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Catholic View of the Economy: Excerpts from Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler's "The Labor Question and Christianity" (1864)

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The third kind of aid that Christianity gives to the working class is its truths and teachings, which also afford the working class true education. If the liberal party promises the working class higher training from the liberals' doctrine of self-help and worker education associations, then this is, to the extent that the teaching methods of Christianity are being disregarded, empty semblance and vain illusion. Only Christianity offers the working class true education. Just as a bread crumb fallen to the ground compares with a rich man's table, so do all the teaching methods of a rationalistic worldview compare with those of Christianity [Lk 16: 21]. They do not know Christianity, with its immense healing powers, and if they, so to speak, find some of the crumbs that have fallen from Christianity, they praise them to the world as if they had found a new, unknown remedy, while what they have is just a small, atrophied bit of what Christianity has to offer people.

[ . . . ]

Finally, in its training, Christianity provides the working class those same virtues that are also so necessary for its material livelihood and that also contribute to increasing and sweetening, so to speak, its miserable daily wage; it gives it inner joyfulness of heart and an inner peace that eases work; it guides it toward moderation, thrift, and abstinence, which increase prosperity; it provides it with familial joys that make the tavern dispensable; it protects it from the influence of evil passions and thereby keeps it healthy and powerful, so that its work becomes even easier.

Thus, Christianity provides the worker with the true means for self-help, by guiding the whole human personality toward developing all his powers, and it provides him with true education by proclaiming the only truths and virtues that are capable of educating.

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