How a Catholic Handles Social Conflict

Socialism says conflict is good. A Catholic can't sign on to that.​

Social conflict—blaming one group for why something’s wrong in a given society—is a phenomenon old and new. There have always been proclivities to fault a particular group when things go wrong in a society. One reason Nero persecuted the early Christians is that they were convenient scapegoats.

Such skullduggery usually doesn’t like to admit what it’s up to, at least openly. That changed in the last century and a half, when political philosophies explicitly incorporated blaming social conflict into their theoretical assumptions. The Nazis, for example, insisted that “Aryans” were victims, so their victimizers—pre-eminently the Jews—had to be eliminated.

The worst example of in-built scapegoating in a political system was socialism. Karl Marx’s entire theory is built upon the assumption of conflict: one social group fights another, victim becoming victimizer, until the “proletariat” prevails and . . . with no explanation, suddenly, social conflict as the engine of change sputters out. Note, however, that socialism actually maintains that conflict among people is a good thing; it’s what makes history “progress.”

That is utterly not the Catholic view of society. It’s a view of human society no Catholic can ever subscribe to, because it predicates that some of your neighbors necessarily have to be your enemies.

There may be other flaws in the socialist worldview that fuel that thinking. One of them is its materialist foundations: by focusing on worldly goods, whether theoretically (we focus on the material because that’s all there is) or practically (do your spiritual stuff on your own; we’re talking “practical living” here), socialism marginalizes (if not denies) the spiritual.

The problem is that material goods, unlike spiritual goods, necessarily diminish by division. That is in stark contrast to spiritual goods, which do not. Four people can be loved as much as three, because love is infinite; four people don’t get as much pizza as three, because the pie is finite.

Continued below.