catholic Social Thought: An Historical Analysis
Creators: name: Duffy, Gavan James
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: Catholic social teaching
subject: slavery
subject: serfdom
subject: capital and labour

description: This thesis examines directly the development of Catholic social teaching in respect of the rights and duties of the worker. Beginning with the Old Testament, the thesis compares the attitude of the Hebrew people as expressed in Scripture to those who performed the tasks associated with the crafts or with labour. This shows how the attitude of the Hebrews to workers, in comparison with the attitude of surrounding peoples, was ameliorated by their belief in a just God who spoke to them in Scripture and through the prophets. In its examination of the New Testament, the thesis extracts gospel references to the worker and extracts from the Epistles, particularly from the Pauline texts, on the subject. The changes in attitude to the worker as expressed in the New and Old Testaments are noted. Next examined are the writings of the Church Fathers and their application to the worker. It can be seen from this examination that the early Church Fathers, whilst not directly developing a body of teaching in respect of the worker, developed a philosophical platform for its later development. It will be shown how the teachings of the Church Fathers, in their application of teaching of Jesus in the Gospels to the prevailing attitudes of Roman society contributed to the further amelioration of the condition of slaves in the later Empire. When speaking of the worker in Greco-Roman society, one is in effect speaking about the institution of slavery. The thesis then discusses the further changes in attitude to the worker that followed the decline of imperial authority in the west. It examines the role of the Church and its teaching regarding the dignity of the human person and the place of work in the scheme of redemption, and how it had an ameliorating effect on the treatment of slaves in the various Barbarian kingdoms which arose in the west following the extinguishing of Roman authority. The thesis argues that it was the influence of Christianity which ultimately led to the evolution of the condition of slavery as it was known in the Roman Empire and Carolingian period, to that of the serfdom of the Middle Ages. Next discussed is the 'Guild System' of regulating and controlling the crafts. The Guilds were a society, in part co-operative but mainly composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self governing, and was designed to check competition between its members in order to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. The thesis examines how the Guilds functioned and explains why some Catholic writers such as Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton regarded the Guilds as an excellent example of the practical application of Christian principles to work and economics. The thesis then examines the effects of the Reformation and the rise of liberal capitalism from the Guild system and how they both contributed to its decline. Following the decline of the Guild system and the onset of liberal capitalism, society came to be divided into two classes, the capitalist class, and the proletariat. This thesis examines how this development occurred and the factors which contributed to it. It shows how the division of society into capitalist and proletariat, haves and have-nots, resulted in the development of a class war and the antagonism between capital and labour. The thesis shows how under the liberal capitalist system, the conditions of the working class came to resemble in the words of Leo XIII, 'a yoke, almost of slavery'. Next developed and analysed is the manner in which the antinomy between capital and labour gave birth to the philosophy of Marxism in 1848 following the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. It shows how the development of these two antagonistic classes was viewed by the Church as an aberration or distortion of the social order and how in response to the rise of the philosophy of Marxism, Leo XIII countered with his great social encyclical Rerum Novarum, promulgated on the 15th May 1891, which was to earn him the title of 'The Workers' Pope'. The thesis then deals sequentially with the social teachings and encyclicals of Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. All of these Popes, in some way, expanded upon and developed the social teaching of the Church regarding the workers. In many ways it could be said that the later encyclicals have 'fleshed out' Rerum Novarum. During this period, numerous advances have been made in the fields of technology and there has been a considerable improvement in the conditions and wages of workers. In its consideration of the social encyclicals since Rerum Novarum, this thesis discusses the way in which the Popes have developed and expanded Catholic social teaching in respect of the workers as changes in technology and various structural changes to the financial system threw up new and complex challenges to the creation of a just social order in which the dignity and the rights of workers are fully respected. It is shown how the Popes since Leo XIII have confronted the injustices associated with these developments and detailed recommendations for action, some of which would be viewed by many as quite radical. Later in this thesis deleterious effects upon the rights of workers of global neo-liberal capitalism are identified. It is demonstrated that in the early years of the twenty-first century, there are already signs that some of the less desirable traits of laissez faire or liberal capitalism, are once again rearing their heads. This is seen in such developments as the 'hollowing out' of the middle class and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. It is also seen in the slow but sure erosion of the working conditions of workers and in their level of remuneration. It is seen in developed countries, in the trend towards longer working hours and the increasing casualisation of the workforce. This thesis shows that in the context of the world economy, a gap continues to widen between the developed and undeveloped nations, whilst inequitable trade agreements tend to confine the developing nations to the status of providers of raw materials to the industrialised world, an inequity, which, more often than not finds itself imposed upon the working men and women of the developing nations in the form of long hours, low wages and poor conditions. It is a tenet of this thesis that the social teaching of the Church directly the challenges and confronts the philosophy of neo-liberal capitalism and its associated philosophy of globalism in respect of the attaining of a just distribution of the world's goods, the dignity of work and the mutual dependence of capital and labour.