On Sunday in the Catholic Hour Series the preceding series of lectures concluded two weeks ago we studied the Encyclical Letter of the great Pope Pius XI on theistic commünism in which he exposes the false principles of morality, philosophy and economics upon which the system is built, and Which of fécéssity doom it to utter failure in the realms of practical application. Any system that stigmatizes the worship of God or degrades human beings is of its very nature false and can only result si Üisáster. To communism we owe a debt of gratitude for having exposed the injustice of the social conditions of labour in our economic life, but to its material ideology we owe nothing except the logical conclusion from a false premise that might is right, The Holy Father however did not feel that he had fulfilled his duties and obligations when he had exposed the false principles and errors of atheistic communism, when he had proved that the remedy it proposes Was worse than the disease. Something else had to be done,—something constructive and practical At the time of Pope Pius XI something had already been done. The wheels had already been set in motion by his saintly predecessor, Leo XIII, but something had to be done to speed up the machinery to the tempo of modern industrialism, built upon the same Christian principles that gave birth to our civilization.
The basic fact underlying the social philosophy of the Encyclical is this: Economic life is a means of worshipping God. That sentence is important, It is the starting point of our whole social system. Natural resources, production, work, ownership, buying and selling exist so that through them "we shall be led by progressive steps to the final end of all, God Himself, our highest and lasting good."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.