Pope John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 1906 describes a concept apparently unknown to American Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike. It reads: “By common good is to be understood ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.’ The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each, and even more from those who exercise the office of authority.”
The citation is from the 1965 The Church in the Modern World, paragraph 74, the Vatican II document concerned with the church as part of today’s society. There it says, “The political community, then, exists for the common good: this is its full justification and meaning and the source of its specific and its basic right to exist.” So according to the highest church teaching, the political structure of any state exists for the people, making no distinctions for those powerful or rich, powerless or poor. Stunning, isn’t it?
Yet since the early 1980s, when the U.S. cut the marginal tax rate from 71 percent to 28 percent and the capital gains rate from 45 percent to 20 percent, the rich and powerful have prospered at the expense of the others. The share of U.S. income since then held by the top 1 percent has more than doubled even though we are consoled by the fact that the rich pay more of the actual dollars proportionately than do the 99 percent. Yet they are being let off easily compared to the tax standards of other industrialized nations. The top 10 percent holds more than 70 percent of U.S. wealth. The top 1 percent holds an astounding 39 percent. The bottom 50 percent holds 2 percent.
This helps explain the wide divergence between the haves and have-nots, which divergence has crippled the economy. Nor is it class warfare to merely say this. The common good is suffering because of the decline in the wellbeing of most Americans. A major part of the reason why the national debt ratchets up another billion every few seconds is the shortfall of tax receipts from those who used to pay until someone thought that wealth held by the wealthy would trickle down by gravity to us lesser types as newfound income would propel the rich to open new factories and provide badly needed jobs. But Labor Department studies show that the jobs never materialized in thirty years. They merely migrated overseas, thanks to the never-rich-enough wealthy who did the exporting.
We have elevated ruthless, rugged individualism to the level of religion, spurning the concern for all as though that were socialism, and thinking it was making it better for us. Wealthy critics often invoke the socialism canard, but its true meaning is about as unfamiliar as the common good. It means that the government owns the means of production, the factories, the resources, everything. But to a 6-year old, it is obvious that such a state is as nonexistent as social justice, the kind that sees to it that all citizens in a democracy are treated fairly.
Gone is the old-fashioned American neighborliness about which Norman Rockwell could not draw enough covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The spirit of pulling together that got America out of the Great Depression exists only in church sermons, if there. The hymn to greed sung by Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko is what passes for religiosity. But what is amazing to see is the self-destructive voting done by the few who vote: they habitually vote for candidates who unashamedly promise to enrich the already rich. The thinking must be that if I vote for the rich, that will make me rich. In other words, it feels so good when I stop hitting my head with a hammer.
Collective bargaining is a right endorsed by church leadership for over a century. It is one form of social assembling for the good of the many. I help you; you help me. When Catholics in America constituted the lower classes, we liked it when popes would speak for our income bracket. They and the U.S. bishops represented us. But now that we have progressed up somewhat, we join the chorus that decries labor unions as — get this — a special interest. For such bargaining and social foment are foreign to the sacred doctrine of individualism.
So which do we prefer, church leadership or capitalism’s?
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