Pope Francis, Property Rights Champion

The current occupant of Saint Peter’s office is known for his criticisms of capital and finance institutions, the tendency of modern economies to instrumentalize human labor, and the vice of avarice. Some have wondered whether he advocates socialism. But though he seems quite skeptical of capitalist institutions, he seems quite comfortable defending institutions of private property rights. Indeed, he worries about contemporary institutions of capital finance in part because the powerful sometimes use such institutions to deprive the vulnerable of their natural rights, including property rights.

This concern is on display in Pope Francis’s exhortation, Querida Amazonia, published today. He has sharp words for those who develop the Amazon at the expense of the poor. In his account, property rights are not tools of the oppressors but an inheritance of the oppressed.

It is well known that, ever since the final decades of the last century, the Amazon region has been presented as an enormous empty space to be filled, a source of raw resources to be developed, a wild expanse to be domesticated. None of this recognizes the rights of the original peoples; it simply ignores them as if they did not exist, or acts as if the lands on which they live do not belong to them. Even in the education of children and young people, the indigenous were viewed as intruders or usurpers. Their lives, their concerns, their ways of struggling to survive were of no interest. They were considered more an obstacle needing to be eliminated than as human beings with the same dignity as others and possessed of their own acquired rights.

Significantly, the Pope twice refers to the “rights” of the Amazonian people to use and occupy their land. This is not a case of rapacious property owners failing to satisfy social obligations to the propertyless. Rather, it is a conflict between two conceptions of property. The rich and powerful lay claim to what they perceive to be a commons, which is open to all and amenable to exploitation. Local authorities give them power over the land. But the local government does not have that power to give. They fail to perceive the prior rights of the land’s inhabitants, which are pre-positive, customary, and moral.

In the Pope’s telling, this is a classic conflict between positivist conceptions of property rights, in which property rights emanate from the sovereign, and natural or customary rights, which are derived from immemorial use and occupancy, and stand on the authority of human reason. The Pope identifies the positivist claims of the exploiters as a “new version of colonialism” that leads to broken institutions and causes injustice. And he connects the natural and customary rights of the inhabitants to possess the land with their fundamental rights of “self-determination and prior consent,” the priority of local communities, and, ultimately, his “cultural dream” for the flourishing of people in the Amazon. (Perhaps he has read Property and Practical Reason.)

There is a lot packed in here. It deserves to be unpacked slowly and thoughtfully, as time allows. For now, I’ll just express my delight that property rights (rightly) play a heroic role in the Pope’s latest expression of political theology.