Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone…. The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and "the first principle of the whole ethical and social order." (John Paul II, Laborem Exercens) The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.
–Pope Francis, Laudato Si 93
3 responses to “”
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Reminds me of the scene in Crime & Punishment where Raskolnikov dreams of the peasant beating his horse to death because it’s “My property!”
Dostoevsky puts forth three great temptations for fallen humans — power, sensuality, and acquisitiveness. I think that some of the pushback against Francis by American conservatives is that he views the latter as truly a vice, not a virtue. -
I’ve never been persuaded that “acquisitiveness” is the right term for what American conservatives favor. But in any case many of them have certainly made themselves look silly in their denunciations of Francis’s economic teaching. The passage I excerpted goes on to quote JPII at further length, which might have been kind of a cagey disarming tactic on Francis’s part–to quote a pope beloved of conservatives.
What movie is it that opens (I think) with a scene of a starved horse being beaten? One of Fellini’s? -
And by the way I don’t think the first sentence in the quote from Francis is true. We–meaning the whole human race–aren’t all agreed on that point.
Light On Dark Water 
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