Is capitalism to be condemned ...?

It is certainly true that the Church condemns both laissez-faire capitalism and communism, neither political system being according to Catholic principles. However, there is a profound difference, the former not being opposed to the natural law as is the latter, which was condemned as “intrinsically perverse” by Pope Pius XI in his 1937 encyclical on communism, Divini Redemptoris.

It was, in fact, before the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in his first encyclical, Qui Pluribus (1846), that Pope Pius IX identified and condemned the fundamental perversion of communism: “the unspeakable doctrine of Communism, as it is called, a doctrine most opposed to the very natural law. For if this doctrine were accepted, the complete destruction of everyone’s laws, government, property, and even of human society itself would follow” (§16). Archbishop Lefebvre comments:
Pope Leo XIII in his magisterial encyclical on the condition of the working classes, Rerum Novarum, condemned both excesses. However, not in the same way. After defending the right of ownership of private property as the foundation of human society, he has this to say of socialism:
He goes on to condemn the implacable class warfare engineered by communism as “abhorrent to reason and truth.”

When it comes to capitalism, it is not the system of private ownership and profit that he condemns, nor the inequalities that exist among men:

He goes on to teach that the collaboration between workers and employers must go beyond simple questions of justice to a relationship of friendship, not bound by materialism, but considering that earthly gain of transitory things is but a preparation for eternity.

It follows from these considerations that capitalism is not condemned by the Church as intrinsically perverse, as is communism. It is a system of government and economy in which a man’s religious and natural rights can be preserved, even if this is not always the case in practice. The right to private ownership guarantees, at least to some extent, a man’s right to raise his family according to the natural and divine law, to support the Church, to practice the true religion, to educate his children, to profess the Faith, all of which rights are denied by the collectivism practiced by communism. If it is true that socialist tendencies penetrating more and more into our modern societies undermine these rights progressively, this is not in itself the consequence of capitalism. Consequently, the Church can use, and even “baptize,” the capitalist system in a way that it cannot do for communism. An industrialist, a businessman, a property developer can all be good Catholics, provided that they observe the principles of justice and charity contained in the natural law. It would consequently be wrong to consider capitalism as inherently unjust, or consider that the state has the right to intervene and distribute wealth equally amongst all the citizens.

However, this being said, it must be remembered that modern, liberal capitalism cannot be accepted as such. It does have to be baptized. It is penetrated by gross materialism; unjust and disordered motives of pure profit; a refusal to consider the primacy of the common good; and by the principle of man’s economic, moral, and social independence that is so characteristic of liberalism and that has destroyed the Catholic spirit ever since the Protestant revolution.

If Pope Pius IX points out that communism is the fruit of Freemasonry, Archbishop Lefebvre also explains the obvious–namely, that the opposing vice of capitalism is also the outcome of Freemasonry, and that they share a similar liberalism and materialism, although in different degrees and different ways: