Lux Lucet

Mexican president elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador believes that mass migration to the United States is the right of all North Americans and all people throughout the world. Further, he promised to defend that right. So where did Lopez Obrador get such a strange idea? From the teachings of the Roman Church-State, of course.

Last week we looked at the Roman Church-State’s theory of property and found that Rome does not look at private property the same way most Americans, even Americanized Roman Catholics, do.

If you were to ask a typical American, regardless of his religion, the basis for his claim to own an item, he’d probably say something like, “Because I paid for it.” That is to say, he believes he has rightful title to a piece of property – a bottle of water, a car or a house – because he lawfully purchased it from the previous owner. This is the correct answer, but probably not for the reason many people think.

If you were to press someone on this point, asking him why the fact that he purchased an item means he rightfully has title to it and enjoys the rights of ownership – to hold, to use, and to dispose of it – at some point you’ll probably be told it’s just common sense. But this is incorrect.

The historic American, and Western, view of private property is not the product of common sense, but of a Biblical view of economics and politics that was re-discovered at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century. In short, the Biblical theory of property is that when God created the world, he gave it to men severally, that is to say, individually. All private property can be traced back to Adam, to whom God gave the entire world as a possession. Adam passed title to this property on to his sons and so forth. This process of selling or ceding one’s property to another has continued down to today. In Scripture, private property, not collective ownership, is original. And just as the whole human race is descended from Adam, so too are all property rights. Lord willing, we’ll take a closer look at the Biblical theory of property in a future installment.

Rome, on the other hand, has a theory of property derived not from Scripture, but from the mistaken belief that when God created the world, he gave it to mankind collectively. In place of the Bibles teaching that private property is original, Rome posits an original communism. This original communism is referred to at times as the “community of goods,” or, as the popes of Rome like to call it, the Universal Destination of Goods.

Roman Catholic Social Teaching is willing to accommodate private property up to a point. For Rome, private property is a convention of what they call positive (man made) law. But when things get serious, natural law trumps positive law. And natural law means the Universal Destination of Goods.

What the Roman Church-State argues is that since the original condition of the world was the possession of all things in common, the ultimate an only moral title to property is, not that one paid for a good or service, but need.

If you have a large house, a full refrigerator, and a nice savings account, and I have none of these things but need them, then Rome argues that because all things originally belonged to all men in common, I have the right to take what I need from you. If necessary, the civil authorities can be called on to do the taking on my behalf. This is the purpose of the modern welfare state, which itself is largely the creation of the Roman Church-State, in a nutshell: To take property from those who have a surplus (at least in the eyes of the Church) and give it to those who need it.

This is not stealing, argues the Church, because, “need is the moral criterion for the rightful and lawful possession of property: Whoever needs property ought to possess it. Need makes another’s goods one’s own. Need is the ultimate and only moral title to property. Neither possession, nor creation, nor production, nor gift, nor inheritance, nor divine commandment (with the exception of Roman Church-State property) grants title to property that is immune to the prior claim of need” (Robbins, Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 32).

As we shall see below, the Church’s unbiblical notion of original communism is central to its program of promoting mass, taxpayers subsidized immigration, migration, and refugee resettlement.

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