By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
The year was 1932. Subsequent to the annual meeting of the German Catholic Bishops Conference at Fulda in August, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich released a pastoral letter that, among other things, forbade Catholics from participation in the National Socialist Party.
National Socialism, he declared, was opposed to the moral and social teaching of the Church, not only with respect to the party’s founding principles, but with respect to its social goals, which if implemented would reduce personal freedoms, notably speech and religion.
Catholics in the United States are slowly waking up to the dangers presented by its own national socialist party. Anyone acquainted with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the 1920s will recognize that the conditions that enabled him to seize power resemble those that prevail here, namely, unemployment, the devaluation of the currency, a shrinking middle class, and a feeling that government has fallen into the hands of an irresponsible ruling class.
Demands for social justice, income equality, universal health care, gender equality, gun control, and renewable energy, just to name a few, are not likely to be attained through government intervention without loss of personal freedom. The bureaucratic direction of economic activity is a sine qua non, if its intent is to make the distribution of income conform to current ideas of social justice.
To achieve socialist goals, state planners and regulators have to assume the right to alter any segment of the economy or social order in the interest of what they take to be the greater good.
Some of the forces that destroyed freedom in Germany and Italy in the early decades of the 20th century are at work here. Middle America still thinks that we are governed by the laws inherited from the founding of the nation. The essential features of individualism owe their origin to Christianity and to the philosophy of classical antiquity. Both features are notably unacknowledged by a class trained in our elite universities. A stranger may think that atheism is the official religion of the country. Indeed, prominent members of the Democratic Party have said as much.
In the economic order, the prospect of regulation results in a fear among all productive sectors. Men must try to outguess the government as much as they try to outguess the market. It is difficult for an individual to outguess a government which has no respect for the laws that govern a market economy.
Writing those words this past week, I found the judgment confirmed the next day by a headline in a national newspaper: “CEO Steps Down as Bets Sour.”
The article revealed that the chief executive officer of a major mining and construction company misjudged the effects of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy which arbitrarily reduced interest rates to near zero. An editorial comment nearby explained that “quantitative easing proved to be less stimulative than advertised.”
Socialism is based on the notion that there is a division in society between the rich and the poor, between capital and labor that needs to be rectified. Calls for adjustment, in practice, inevitably lead to the evisceration of a middle class, “the despised middle class,” you may say, which ends up paying the bill. Normal economic and social achievements are denied their reward. Distinction and rank are more likely to be conferred on salaried employees of the state.
Happily some prelates have followed the example of Cardinal Faulhaber in calling attention to the danger presented by our own national socialist party, dare we call it, the Democratic Party. We find pastoral letters calling attention to what is at stake in November, urging care in the formation of political judgment as one prepares to fulfill his civic duty at the ballot box.
In the words of Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Va., “Forming our consciences will require prayer, reflection on the teachings of our Church, the application of principles to the issues of the day and the positions taken by candidates for public office.”
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