Jesuit Says, "A Socialist Is A Stone In The Wall Of A Government Office"

One great and obvious difference between Socialism and Religious life we have kept for the last. Religious men have no wife and children. Being single persons, without family ties and private family interests, they are able to club together: their Order is their family, their equals in age are their brothers, their seniors are to them as fathers, and their juniors as sons. The property of the Order is their family property. Among married people you have confraternities, you could never have a Religious Order. The precedent of Religious Orders, therefore, goes little or no way in favour of the feasibility of a Socialist commonwealth. We gather, however, some pretty plain hints from the pages of Socialist literature, that, though Socialists cannot do without children, some of them at least intend to do without the family; that though they must have women, they want no permanently wedded wives. Marriage shall not stand in the way of their collectivism. The morality of this procedure we may leave undiscussed. But we would propose one question:  

Where is this type of Socialist going to have his home ? Not in the next world, for he believes in none. Not with wife and family, if the State is to cut off, or discourage to the utmost, such individualist appendages, and take his children away from him. 

 The lodging-house or barracks in which he is quartered will be no home to him. The inmates will be strangers to the charities of Religious life. If he lives by himself, like Timon and Diogenes, he finds no home in that misanthropic solitude. He can hardly look upon the Guildhall as his home, or the House of Commons, or wherever be the meeting-place of the General Assembly. He is no longer a man, but a stone in the wall of a Government Office. He has no individuality and no home.

Link (here) to the essay entitled, Socialism and Religious Life by Fr. Joseph Rickaby, S.J.