Catherine of Siena on How Wealth Corrupts Justice

Born in 1347, Catherine of Siena had a great influence on Italian literature and the Catholic Church. She sent numerous letters to princes and cardinals to promote obedience to Pope Urban VI, and to defend what she called the “vessel of the Church.”

One such letter was addressed to the Anziani and Consuls of Bologna, and in it Catherine discusses the concepts of civil justice and injustice, dissecting why those who govern the state treat the wealthy differently from the poor.

Crimes and injustices committed by the wealthy, Catherine states, are often overlooked due to the corrupt self-interest of those who govern: they refuse to risk upsetting the wealthy, who lobby and hold power over them.

“This is the reason one often fails at justice,” Catherine writes:

One is afraid of losing one’s status, so in order not to displease others, one keeps covering and hiding their wrongdoing, smearing ointment on a wound which at the time needs to be cauterized. They pretend not to see the flatterers’ wrongdoing.

Crimes committed by the poor, in contrast, are met with a ruthless severity:

Toward the poor who seem insignificant and whom they do not fear, they display tremendous enthusiasm for ‘justice’, and show neither mercy nor compassion, they exact harsh punishments for small faults.

The ruler risks nothing in punishing the powerless, so making an example of them helps distract from the injustices committed by the wealthy, and demonstrates and reasserts the ruler’s moral authority in the eyes of the public.

Catherine’s observations have been echoed and anticipated by thinkers across time. Consider Plato in The Republic, written around 375 BCE:

Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones — you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states.

2,000 years after Plato, here’s George Eliot in her wonderful 1871 novel, Middlemarch:

When a youthful nobleman steals jewelry we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.

So, what’s the solution to wealth’s corruption of justice? Is there one?

Catherine advocates the employment of rulers freed from self-love and dedicated to the disinterested, fair administration of law and order.

The spiritual and moral character of the ruler is thus absolutely key, and should be one of the most important criteria by which rulers are measured.

But Catherine made these arguments just under 700 years ago.

Do you think we’ve heeded her words? Have we made any progress in organizing society to produce rulers that govern impartially? Is such progress possible?

Or do you think we just have to live with the old proverb that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

What do you make of Catherine’s analysis?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• John Rawls: How a ‘Veil of Ignorance’ Can Help Us Build a Just Society
• Hannah Arendt On Standing Up to the Banality of Evil
• Isaiah Berlin On Why the Pursuit of the Ideal is Dangerous

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