In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
- Genesis 1:1
In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis wrote, “The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.”
Listed under the heading “Re-Envisaging The Social Role of Property,” Francis’ comments are not, as some of his more free market critics suppose, out of the mainstream of Roman Catholic economic thought. Rather, the Pope’s attack on private property is simply a restatement of Rome’s long-held unchristian, erroneous, and socialist understanding of private property.
To underscore Francis hostility to private property, we need look no further than the paragraph quoted at the top of this post, “The principle of the common use of created goods is the ‘first principle of the whole ethical and social order; it is a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.’” In Pope Francis view, collectivism is “ethical” while holding to the Bible’s view of private property, that it is lawful for a man to do what he wishes with his own things, is not.
Contrary to Pope Francis, the common use of created goods, far from being the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order,” is a guarantor of poverty and tyranny. One would think the many failed socialist states over the past 100 years, and the economic and political disasters suffered by those unfortunate enough to live in them, would make this clear. But far from slowing them down, it’s almost as if the economic disasters suffered by the Soviet Union, Venezuela and a host of other nations embolden the socialists, including Pope Francis, to double down on calling evil good and good evil by pushing for more economic collectivism.
In one of his lectures, John Robbins made the important point that systems of thought tend to go wrong from the very beginning. That is to say, systems of thought, in this case economic thought, tend to begin with faulty premises which then lead their adherents to faulty conclusions.
This can be seen in the economic thinking of Pope Francis, who begins with the unbiblical notion of the “the principle of the universal destination of created goods” which in turn leads him to attack private property and capitalism – God’s economics – and to promote the form of coveting we know as socialism or collectivism.
But while at least some Christians understand that capitalism is the economic system of the Bible, it may come as a surprise even to them that one must begin in Genesis to have a sound understanding of economics, specifically, the origin of private property.
