Indeed, besides the earth, man’s principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied. It is his disciplined work in close collaboration with others that makes possible the creation of ever more extensive working communities which can be relied upon to transform man’s natural and human environments. Important virtues are involved in this process, such as diligence, industriousness, prudence in undertaking reasonable risks, reliability and fidelity in interpersonal relationships, as well as courage in carrying out decisions which are difficult and painful but necessary, both for the overall working of a business and in meeting possible set-backs.9
5. Community of Work
It is becoming clearer how a person’s work is naturally interrelated with the work of others. More than ever, work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else. Work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable of the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognisant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.
(John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §31.)
If you lift from your desktop a bright yellow schoolboy pencil, with a bit of alloyed metal holding tight to a pink eraser, you may gain an insight into how the “universal workbench” of a global economy works. Do you know where the lightweight wood of that pencil comes from—from what country on earth? And the graphite that provides the mark of your writing on paper? And the bronze-colored alloy that holds the eraser? And the gum of the eraser itself? There are not many of us who know whence all those things derive, and what is the most efficient way to procure and to process them. And, by the way, someone needs to know how to produce and process the lacquer that makes the pencil shiny and prevents tiny paint chips from flecking off when schoolchildren put their pencils in their mouths.
No one person needs to know all the steps in finding, producing, and assembling these elements of the pencil. But some one person or small group does need to know where to find teams of people who know how to produce each element most efficiently and at high quality standards, and maybe another team to assemble them all together, and yet another team to market and to transport them to wholesalers and retailers. A simple yellow pencil may require a global workbench. The workers in Sri Lanka, Chile, and other nations who may have supplied one part or another will never get to speak with or even see the schoolchildren who end up using those pencils. Nonetheless, these workers serve those distant children well. If they do their work, providing good service to their fellow humans, this very ordinary form of love will accompany the pencils to the unknown, unseen hands that use them.
It is not a wasted idea for anyone who uses a pencil to say a word of thanks to the faraway people who produced it. In this way, there is not only a universal workbench, but also an invisible filament of mutual service racing around the earth, encircling the hearts of the whole world as one. Do not think that commerce means only a material bond. Do not think that globalization lacks all soul.
THE SECOND SET OF BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL doctrine can be remembered as the five Rs. These designate the five rights that Catholic social teaching has recognized throughout history, through close observation of necessities for human flourishing. Declarations of human rights long antedate the contemporary world.
1. The Right to Give to Caesar What Is Caesar’s, But to God the Things That Are God’s
“Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard it, they marveled. And they left him and went away.
(Matthew 22:17–22.)
The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated.
(Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §28.)
Natan Sharansky calls the principle about Caesar and God the “anti-totalitarian principle,” for it lays out in such stark and simple terms the reality that some things do not belong to Caesar. No government has the right to claim total power. All government is limited, by right. One very large realm of human life (among others) from which Caesar is shut out is the life of the human spirit, the human mind, the human soul. The relentless questioning of science is by right free from the control of the state. So is the life of the arts. Even more so is the free inquiry and reporting of the press, both electronic and print. The same applies to the right to free public speech.
Yet more emphatic than any of these is the right of the human conscience to respond freely and without governmental restraint or burden to the internal calling of the Lord God Creator. It is self-evident that the difference in power, intellect, and love between the Creator and the conscious and reflective creature imposes a duty of awe, even a trace of what Kierkegaard called “fear and trembling,” in the face-to-face of God and humans. Furthermore, the alert human feels, perhaps, a surge of gratitude. And if a duty toward the Creator is evident, then an individual has a right to respond unimpeded by any lesser power. The same freedom, based on an inalienable duty, has been felt by religious communities around the world throughout history. Most of the most important things in life do not come under the rule of Caesar.
That is why the freedom to exercise one’s own religious conscience is the first freedom, from which all others descend. It is called the first freedom because it most brilliantly spotlights the transcendence of each human person. Each alone must choose to accept—or to reject—the friendship offered by the Lord God Creator. No other freedom goes so deep. No other freedom is so deeply inalienable.
Woe to the human who dares to block, or to meddle with, the interior personal encounter between the Creator and his free, responsible creature.
Atheists, too, share in this liberty. No human may be compelled either to believe in God or to consent to serve God. For atheists, the problem is to discover how to establish this right on atheist grounds. Tom Paine did not believe this could be done, and sailed to France to dissuade the leaders of the Revolution of 1789 from turning atheistic. He held that they would thus undermine the very argument that grounded their own rights. They would turn their rights into preferences, a reality of a very different order indeed. For if rights do not come from God, but only from human preference, what security shall believers find in “rights,” and what security will atheists find in changeable and often fickle human preferences?
2. The Right to Worship God and Practice One’s Faith
Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, “this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name.”
(John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, §14.)
In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience in order that he may come to God, the end and