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Universal Destination of Earthly Goods |
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God created the world both to show his glory and to provide the human race with the various things it needs. Each human person is God’s creature and was intended by God to receive his necessary share of created goods. Though the things of the world have, through human institutions, been parceled out into various forms of property, in the last analysis even property rights and the commandment against stealing may give way to the requirements of the universal destination of goods that is God’s will in creating. The concept of the universal destination, however, must be properly understood. In recent centuries, under the impulse of ideologies such as socialism, property rights were denigrated as opposed to God’s universal will. This is misleading at best and usually wrong. For the most part God’s will in these matters is accomplished through the principle of subsidiarity, whereby individuals are responsible for themselves, families for children and dependents, associations for members, and so forth. A society as a whole or the world community may choose to aid those who are not being served by subsidiary institutions. But private property and subsidiarity of jurisdictions are important, both because they distribute the goods of the earth in a generally just way and because they empower individuals and human groups to play their role in God’s creation. If the universal destination meant a centralized distribution of goods, it would soon lead to totalitarianism. At absolute need, individuals or groups, or even whole societies, may have the right to appropriate property that has been unjustly kept from them and to which they have an immediate and life-threatening need. But this can only be done if all other moral prohibitions are observed (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 76, a. 7). In recent years, the universal destination has also been used to warn about degradation of the environment, which may become, in effect, an unjust appropriation of goods God has also intended for future generations.
See: Common Good; Environment; Preferential Option for the Poor; Property; Revolution; Social Doctrine; Stealing; Subsidiarity. |
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