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Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
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Human Rights in Ireland >>
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Jump To Comment: 1Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo III in 1891 upheld private property as a natural right and supported capitalist industrial enterprise. The encyclical also stated that ownership of property was not absolute: it was to be used with the 'common good' in mind. The pope also said that employers had moral duties towards employees - safe working conditions, reasonable hours on duty and adequate weekly rest, a just wage to be paid so that (male) employees could support their wives and children. Here is a quote from the encyclical about moral duties towards the workers:
"The following duties . . . concern rich men and employers: Workers are not to be treated as slaves; justice demands that the dignity of human personality be respected in them, … gainful occupations are not a mark of shame to man, but rather of respect, as they provide him with an honorable means of supporting life.
It is shameful and inhuman, however, to use men as things for gain and to put no more value on them than what they are worth in muscle and energy."
Irish Catholic bishops and priests from 1922 onwards were obsessed by the spectre of Bolshevik marxism and its brutal practice in Soviet Russia. They failed adequately to preach social justice to Irish employers.
But capitalism in the Irish Free State for the first decades of the state was noted for the prominent participation of minority protestant property owners. The Protestant church leaders were not noted for preaching about unjust treatment of employees by employers. Their theology did not produce any documents as far reaching as Rerum Novarum and Quadregesimo Anno (1931). They were satisfied with capitalism Irish style. When Noel Browne in 1950-51 wished to steer a Mother and Child bill through the Dail the Church of Ireland Gazette carried an editorial likening socialised medicine to communist tyranny. The post 1922 Irish Department of Education gave special attention to suporting protestant denominational primary schools and fee-paying secondary schools. Anti-capitalist social teaching never featured in such schools.
Look at the posthumously published Diaries of George Orwell in Penguin paperback. Orwell in the 1930s travelled around industrial England - Birmingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire in particular. He found horrible housing and nutrition conditions among the English working class. The British Labour Party was ineffective, nay timorously conservative, in the hungry 1930s as workers marched from Jarrow to London, and as deaths from TB and industrial caused cancer mounted. It took World War II to jolt the smug English voting public into giving Labour a landslide in 1945. That Labour Party nationalised coal and the railways and enacted the great National Health service - and cute Butskellite policies on welfare from the 1950s until the 1979 appointment of Margaret Thatcher as PM ensured that British capitalism remained dominant and imperial Defence expenditure and colonial purpose remained the same as before the diminution of the empire.
Support for capitalism is not a Catholic Church monopoly. It is found among Protestants, Jews and atheists. The laique French state is capitalist. Post-Christian Netherlands is capitalist. Post-Christian Belgium is capitalist. Northern Italy, largely urban and post-Catholic, is capitalist.
Any supposition that de-catholicising and/or dechristianizing a society will lead to socialism replacing capitalism is not based on twentieth-century social experie