The 15th May brings us back to Pope Leo XIII
(see previous blog Encyclical Performance 20/04/2012). The Rerum Novarum (Latin for On the New Things) is an encyclical issued by him on 15th May 1891.
It was an open letter, passed to all Catholic bishops, that addressed the
condition of the working classes. The encyclical is entitled: "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour".
It
had discussed the relationships and mutual duties between labour and obtaining
capital, as well as government and its citizens. Of primary concern was the
need for some amelioration for "The misery and wretchedness pressing so
unjustly on the majority of the working class." It (apparently)
supported the rights of labour to form unions, rejected communism and
unrestricted capitalism, whilst affirming the right to private property.
"Let the working man
and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely
as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice
more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that
wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved
wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder
conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is
made the victim of force and injustice."
Some of the duties of workers are:
▪
"fully and faithfully" to
perform their agreed-upon tasks
▪
individually, to refrain from vandalism or
personal attacks
▪
collectively, to refrain from rioting
and violence
Some of the duties of employers are:
▪
to pay fair wages
▪
to provide time off for religious
practice and family life
▪
to provide work suited to each person's
strength, gender, and age
▪
to respect the dignity of workers and
not regard them as slaves
The sentiments that labour is ‘unjustly
pressed’ and that workers have the right to form unions, is perhaps laudable,
but the language, by its condescending nature and tone, belies the meaning. Who
is this “frugal and well-behaved wage-earner”?
The reality for Leo XIII was that:
“Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to
exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary.”
He goes on to quote Aquinas: "It
is lawful," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "for a man to hold private
property; and it is also necessary for the carrying on of human
existence."
He claims:
Whoever
has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings,
whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them
for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the
same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God's providence, for the
benefit of others.
Fat chance of that, in my view.
Bull is bull, as our friend Bowater so
rightly says, but are we being too severe and critical?
In contrast to all this the writer and
London Lawyer James Puckle (who wrote the following texts, The Interest of
England considered in an essay upon wool, our woolen manufactures, and the
improvement of trade : with some remarks upon the conceptions of Sir
Josiah Child. (1694); England's interest, or, A brief discourse of the
royal fishery in a letter to a friend (1696); A new dialogue between a
burgermaster and an English gentleman (1697); England's way wealth and
honour in a dialogue between and English-man and a Dutch-man. (1699); and, The club; or, A grey cap for a green
head - A dialogue between a father and son. (1713)) took out a patent on
the 15th May 1718 for what was the
first machine gun.
In 1718, Puckle demonstrated
his new invention, the Defence Gun—a tripod-mounted, single-barrelled flintlock
weapon fitted with a multi-shot revolving cylinder, designed for shipboard use
to prevent boarding. The barrel was 3 feet (0.91 m) long with a bore of
1.25 inches (32 mm) and a pre-loaded "cylinder" which held 11
charges and could fire 63 shots in seven minutes—this at a time when the standard
soldier's musket could at best be loaded and fired three times per minute
Another contrast, on the 15th
May 1928, Mickey Mouse premiered in his first cartoon Plane Crazy.
Also on
the 15th May 1951, the Polish
cultural attaché in Paris, Czesław
Miłosz, asked for and received political asylum from the French Government. Czesław
Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian
origin. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20
"naive" poems. He defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction
book The Captive Mind (1953) is a
classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic
Languages and Literatures at the University
of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen and was
awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel
Prize in Literature. It was stated that Miłosz was a writer "who
with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world
of severe conflicts".
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