§ 156. The Church’s Right to Possess Property

Since the Church has an incontestable right to fulfill her sacred task on earth, she thereby already has an incontestable right to the means that are necessary to her for the fulfillment of that task. As a social organism, the Church, for the sake of her existence on earth, must possess earthly goods as well, so that she may satisfy the needs of Christian worship, support her ministers, and assist all those who stand in need of her protection. This right of the Church to possess property rests both on natural law, in view of the necessity of the Church’s existence in the world, and equally on divine law. The Founder of the Church, although He Himself lived in poverty and preached poverty as a Christian virtue, did not thereby impose on His own Church that she must exist in utter poverty; on the contrary, He Himself spoke of church property, and thereby gave His blessing to the Church to gather and, for her needs, to keep such property. Several passages of Holy Scripture bear witness to this.[1] If in addition we attend to Christ’s counsel to individuals to share all things with their neighbors, we must see in this both His guidance concerning the acquisition of church property—that the church community be sustained—and equally the direction in which the Church must proceed in order to arrive at such property, for the general purpose thereby designated. The examples of the apostolic age show us that the Church, following the guidance of her Founder, began to act in this regard immediately at the very outset of her existence.[2] Offerings brought to the altar, the regular and extraordinary collection of alms, the money that fell into the church poor-boxes set out at places of worship, and the considerable contributions that came to the Church from wealthy families passing over to Christianity—all this together made up a rather rich source of church property. And the use of this property, after what was necessary for worship and for the support of the clergy, consisted chiefly in aiding the poor members of the Church. This last consideration formed the very basis that impelled the Church to acquire ever more property, for in helping the poor, the sick, widows, orphans, and the like, the Church was directly pursuing one of her chief tasks, and thereby she was contributing to the removal, from social life, of that hateful opposition that existed between the rich and the poor classes in the pagan Roman state. By this same reasoning is explained also that relation into which the Greco-Roman legislation, beginning with Constantine the Great, thereafter entered with regard to the property of the Church—a legislation in which we frequently find it emphasized that, since it is chiefly the poor who are supported from church property, care must be taken that this same property be increased and kept free from the state tax and from various imposts.[3]