Posted on 05/09/2014 7:15:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today.
Francis made the appeal during a speech to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies who met in Rome this week.
Latin America's first pope has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system that excludes so much of humanity, though his predecessors have voiced similar concerns.
On Friday, Francis called for the United Nations to promote a "worldwide ethical mobilization" of solidarity with the poor in a new spirit of generosity.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
“How about redistribution of the Catholic churches wealth 1st!!”
FR needs an upvote system for good posts.
Maybe we should ask who the pope must pay taxes to.
Amen. It may be that that no matter who we elect, the federal government will not ADEQUATELY reduce its own size. It looks like this is a job for the states. Hopefully the Convention of States proposed by the Citizens for Self-Governance will take a big step in that direction.
agreed.....we can pray that happens
The ancient contract tax-collectors, or publicans, were supposed to keep a cut. They had to report their total collections and then a portion of that was returned to them. The system was old already in the time of the Ptolemies.
Corruption doesn't happen because one is a publican. It happens because one is corrupt.
But the statement doesn't establish that the publican in question was "cheating" people.
Publicans were hated anyway, even when they were honest.
Considering the Vatican alone is supposedly worth $10-$15B, I can’t tell you how levels of hypocritical this is.
So the "numerous reports" of the Vatican alone being worth $10 - $15B is untrue then?
Last I saw our government was $17 Trillion in debt.
Whatever, dude.
I would have you know that before this pope I had given serous thought to the idea of converting to Catholic. I thought perhaps foolishly that the centralization of catholic doctrine gave a kind of stability of faith needed to remain true to God.
Now I see that it also comes with great risks of sudden instability and radical shifts into madness.
Althou I do not think this pope will be the end of the Catholic church, I do think his long term effects will be a weaker Catholic faith and institutional church.
One cannot appeal for the advancement of those monetary & political interest while also seeking the advancement of the spiritual.
If the Teaching of God is to say anything at all on the subject of the management of wealth it is to the individuals who have earned that wealth not to those who would take it for others.
So the "numerous reports" of the Vatican alone being worth $10 - $15B is untrue then?
Ignoring the more sensational charges,
Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate. Dividends help pay for Vatican expenses and charities such as assisting 1,500,000 children and providing some measure of food and clothing to 7,000,000 needy Italians. Unlike ordinary stockholders, the Vatican pays no taxes on this income, which led the leftist Rome weekly L'Espresso last week to call it "the biggest... - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,833509,00.html#ixzz2n6cnW5cA; http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3100280/replies?c=7
e. In 2004, the AP estimated that the Holy See's real estate, excluding St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel, was worth nearly a billion dollars. Then there is the untold quantity of priceless artwork, including world-famous works by Michelangelo and Raphael. The Vatican doesn't even try to apply a fair-market value to its art collection — the price used to be listed on the church's books as 1 lira [0.48 USD]— but it's safe to say that if sold, even a fraction of the works could likely fetch billions more.
Catholic Charities—and the same could be said about the Association of Jewish Family and Children's Agencies or the Lutheran Services in America—has become over the last three decades an arm of the welfare state, with 65 percent of its $2.3 billion annual budget now flowing from government sources and little that is explicitly religious, or even values-laden, about most of the services its 1,400 member agencies and 46,000 paid employees provide. - How Catholic Charities Lost Its Soul ; https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7587
By Steve Fiffer Special to Tribune Newspapers What does a church do when faced with potentially having to pay billions of dollars in damages to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of its clergy? As Jason Berry documents so well in his compelling new book, "Render Unto Rome," the Catholic Church's initial response was to fight the charges...More: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-books-0817-review-render,0,1427214.story
ENCYCLICAL LETTER CARITAS IN VERITATE 67. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority,...
Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties,...
The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity*, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations.”
*Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.
This is his own personal beliefs. Of no more importance than yours or mine. Popes are human beings. Nobody ever said they weren't.
Its time to abolish the United Nations before this evil is upon us.
Rarely have I read a more fundamentally flawed document than the charter of the United Nations, which is filled with leftist ideas that attempt make men slaves of other men.
Well that's my point those are not his words. Those are the Philly Enquirer's words. He said "redistribution of economic benefit." And as I said elsewhere this can be understood as not only curbing crony capitalism, but tax reductions, limiting the size of federal government, and onerous regulations. All, when done, redistribute economic benefit from the few who receive it (federal workers and contractors and friends of same) to more people, people who just want to work for themselves and help their own families.
In other words, making the BENEFIT of economic activity available to more.
I submit my interpretation is probably correct because he didn't say "redistribution of wealth", he said "redistribution of economic benefit". One must ask, to be reasonable, if he's just another Marxist railing against personal wealth, why did he say "economic BENEFIT" and not simply "money"?
Also as I said elsewhere as conservatives we have almost a reflexive hatred for the Marxist buzzwords like "redistribution" but the mere word "redistribution" doesn't necessarily mean "forced redistribution of money or wealth."
He's not a very effective speaker and indeed may have some leftist leanings, but he has said flat out before Marxism is wrong so, given that and the reasonable alternative above, I submit it's reasonable to believe he's only trying to ensure as many people as possible are not enslaved by either statist philosophies or "capitalists" who only seek to exploit people, and not treat them as fellow human beings, through the power of the state (aka crony capitalism).
In other words he's promoting the very Catholic idea of subsidiarity. (Which is not liberation theology mind you)
So who should determine what is "legitimate" in this scenario? Well under the notion of subsidiarity local groups (all the way down to the individual when possible)'determine that. Under subsidiarity, federal intervention is only the last resort. It's not the strict American ideal, as I've said, but it's certainly not Marxism. Or socialism.
“He has not spoken ex cathedra on this, and won’t.
This is his own personal beliefs. Of no more importance than yours or mine. Popes are human beings. Nobody ever said they weren’t.”
I guess theses people sure fooled me on that. Still what I said about centralization of faith is a question that still runs thou my mind.
I know that with many of the smaller protestant denominations there is failure to hold to the will of God as individual units. Althou I admit my study in this areas has not gone as far as it perhaps should in analyzing whether or not the supposed fall of various Protestant denominations constituted a general fall of the virtue of the faithful in that realm.
I suppose the question of how to find and commit ones family to a better more reliable long term community of faith, invariably crosses over into the political sciences of human institutions of faith.
The “constitution” that is the text of the bible being our most firm foundation all together. To hold to that constant as the best indicator of the will of our God who is after all the Same God as the God who guided Abraham and Moses all those years ago.
“I have paid out over 80 years of property taxes accordingly. About 50% of those property taxes were used to pay for schools.
I never had any kids.
I sure would like that 50% rebated to me now.”
We should all have the wasted on what passes for ‘education’ refunded to us. I got a teaching credential and taught for a very short time. The decline in what is happening in our schools is shocking, as is the worthless ‘teacher education’. It’s nothing more than liberal indoctrination.
“By now, Pope Francis must surely be informed that his pronouncements are either too confusing to interpret, too shocking for words, too alligned with the words, terms, and general direction of the dangerous Left.”
Since he has likely read from a speech and wasn’t just speaking off the cuff, I’d say he meant exactly what he said. He probably has others checking over what he will be saying, much like our politician’s speeches. I don’t think anything is left to chance or inaccuracy.
The fundamental problem is that this "generosity" is generosity with other people's money...
“The Vatican website say that Pope Francis said “legitimate redistribution of benefits. Why did the AP change that to redistribution of wealth? That’s what I want to know.”
Because the AP is very liberal, and will use deceipt to push their agenda.
What I’d like to know is why do people have knee-jerk reactions without hearing the true story.
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