Tea at Trianon: The Postmodern Rejection of Property

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

The Postmodern Rejection of Property

From Return to Order:

The first is to review the Catholic Church’s teaching about property. The Church has always defended private property finding ample Scriptural justification in the Old and New Testaments.4 The Church has also condemned abuses of this right and praised voluntary poverty as an evangelical counsel for those seeking a higher perfection.

Traditional theologians have consistently declared private ownership to be just and necessary. Indeed, the Church teaches it is a natural right that cannot be taken away. Property is a given proposition upon which everything else is built. It is expressed by the maxim that privatas possessiones inviolate servandas (private property is to be preserved inviolate) found in Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum. Leo XIII also defended the justice of private ownership in several other encyclicals against the unjust socialist attacks upon the institution. Saint Pius X, in his Motu Proprio: Fin dalla prima nostra of December 18, 1903, declares that “Private property is under all circumstances, be it the fruit of labor or acquired by conveyance or donation, a natural right, and everybody may make such reasonable disposal of it as he thinks fit.”5

Replying to the Social Questions Raised by the Industrial Revolution

The modern debate over property focused on social questions raised by the destructive effects of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. As a result, the Church vastly expanded Her teaching to consider the many attacks upon property, especially from the sociological and economic perspectives.

The Church fearlessly denounced the abuses of property. However, she also discussed with great clarity the nature of property, how it might be acquired, its foundations in natural law, its limitations and the universal right to acquire property. The Church saw private property as an element of order that allowed social institutions like the family, the community, the economy and the State to flourish. Property is providential in that it teaches people to think about the future. It makes planning possible since it involves material accumulation in anticipation of shortages.

Property is essential for the practice of virtue and the pursuit of truth. Justice by which each is given that which is due implies a division between mine and thine found in property. Charity to others is physically expressed in the voluntary distribution of property to the needy. By its undeniable physical existence, property affirms objective reality and being. It imposes consequences on acts. (Read more.)