Section I. General Principles

None but an intellectual being endowed with intellect and will can own property. For such alone, or persons as distinct from things, are the subjects of rights; persons alone can freely dispose of objects which are necessary or useful for the attainment of man’s destiny. Persons alone can suffer a formal injury by the wilful violation of their rights against their will, and so they alone are capable of having rights and holding property.

God, who is the Creator of all things, is also their universal Lord and Master. He can do what he pleases with his own; however he may treat his creatures, they cannot complain of God’s injustice toward them. He is bound only by the laws of his own infinite Goodness and Wisdom.

Other pure spirits whom God has created might conceivably have rights of ownership, but as they have no use for material things with which we are specially concerned, we need not further consider them in this connection.

All men, even imbeciles, who will never have the use of reason, and infants still unborn, are subjects of rights and capable of holding property. For they all require many things for their support, preservation, and defence, for the perfect development of all their faculties, mental and bodily, and for the orderly and secure attainment of their end. As, then, they are under the obligation of striving for the attainment of their end, and they have the right to do so, they have also the right to the necessary means. This reasoning is not invalidated by the incapacity of infants and imbeciles to use their faculties and administer their property. Their rational nature gives them their rights; their capacity to use them is not a necessary condition of their existence. A man who is asleep retains his rights, though he cannot then exercise them. Besides, whatever defect there might be in the title of infants and imbeciles to the rights of men is supplied by the provisions of positive law, which confers rights of property independently of the knowledge or acceptance of the owner.

Inasmuch as man is a social animal, and develops his faculties in the society of his fellows, whose help he constantly needs, nature herself has given him the right to form private societies, companies, or corporations, for the furtherance of common ends, independently of that larger public society which we call the State, and to which all belong. As Leo XIII teaches: “‘ Private societies, then, although they exist within the State, and are severally part of the State, cannot nevertheless be absolutely and as such prohibited by the State. For to enter into a society of this kind is the natural right of man; and the State is bound to protect natural rights, not to destroy them; and if it forbid its citizens to form associations, it contradicts the very principle of its own existence; for both they and it exist in virtue of the like principle—namely, the natural tendency of man to dwell in society.¹

The State, of course, has the right of control over such societies as are founded for civil purposes, and they are subject to the just laws which the State may make in their regard. English law acknowledges both corporations aggregate, consisting of more than one person united for the purpose of pursuing a common end, and corporations sole, consisting of but one person like the sovereign or the rector of a church. A corporation is a moral entity, a fictitious person, with rights of its own, distinct from the rights of the physical persons who compose it. As far as property is necessary for the attainment of its end, a corporation has the right of ownership, though this right is subject to the control and regulation of the supreme authority. Leo XIII in his encyclical on labour warmly approves of workmen forming their own unions and societies for the defence of their rights and the furtherance of their welfare.

¹ Encyclical on the Condition of Labour, May 15, 1891.