Last June, New York City assemblymember Zohran Mamdani surprised the country with a decisive win over former New York Governor Anderw Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary. Now, the latest polls show Mamdani with a 17-point advantage over Cuomo and Republican Curtis Slivwa.
Mamdani’s platform focuses on cost of living issues for New Yorkers – something that city residents are concerned about. The Democratic nominee is proposing among other things – rent freezes, free childcare, city-owned grocery stores, and taxes on corporations and high-income earners to pay for his programs.
However, Mamdani’s likely win puts the question of socialism and its problems back into focus. Dr. Paul Kenogr, professor of political science at Grove City College, told Drew Mariani that the Church has frequently condemned socialism.
Rerum Novarum
In Pope Leo XIII’s landmark social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), the Holy Father rejects socialist ideology. “The main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind.”
The Holy Father also writes that the transfer of property rights from the individual to the community is “emphatically unjust.”
Socialist ideology, the Holy Father, says, would prevent workers from bettering their lives. Taking away wages from a worker would “deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.”
Quadragesimo Anno
Forty years after the publication of Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI released a follow-up encyclical addressing further questions related to socialism and capitalism. At the time, there was a question as to whether or not a moderated socialism was reconcilable with Christianity. The Pope answered in the negative. Socialism, he says, “cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.”
The Holy Father explains that Christian teaching says man ought to “fully cultivate and develop all his faculties unto the praise and glory of his Creator.” Socialism, however, neglects man’s eternal end.
Centesimus Annus
St. John Paul II affirmed this critique of socialism in the 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus when he wrote that the primary problem with socialism “is anthropological in nature” because it “considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism” and ultimately negates man’s free choice.