Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

towards absolutism“ (Georges Ripert). 61 Since property arises from greater or less thrift and
industry, it gravitates automatically, as it were, towards the ‘best innkeeper’ in the competitive
process. Limitations are not immanent within the right of ownership, but are prescriptions
of morality or of positive law added from without.
These theses were rejected even in the liberal nineteenth century by numerous critics as an
expression of the „basest, most wanton egoism“ (Rudolf v. Ihering), 62 of a „one-sided, romantic
jurisprudence as well as of an individualistic philosophy“ (Gustav Schmoller), 63 and as a
„fundamentally individualistic, capitalistic, antisocial view“ (Otto v. Gierke), 64 with the observation
that the social bond is „immanent to ownership“ and belongs „to the definition of
ownership“ (Martin Wolff). 65
2. Individual and Social Function
The twofold aspect of ownership, i.e., its individual and social function, results, according to
the Christian understanding, from the reasons adduced for the system of private ownership
(see above, pp. ?). „Social function“ (in Quadragesimo anno ratio socialis, indoles socialis)
does not mean a „social mortgage“ on property which is in itself individualistic, but the inner
social relatedness of property as such. Whereas the individual function of consumer goods
consists in the meeting of daily needs and that of durable goods in the development of personal
initiative as well as in providing for the future of a man and his family, the social function
demands that all strata of the population have a livelihood worthy of a human being and
the „concrete possibility“ of acquiring ownership of capital goods (a home, the means of production,
and the like) (Pius XII). In the service of these goals, the state can not only regulate
the use of property through ordering „restricted use“ (Pius XII), for instance, but also circumscribe
the right to ownership more narrowly. As the „other elements of social life“ so too the
right of ownership „is not absolutely unchanging.“ What divers forms has property had, from
that primitive form among rude and savage peoples...to the form of possession in the patriarchal
age; and so further to the various forms under tyranny...then through the feudal and monarchial
forms down to the various types which are to be found in more recent times“ (Quadragesimo
anno, 49). In the encyclical „Populorum Progressio,“ Pope Paul VI gives this summary
explanation: „The right to property is not absolute and unconditional. No one may appropriate
surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of
life. In short, as the fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of
private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good.’ When ‘private
gain and basic community needs conflict with one another’, it is for the public authorities ‘to
seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social
groups’.“ (n.23)
§ 6 The Crisis of the Economic Function of Private Ownership in Modern
Society
l. The Fourfold Crisis of the Function of Private Ownership.
Since it is proper to Christian social teaching to be a binding theory, it must apply its principles
to current conditions. In the light of the natural-law foundation of private ownership, four
functional crises of ownership can be discerned in modern society:
61 Cf. H. Peter, Wandlung der Eigentumsordnung und der Eigentumslehre seit dem 19. Jh. (Aarau, 1949), 103.
62 Ibid., 40.
63 Ibid., 49.
64 Ibid., 51.
65 Ibid., 12.
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