1. She founds and manages institutions for the benefit of the laborer unable to work. These are managed by those who have a tender interest in his welfare. Love to Christ will enable the Catholic nurses to perform disagreeable and repulsive services in a mild and gentle manner.
2. She offers him the institution of the Christian family.
3. She presents to him the truths and doctrines of the Church, which are the true education of the laborer. The doctrine of the liberals, that education for the laborers is to be found in self-help and in their unions for instructing working-men is only a simulacrum and deceit.
4. She offers him the social power of the Church. This unites men, and may be used to assist in founding unions and societies of laborers. Such unions are Christian in nature.[212]
5. This social power of the Church might be used in establishing productive co-operative associations on a Christian basis. Nothing could be more pleasing to God and beneficial to man than gifts of the wealthy for this purpose.
For our part, we rejoice that men of all shades of opinion are turning to Christianity for help in the solution of social problems, and trust that the poor and needy, where they are now estranged from the Church, may ere long be led to recognize in her their best friend. All Christian men, and particularly the authorities of the Church, should see to it that no opportunity is lost to win to her the toiling masses. We fully agree with a celebrated Belgian professor[213] of Political Economy when he writes: “The proletarians have been detached from and will return to Christianity when they begin to understand that it brings to them freedom and equal rights, whereas atheistic materialism consecrates their slavery and sacrifices them to pretended natural laws. By a complete misapplication of its ideas, the religion of Christ, transformed into a temporal and sacerdotal institution, has been called in as the ally of caste, despotism, and the ancient régime to sanction all social inequalities. The Gospel, on the contrary, is the good news to the poor—the announcement of the advent of that kingdom when the humble shall be lifted up and the disinherited shall possess the earth.”[214]
FOOTNOTES
[1] Vide “Histoire du Communisme,” par Alfred Sudre (5th ed., Paris, 1856), ch. xiv. sec. iv. pp. 232-250.
[2] Vide “Rousseau,” by John Morley (Lond. 1873), vol. i. p. 192.