Published: Wednesday, 30th July, 2008 10:05
To whose benefit?
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Certain aspects of Gordon Brown’s recently proposed revision of the ‘benefit’ system should give the Catholic voters in Clydebank cause for thought.
Under the plans, claimants will have to look for work in order to continue receiving benefits, and unemployed people will have to undertake community service in return for receiving benefit.
The Catholic Church teaches that all human beings have the inalienable and basic right to food, clothes and shelter whether their work is needed or not.
In the Great Depression, sustenance was withheld from the jobless unless they conformed to conscription for meaningless work and “If they will not work let them not eat” was quoted against them.
But the then Pope, Pius XI, in the Social Encyclical ‘Quadragessimo Anno’, condemned this misapplication of scripture and put it in its correct context.
Moreover, Catholic social teaching states that in return for his labour the worker should receive the wherewithal to ensure house ownership (private property being the one guarantee against state slavery).
They should also receive a piece of garden to work in during times of unemployment, which would be sufficient to maintain his wife and family in the state of education and dignity accepted as normal and desirable in the community.
This should also allow for holidays and savings, and allow the mother to remain at home and fulfil her right and duty to raise her own children.
Forcing the mother out to work, general wage suppression, loss of lower paid jobs and emotional trauma to both mother and child, is recognised as a particular abomination and denial of basic justice.
As is misallocating to the unmarried and those in irregular or incongruous situations the rights and protection properly owed by the community to the married.
It should be emphasised that these inalienable rights of the worker are his before any mention is made of training, skills or profession is made.
As the Pope Pius XI succinctly puts it “What else has the worker to trade with but his labour?”
The conscription of the worker, whether in this century or previous, indicates a slave situation in modern times.
This is fuelled by the idea of the Puritan work ethic which views the human being, on the one hand as cannon fodder, and on the other, mere factory fodder.
Meanwhile the basic anti-Christian disorder of our global economic system is perpetuated to the gain of the few “against whom none dare breathe against their will”.
MT Kielty, Mountblow
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