With his own right hand, his own pen. Pope Pius XI traced the 20,000 words of Quadragesima Anno, his encyclical on Capital & Labor, issued last week in Vatican City. Fortnight ago a vague 2,000-word official summary was released (TIME, May 25). The actual words of His Holiness last week were fresh and vibrant, precise and bold. Most remarkable were those passages in which the Supreme Pontiff pronounced squarely upon three basic elements in the life of almost every human being: the corporation, the factory, the machine.
Corporations. Upon corporations great & small Pius XI made this infallible* pronouncement: "The regulations legally enacted for corporations, with their divided responsibility and limited liability, have given occasion to abominable abuses. The greatly weakened accountability makes little impression, as is evident, upon the conscience. The worst injustices and frauds take place beneath the obscurity of the common name of a corporative firm. Boards of directors proceed in their unconscionable methods even to the violation of their trust in regard to those whose savings they administer."
Factories: "The mind shudders if we consider the frightful perils to which the morals of workers (of boys and young men particularly) and the virtue of girls and women are exposed in modern factories; if we recall how the present economic regime and above all the disgraceful housing conditions prove obstacles to the family tie and family life; if we remember the insuperable difficulties placed in the way of a proper observance of the holy days."
Machines: "How universally has the true Christian spirit become impaired which formerly produced such lofty sentiments even in uncultured and illiterate men! In its stead, man's one solicitude is to obtain his daily bread in any way he can, and so bodily labor, which was decreed by Providence for the good of man's body and soul even after original sin, has everywhere been changed into an instrument of strange perversion; for dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, where men are corrupted and degraded."
Communists. In the most intense portion of his encyclical Pope Pius termed Communists degenerate, cruel, inhuman, impious, nefarious, and many of their works ghastly. "One section of Socialism," declared His Holiness, "has degenerated into Communism. Communism teaches and pursues a two-fold aim: Merciless class warfare and complete abolition of private ownership. And this it does, not in secret and by hidden methods, but openly, frankly and by every means, even the most violent. To obtain these ends, Communists shrink from nothing and fear nothing, and when they have attained power, it is unbelievable, indeed, it seems portentous, how cruel and inhuman they show themselves to be. Evidence for this is the ghastly destruction and ruin with which they have laid waste immense tracts of Eastern Europe and Asia, while their antagonism and open hostility to Holy Church and to God himself are, alas, but too well known and proved by their deeds.
"We do not think it necessary to warn upright and faithful children of the Church against the impious and nefarious character of Communism."