People have a right to the basic requirements for the sustenance of life. These are the four classical Elements - air, water, earth and fire. Air is not too much of problem, water is ok for some, and fire can be tricky. The most contentious one is land, because people can come along, put a fence round it and claim it is theirs. If anyone contests their claim to ownership, they are backed up by the law of the land plus any force of their own they may care to impose. Land is just regarded as a commodity to be traded like any other, not as something essential for people to live upon and make their livelihoods. Yet humans can do nothing without land.
Since 1891, successive Popes have issued Encyclicals dealing with social and economic issues. Collectively, this is known as the body of "Catholic Social Teaching". It has far-reaching and radical things to say about all sorts of matters but has consistently skirted round the land issue. We get hints about people's rights to property ownership and the duty of stewardship that goes with such owneship, but it stops there. Peasants' land rights in Third World countries sometimes get a mention but this is invariably discussed in terms of rural land distribution, which is no solution at all, as people are discovering in countries like El Salvador where land distribution took place in the early 1990s.
Aside from the official hierarchy we have bodies like CAFOD, which do an excellent job on the ground but go astray when they start talking about politics and economics. Thus we had the Jubilee 2000 Campaign, which was about debt relief, and ingored the fact that the biblical Jubilee was primarily about land. The only other land rights that get much of a mention are the land rights of the Palestinians, yet the English have also had their land stolen from them and most people haven't even noticed. It is not difficult to demonstrate that this is the root cause of much of the malaise in this country, as indeed in most countries in the world today.
Perhaps Pope Benedict, who has just issued a statement on Human Rights, will at last engage with the subject directly.
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IF you haven't read Henry George's Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, you might check it out at http://www.wealthandwant.com/
In July, 2007, there will be a conference at Scranton, Pennsylvania, US, contrasting the Georgist and the Roman Catholic points of view on a number of issues on social justice. It promises to be very good!
In my experience, my friends in the Catholic church seem to be good on intentions but lazy about thinking through the underlying economics, so they are happy to go out every evening and serve on the soup run, which is OK but it means that causes are never addressed.
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