St. Thomas against Uniform Distributism

Traditioninaction.org, one of the finest Catholic Websites for its historical and theological accuracy,* publishes this quote from St. Thomas, in regard to the recent advocacy of the Distributist position of Chesterton, among American Catholics. While I am not convinced that Chesterton advocated the kind of socialims St. Thomas condemns in the passage below, it is useful to consider what the Angelic Doctor says. What follows is an excerpt from Traditioninaction.org's website, the entire text of St. Thomas can be found linked through the title of this post above.

St. Thomas: Giving Families Equal Properties Destroys the Natural Order

Since we are witnessing in the United States today the rebirth of old Catholic-Socialist errors under the name of Distributism, it seems very timely to remind our readers of the perennial teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Universal Doctor of the Church, on this topic.


About the community of goods with regard to possessions Given that the Philosophers (Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato) spoke about the community of possessions, it seems fitting to see what others, who themselves established societies, said on this topic. There were two philosophers who, thinking that disputes in their cities arose from the fact that one had a surplus of what another was lacking, wanted their communities to have equal possessions. One was Phaleas of Chalcedon, whom Aristotle mentions, and another was Lycurgus, the son of the king of Sparta, who established laws for the Lacedaemonians, as Justin reports, so that by all having equal possessions, no one would be more powerful than another.

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* The one exception I make to this commendation, is that I believe the Traditioninaction.org's critique of pictures of Sr. Lucia, while interesting speculatively, is more amply refuted by the testimony of her relatives, with whom she held converse, and who held no such opinion. For in such matters I believe that the forensice evidence of human testimony outweighs that of all experts who have no personal knowledge; otherwise, if we do not accept such a principle, we would put in doubt the very testimonies of the Apostles in regard to the Resurrection, or similar historical events, about which the human testimony of eye witnesses is unanimous. The disparity of photographs is more easily explained by a misidentification of photographs, the natural irregularities of Sr. Lucia's Face; furthermore, photos taken in the last years of her life show the same face, when taken from similar angles as those of her childhood, and these can be viewed from the website of the Carmel in Coimbra, Portugal.