EMPLOYERS MEET

'CM.' REPORTER
"THE past 100 years have Aproved that man is a good deal less narrowly selfish than Marx says he should be," said Dom Christopher Butler, 0.S.B., Abbot of Downside, last week. He was speaking at a meeting London of the Association al Catholic Managers and Employers. T Ii a industrial revolution, which intensified social evils and widened the gulf even more between the very rich and the very poor, provoked writings such as Das Kapital by Karl Marx — and the Church's answer to this was Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Reruni Nov cram.
The Abbot went on to explain, point by point, the moral obligations of employers to their workers, as outlined by Rerum Novarum — and the problems posed by those obligations. How, for instance, does one decide what is a just wage ? Pointing out that "a great deal of what is set before us in Reram Novarum has been achieved in the last 40 or 50 years," Abbot Butler noted that history had falsified the
Marxist theory "left, right, and centre."
Nevertheless, we must not
let up. We have got to be continually keeping our critical faculties alert and finding our weaknesses," he said. And, when we had found them, we must deal with them.