CLASSES. – The shared social positions, professions, and activities within a community, contrasted with the diversity of aptitudes, education, and economic conditions, drive citizens to form distinct groups. These groups foster closer bonds among their members, both due to an innate human tendency to associate with those similar to oneself and the necessity of uniting forces to meet individual needs more effectively. However, the phenomenon exhibits different characteristics and names depending on whether the primary reason for citizens uniting responds to civil, military, religious, or economic needs.
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, and even today among some less developed peoples, society appears divided into "estates," "orders," or "castes," which originate from birth (patriciate, nobility, warrior castes) or religion (priestly estate, clergy), while economic considerations remain of secondary importance. Conversely, especially in modern and contemporary periods, thanks to economic progress, the defense of individual interests has taken precedence over other motives, giving rise to guilds of arts and crafts and, after the Industrial Revolution, to classes in the specific sense in which the term is used today: unlike guilds, classes unite not only citizens in economically privileged positions (the bourgeoisie, the wealthy) but also those in inferior positions (the proletariat), fostering in both a "class consciousness," that is, a deep awareness of their sectional interests and the need to defend them through strongly solidaristic action. Moreover, classes tend to operate not merely in the economic sphere, as guilds did, but also in the political sphere, aiming to seize public power to decisively impose their will over rival classes.
I. SOCIALIST DOCTRINES
The concept of class, as an expression of solidarity based purely on homogeneous material interests in contrast to the interests of other contemporary groups, is characteristic of modern socialist doctrines, taken in a generic sense that places the economic factor as the determining element of social relations and their evolution over the centuries. This concept was elaborated differently by various currents of socialism, among which the Marxist theory stands out, interpreting it in an absolutely materialistic sense (historical materialism) and carrying it to its extreme political and economic consequences. For Marxism, social relations are entirely and exclusively dominated by the economic factor and evolve through an irreconcilable and brutal conflict between the categories of owners of the means of production and simple workers. This conflict passes through different phases, assuming various manifestations in different historical epochs according to the structure of economic life, transitioning from one to another by virtue of an immanent evolutionary determinism in social life, to manifest in the present capitalist society as a "class struggle." This struggle, however, is destined to end in a new society, which, according to Marx, will inevitably succeed capitalist society. In the future society, with the abolition of private property in the means of production and their transfer to the State, classes will also be eliminated, along with the conflicts and social inequalities among citizens, who will all become workers. Meanwhile, workers worldwide must unite nationally and internationally and resort to violent and revolutionary action to expropriate the class that holds wealth and secure the victory of their own class by temporarily seizing political power (the dictatorship of the proletariat), thus accelerating humanity’s dynamic progress toward a classless society.II. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
Catholic doctrine recognizes social inequalities as natural and necessary, since "not all possess the same intelligence, the same diligence; not the same health or strength; and from these inevitable differences necessarily arise differences in social conditions" (Leo XIII, in the encyclical *Rerum novarum*, no. 9). The rise and formation of classes is therefore not a moment in social becoming, as socialist and particularly Marxist theses claim, which seek to level the social positions of citizens but can only replace one set of inequalities and classes with another in capitalist society. On the contrary, classes are the result of individual differences, partly established by historical exigencies and partly—and more so—by natural aptitudes, to the benefit of society, whose life precisely requires diverse capacities and services. The opposition between the Catholic and socialist conceptions concerns not only the origin of classes but also their purpose and the position that the individual occupies within the class. The purpose for which citizens organize into classes is to promote, through the union of forces, their personal development and to safeguard, before the State and other classes, every legitimate right of the person. It is not a matter of asserting purely economic interests against other interests but of effectively procuring all that leads to human perfection, which the isolated citizen could not achieve conveniently. Nor can the individual be subordinated to the class, as if it were an end in itself, but the class must be subordinated to the individual, who in the social order possesses absolute value. The opposition between the two conceptions extends also to the mutual relations between classes and between them and the community and the State that legally represents II. Classes are bound by ties of complementarity and mutual dependence. Speaking specifically of the owners of the means of production and workers, Leo XIII observed that "one has need of the other; neither capital without labor nor labor without capital can subsist" (*ibid.*). Consequently, it is not subordination, nor much less discord and struggle, that should govern relations between classes, but coordination, harmony, and collaboration, as among the members of the same social body, respecting others’ rights and fulfilling one’s own duties. The Church, therefore, while condemning the economic and political supremacy of the capitalist class to the detriment of the working class, rejects social revolution as a means for the latter to reclaim its rights by establishing a supremacy of labor to the detriment of the owners of productive goods. Both forms of supremacy are oppressive and contrary to the principles of social justice. Should all capital be transferred to the State, the complete annihilation of human dignity would result, under the weight of a dictatorship unparalleled by any other supremacy of private citizens or categories.Instead of a destructive revolution that annihilates material and moral values, the Church advocates "a progressive and prudent, courageous and nature-consonant evolution, enlightened and guided by the holy norms of Christian justice and equity" (Pius XII, in the address to workers on *World Peace and Class Collaboration*), which opens to working classes the path to acquiring
They must play their part in the direction of the nation’s economic and political life. According to Catholic doctrine, the State’s task is to maintain in society a condition of social peace founded on justice. To this end the State will take care to uphold the rights of all classes, giving particular protection to those that are lower and economically weaker, so that the diversity of social positions and professions may not lead to other unjustified inequalities—especially economic ones—among citizens. The diversity of social positions does not imply an equal diversity in civil rights (democracy); in a well-ordered society, therefore, every citizen must be allowed to enjoy the benefits of social life, and those belonging to the lower classes must be given real opportunities to improve their economic and social condition.
Finally, whatever their nature, the classes are bound to provide for the common good of society, both by fostering mutual collaboration and by overcoming any particular interests that may prove contrary to the higher interests of the social organism to which they belong and in which they act as partial organs. To this end, appropriate legislative measures are required to regulate the internal constitution, mutual relations, and activity of the classes. The classes organize themselves “on legitimate bases” when they aim at union with other classes; their particular ends do not occupy the supreme place in the natural hierarchy of social ends. With these reservations, the Christian organization of the various social classes can pursue legitimate aims of mutual aid, collaboration, assistance, and apostolate (Code Social de Malines, Rome 1943, no. 169).
Thus, without being “classist,” the Church’s social doctrine has a “pluralistic” conception of social life, in the sense that it admits the legitimacy and expediency of heterogeneous groups possessing their own autonomy and activity within the social whole; yet this conception is at the same time “organic,” for it unites and associates the different groups in common subordination to the good of society, from whose vitality and well-being they will derive greater advantages the more solidary and harmonious their action in contributing to it may be.