The Church, from her origins, was a movement of the poor and the powerless. The fact that her founder, Jesus Christ, was born in poor circumstances necessarily made concern for the poor one of its founding commitments.
By Gerald Grace
Emeritus Professor, St Mary’s University, Twickenham and Former Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education (CRDCE) at St Mary’s University; member of the ecumenical organisation, Church Action for Tax Justice, UK.
The Catholic Church has learned slowly that its mission on earth, for the salvation of souls by prayer and spiritual teaching, needed also the salvation of the environmental, social, economic and taxation conditions which worked against such salvation for the majority of people.
Taxes and tax collectors have not had a very good name historically. They have frequently been portrayed as agents of oppression and extortion. In the Bible and other religious teachings, tax collectors are the pariahs of society and their company is shunned by the righteous and respectable.
It must be admitted that there were some good reasons for this negative image. Levels of taxation were set by kings, emperors and mediaeval popes at unreasonable and disproportionate levels, and much was spent on power struggles and warfare and not on the welfare of the people. There was much corruption in the working of the tax systems, and tax collectors were known to add on a personal rate to cover their costs. These images and practices have had a deep social and cultural effect on all societies, causing many contemporary citizens to continue to associate ideas of taxation and tax collectors with a form of robbery, extortion and corruption. Many banks and corporations propagate slogans such as ‘don’t let the taxman get your money’. It has become almost a political virtue to propose tax cuts (when situations often require tax increases), and a vast number of tax evasion and avoidance schemes are available to those who want to reduce their tax commitment. In the contemporary world, this is thought to be a ‘smart’ thing to do.
The Church, from her origins, was a movement of the poor and the powerless. The fact that her founder, Jesus Christ, was born in poor circumstances necessarily made concern for the poor one of its founding commitments. The fact that Jesus, in forming His first apostles, called Matthew the tax collector to follow Him has great symbolic importance, and greater scholarly attention should be given to this dramatic counter-cultural action as well as to its Christian significance. It was surely saying that a Christian approach to taxation and to tax collection was going to be different from that of secular society in the longer term.88
However, it cannot be denied that the Catholic Church, as it developed institutionally in later centuries, became itself preoccupied by power, politics, finance and excessive taxation of the faithful. It was far from being the ‘saviour’ for existing social, economic and taxation conditions for many centuries but rather an example of how institutions can become corrupted over time.89
Provoked by the exploitation and oppressive social and economic conditions developing in Europe in the first industrial revolution, the Church was recalled to its earlier mission of ‘defender of the poor’ and began the development of what subsequently became formal Catholic social, economic and environmental teaching. Arguably, the pioneer of this was Pius XI in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931). He built upon and extended the earlier encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891). The position of the Church, before Pius XI, had been that the duty of the Church was to alleviate, by all charitable means, the worst excesses of industrial capitalism. Pius went radically beyond this when he made a clear distinction between social charity and social justice. It was a direct challenge to the emerging exploitation of workers in the newly developing capitalist system in Europe. Pope Pius wrote in Quadragesimo Anno: “no vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied” (Quadragesimo Anno 137). And as explained by Fr J-Y. Calvez and Fr J. Perrin:
“A charity which defrauds the worker of his just wage is no true charity but a hollow name and pretence. Doles given out of pity will not exempt a man from his obligations of justice… True charity, on the contrary, is the moral virtue which makes men try to improve the distribution of goods as justice requires”.90
The language of social justice had, at last, entered the discourse of the Church. This language was taken up and developed by Pope Paul VI and by Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate (2009).91
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) first addressed itself to the serious study of the challenges of taxation in their publication, Taxation for the Common Good, published in 2004, which unfortunately did not receive the publicity and the public and political attention it deserved.92 The few who engaged with it in the media and elsewhere tended to use classical ideological criticism of it, along the lines of ‘bishops should keep their attention on what they know about’ (such as prayer and spirituality), or used explicitly political attempts to discredit the bishops by suggesting party-political bias, such as describing it as ‘the most socialist document ever published by the CBCEW’.
An impartial examination of Taxation for the Common Good reveals that the bishops intended to inform the public that the discussion of taxation is not simply a set of financial, technical and secular policy questions but one to be addressed from a religious and moral perspective. This was expressed most powerfully by Archbishop Peter Smith in his foreword when he wrote:
“These are issues on which our political parties will often hold sharply differing views. What is it then, that a Church might have to add to the debate? The answer is a moral context. What is often missing from debates about taxation, is a shared commitment by citizens to building up a society that serves the common good. The Catholic Church has developed a body of Social Teaching. This publication argues… that taxation is a contribution to The Common Good.” (Taxation for the Common Good p. 4)
He later added that “taxation is a sign of social health and moral good. Our willingness to pay it is a sign of our solidarity with one another and of our humanity” (Ibid p. 4).
Archbishop Smith made it very clear that the bishops were not taking a party-political stance but a moral stance based on Christian values. This 2004 booklet ended with the statement: “taxation is neither a burden nor a necessary evil, but as a positive contribution to the common good, it is a responsibility of citizenship” (Ibid p. 39).
While the Catholic bishops made a strong case for moral and religious understanding of taxation, with Archbishop Peter Smith describing it as “a sign of social health and a moral good” (Ibid p. 5), what the bishops did not mention or analyse was that, in large sections of global taxation practice in many countries, taxation had also become a social disease beset by moral corruption as a result of tax avoidance strategies of various kinds. The United Nations began to reveal the extent of this problem. In
November 2008, the Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD) reported that:
“Developing countries are estimated to lose to ‘tax havens’ almost three times what they get from developed countries in aid… in the most recent estimates, Africa loses $89 billions of dollars every single year in illicit financial flows from the continent… It is for this reason, we can confidently say that tax dodging kills the poor.”93
Such revelations caused Pope Francis, from the very beginning of his ministry, to begin to criticise this social and economic disease and this moral corruption in these terms:
“In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times, but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few… which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. Hence, they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life blood whereby the entire economic system lives and have so firmly in their grip, the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.”94
It was Pope John Paul II who pointed out that the existence of ‘structures of sin’, such as apartheid, racism in general and the pursuit of profits at any cost, worked constantly to undermine the mission of the Church to establish a civilisation of love, kinship and justice in the world.95 Egregious tax avoidance can be included in this list of structures of sin.
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales in 2004 addressed their appeal to all ‘persons of goodwill’. The ‘structure of sin’ which is tax avoidance and tax corruption will need all secular, religious and international agencies to work together with courage and commitment to overcome this great evil. That which is hidden in the ‘tax havens’ needs to be brought out into the light of tax justice and fairness and the judgement of all nations.
The Covid-19 pandemic made painfully visible and manifest to us all the inequalities in people’s life chances in health, environmental, social and economic outcomes. We do not want to restore the ‘old normal’; we must instead try to create a ‘new normal’ for the future.
What the Covid experience taught us, and demonstrated, is that humanity is at its best when it unites to work on common good principles which extend beyond ‘my health, my family and my nation’. This has largely been the case with vaccine production and distribution. At its best, it has moved the idea of policy and action driven by common good principles from the university seminar into the field of practical action. Common good ideas are not just theoretical: they work.
Those of us writing in this document are concentrating our vision on just one sector (but a crucial one) of what must be the ‘new normal’ in the future. This relates to an attempt to change the whole culture in which taxation is currently understood and practised. Pope Francis, in his strong criticism of current global social and economic practice, has said: “Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies… To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions.”96
This culture, which has developed historically over many years, has generated: images of taxation as ‘state robbery’ of hardworking citizens; notions of how to be a modern ‘smart’ person by limiting or avoiding your contribution; and the conceit that taxation is financially so complex in practice that only the financially cognoscenti can speak about it. It is a culture which, in its calculations, excludes moral and religious understandings as ‘externalities’ that have no place in public discussion. Taxation is not regarded as a moral problem; it is a technical problem and a secular problem.
We should try to change this culture which is unjust. We should try to ensure that various media agencies will join us in amplifying our arguments to many citizens for a better future. A new culture of taxation as a contribution to the common good of all can be brought into existence.
I found both inspiration and encouragement from the late Archbishop of Southwark, Peter Smith. May he rest in peace. I have also learned much from the creative ideas of my daughter, Helena Grace, who has acted as my editorial assistant during lockdown in the UK.
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Chapter Eleven: Pope Francis and Tax Justice >
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88. M. Doak, A Prophetic Public Church: Witness to Hope Amid the Global Crises of the 21st Century (2020). Professor Doak reminds us that Matthew was one of only two apostles (the other being Luke) who warned of the challenge for Christians of the ‘love of God versus love of money’ contradiction. See Matthew 6:24: “You cannot serve God and money”.
89. See E. Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (Fourth edition, 2014).
90. J-Y. Calvez SJ and J. Perrin SJ, The Church and Social Justice: The Social Teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII (1961) p. 164.
91. Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (2009) 78: “[W]e are sustained by our faith that God is present alongside those who come together in his name to work for justice… The greatest service to development, then, is a Christian humanism… Openness to God makes us open towards our brothers and sisters and towards an understanding of life as a joyful task to be accomplished in a spirit of solidarity”.
92. Committee for Public Life, Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, Taxation for the Common Good (2004).
93. Church Action for Tax Justice, Fair Tax Now (2021). Church Action for Tax Justice (CATJ) is a
programme of the registered charity Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility (ECCR). It is
an inter-denominational movement united by the belief that churches have a faith-derived imperative
to challenge economic injustice. Among its objectives is included a “Campaign for transparency and an
end to tax dodging by both corporations and individuals internationally”.
94. A. Tornielle and G. Galeazzi, This Economy Kills: Pope Francis on Capitalism and Social Justice (2015)
p. xi.
95. See: Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) 37: “This general analysis, which is religious in
nature, can be supplemented by a number of particular considerations to demonstrate that among the
actions and attitudes opposed to the will of God, the good of neighbor and the “structures” created by
them, two are very typical: on the one hand, the all-consuming desire for profit, and on the other, the
thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others. In order to characterize better
each of these attitudes, one can add the expression: ‘at any price’.”
96. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013) 56.
It is not the purpose of this essay to discuss how extensive state spending should be. There is a wide range of views that are compatible with the tradition of Catholic social teaching.
The late Pope Francis drew attention to the problems associated with a system that fosters inequality
As with many other questions in Catholic social thought and teaching, a logical starting point is the work of St Thomas Aquinas.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that individuals and companies have a responsibility for the common good, and thus it is morally obligatory to pay taxes that are due.
