On The Sanctity Of Property

Here I must digress and say why the other great international force, the Catholic Church, has not been able—and will never be able—to attack Industrial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though, as I have said, it acts indirectly as a solvent of this evil and will destroy it wherever society remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only in its abstract doctrine, but acting as the expression of our European civilization, is profoundly attached to the conception of private property. It makes the family the unit of the State and it perceives that the freedom of the family is most secure where the family owns. It perceives, as do all Europeans, instinctively or explicitly, that property is the correlative of freedom, or, at any rate, of that only kind of freedom which we Europeans care to have: that it is the safeguard of spiritual health (the mark of which is humour), of breadth and diversity in action, of elasticity in the State, of permanence in institutions. Property, as widely distributed as possible, but sacred as a principle, is an inevitable social accompaniment of Catholicism.
Apart from this, it is also a definite feature of Catholic doctrine to deny that private property is immoral. No Catholic can say that private property is immoral without cutting himself off from the Communion of the Church, any more than he can say that the authority in the State is immoral. He cannot be a communist, in abstract morals any more than he can be an anarchist.
Now Industrial Capitalism is a disease of property. It is the monstrous state of affairs in which a very few men derive their vast advantage from the corresponding fact that most men whom they exploit do not own.
But it remains true that the sheet-anchor of Capitalism is a sense of ownership in the mass as well as in the privileged few. The only moral force remaining to Industrial Capitalism, the only spiritual tie which prevents its dissolution, is this admission by the European mind that property is a right—even property in a diseased and exaggerated form.
The whole of the operations of Industrial Capitalism rely upon the sanctity of property and the sanctity of contract which develops from the sanctity of property. And whenever society loses this sense, industrial capitalism will fall into chaos. The Church cannot deny that one moral principle. Its action will always be towards the dissolution of the great accumulations promoted by capitalism. It always will work indirectly for the establishment of well-divided property, an ideal defined by the voice of its great modern Pope, Leo XIII, who explicitly states it in his Rerum Novarum. But the Church can never take the short cut of destroying Industrial Capitalism root and branch and at once, by erecting against it the doctrine of Communism or (as many people call diluted Communism) “Socialism.” It never can do so in theory, and still less will it ever do so in practice. A Catholic society will always tend to be a society of owners: with all the elements of co-operation, with the Guild, with masses of corporate property attached to the State or connected with the city, with the college, with the corporation. For without such corporate property in a State, property is never well founded.

— Hilaire Belloc, The Jews