Temporal Prosperity

 From Catholic Exchange:

Every one of the commandments is vital not only for the salvation of the individual but also for the wellbeing of society. None of them can be ignored or widely violated without disastrous results to the whole community. But these results are more immediate and more evident in the case of some commandments than in that of others. The two we consider now are so intimately bound up with the economic and social life of man that they simply govern business intercourse and effectively determine the measure of prosperity any nation shall be permitted to enjoy. They prescribe for all of us the practice of justice in our dealings with our fellowmen; and justice is the very keystone of the arch that bridges over the gulf separating ordered civilized existence from the conditions of prehistory.

Justitia stant magna imperia was a medieval proverb. Its application is wider: the whole social life of men rests upon the virtue of justice as a pyramid rests on its base. It is literally impossible to exaggerate its importance in the building up of any social structure whatsoever. I need not apologize, therefore, for dwelling upon the definition and analysis of the concept. Justice is often used in Scripture as the equivalent of righteousness or of the whole duty of man. Here we are envisaging the word in a somewhat narrower or more technical sense. We may define it as the moral virtue that impels us to give to all our fellow men whatever may be their due. Yet more strictly understood, it ordains respect for the rights of property that men possess. Now, that men possess certain such rights I here purpose to assume. That nobody has any strict right to any form of property is too silly a pretension for debate. The limitations of those rights may, indeed, raise all manner of perplexing problems; the existence of them is too deeply rooted in the nature of man, too clearly exemplified in his whole secular history for any reasonable denial.

Neither can I dwell on the various ways in which those rights arise. They are not conferred upon the individual by the state. How could they be? The individual is logically prior to the state. Man is an individual before he is a citizen. The state, rightly conceived, is nothing other than so many individuals organically united into a society that, as a moral entity, has for its sole function the securing of the fullest and most complete life in common of the units composing it. Perhaps one may say that half our modern political blundering is due to a forgetfulness of this fact. The state has been set up as something existing, as it were, in the air: distinct from, prior to, and dominating over the various individuals. It is divinized—literally deified—and set up on the emptied altar of God. This would be bad enough if it were merely an abstract theory with no influence on conduct. So far, however, from being that, it translates itself into practice immediately, even necessarily, by turning the state into a Moloch on whose cruel altar nearly every right of human personality is immolated. If we cannot see this exemplified in the various totalitarian states of today, we can see nothing. (Read more.)

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