Pope Francis and Private Property

This one has been on my to do list since 2013 or 2014 I think, as I remember hearing friends talking about it sometime within a couple months after the apostolic exhortation Evangeli Gaudium was promulgated by Pope Francis, which was  Nov 24, 2013. My point concerns the comments of some friends that took what the Pope had to say on private property as new and a sign that the current pontiff could be making big changes soon (these particular friends viewed this in a positive light). The main point in the following is not to argue a point, but to take the point as sound and offer an analogy, admitting I'm not demonstrating it conclusively, but hoping that such an analogy helps understand the content better and, thus, makes it easier to process actual arguments concerning it.

The point concerns the following statement in Evangeli Gaudium §189:

 The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.

I thought my friends were getting a bit excited about nothing. The critique of the capitalist approach to the right of private property has been going on at least since John Paul II. But, while those friends were decidedly on the "left" side and looking for changes to happen, I am sure there were as many on the "right" who drift closer and closer to being traditionalist schismatics from taking statements like this to be unacceptable change: the same reading of the statement (radical change, maybe forecasting more decisive new doctrinal positions against private property and free market) just two different responses (positive and negative). 

My take on it, without even getting into John Paul II and Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891, the kickoff of the modern "social justice encyclicals") and Centesimus Annus (JP II's 1991 encyclical on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum), is that not only is its (Evangeli Gaudium §189's) conception of "rights" true (and hopefully the analogy helps to see what I think that conception is), but also, if a schmuck like me can be noticing something analogous and thinking it in similar terms in the late 1990s from a Mel Gibosn film ... it quite simply cannot be that "radically" new (meaning breaching substantially with past teaching)

The analogy is with Braveheart (1995) and particularly with the element there of prime nocte, in which English lords were stated by the English king to have sexual rights to any woman in their lands on the first night of her marriage. Pondering on this, I began to see a conception of rights other than that of unrestricted entitlement. The form that it took in my head was "rights are the guarantees of your ability to do what is right." There are obviously human rights violation in the inflicting of psychological suffering on others, but the basic and most distinctive rights violation here is the fact that it takes away form the couple what they need to keep up a particular obligation on their end, the obligation to marital fidelity. The "right" (not sharing my spouse) is necessitated primarily by the obligation (my spouse and I remaining faithful to each other ... and, yes, this excludes all mutually consenting "open" arrangements).

What is being said by Pope Francis in regard to the right of private property seems to me to be much the same: the right to private property is not meant to be had in a completely unrestricted way by the individual, but is rather always oriented to the common good, entailing an obligation to use it so to the best of one's ability.

I know this would would take a LOT more to develop more thorough arguments for it. My main point here was to post one that had been in the tray for a few years in a brief form of getting out the analogy that was my main incentive to write it in the first place, rather than getting bogged down in a whole new research and argument post. I'm not saying the situation does not get MUCH more complicated, because I know that it does, but I also think that there is a real difference between unbridled capitalism's understanding of absolute rights and a truly traditional Christian understanding of rights existing in the context of obligations to participation in the health of a whole community. And maybe, hopefully, the analogy helps in getting a better idea of what it is exactly that would need to be argued, the actual concept of "rights" being debated.