Posted on 05/29/2017 5:28:47 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Speaking to workers and business people in Italy’s port city of Genoa Saturday, Pope Francis surprised his hearers by praising entrepreneurship and touting the importance of healthy businesses for the economy.
“There can’t be a good economy without good businessmen, without their capacity to create and to produce,” he said, shattering his reputation as an enemy of the free market economy.
The Pope recognized that the essential value of work and employment is only possible when companies are sound and successful.
Without denouncing unemployment benefits, Francis insisted that state intervention wasn’t a real solution. “A monthly check from the state that allows you to keep the family afloat doesn’t solve the problem. It has to be resolved with work for everyone,” he said.
The Pope went on to underscore differences between healthy entrepreneurship and financial “speculation.”
“A sickness of the economy is the progressive transformation of business people into speculators,” Francis said. “A speculator is a figure similar to what Jesus called ‘hired-hands’ as opposed to good shepherds.”
Like a hired hand, Francis mused, a speculator “doesn’t love his company or his workers, since they are merely a means for making profits. He has no problem firing people, closing a factory or relocating the company,” because he doesn’t care about his workers but uses them simply as a means for increasing his profits.
[big snip]
[Working] men and women “generate solidarity by their actions, and they create organizations which offer a helping hand to those most in need,” he said.
“Business is a noble vocation,” the Pope continued, “directed to producing wealth and improving the world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Ah, but then we would be conceding that the left had some sort of point after all /gentle irony.
Francis’ response to Donald Trump is one that should bring hope. That Francis didn’t pan Trump.
People are meant by God to share, but that presupposes that they are also free to gain, in order to get into a position to share. Not even God is expecting blood from turnips. The bible says so. Let those who are rich in this world not put their confidence in riches but instead be generous and willing to share — it doesn’t say anything about being ashamed of the riches, but rather about the uses to which they should be put.
If this were all going on for the sake of gospel — the salvational news about Jesus Christ — we wouldn’t have our current difficulties with secular governments clumsily trying to fill that void.
Marx didn’t invent this in a vacuum; God wrote it first on human hearts, and Marx stole it into a godless realm.
Ah, how the devil manages to put such distortion upon what God has wrought!
And yet we have Jesuits - the Gestapo of the Church
The essential element to godliness here is “BY THE GIFT OF GOD.”
We should realize that we ALL are on welfare. It’s called God’s grace in the face of our sin.
Because something can be attempted and carried out poorly doesn’t mean that there are no better ways to attempt the same ends.
Thank-you President Trump for helping Pope Francis change his mind.
That sounds very like what the Church has taught for more than a century, back to Rerum novarum.
(No, I didn't remember the document's name: I used Google. I remembered that it existed, though!)
I call you and raise - So that is why we got Babylon and all of the various religions
You are spunky this morning - So is this why Communism has failed everywhere it has been tried?
I do this because I believe I understand more and more a larger plan of God. Something that transcends political systems and human ideas of denominations.
Bu doing so, I bring discontent to partisans of all kinds. But I hope if I protest, I do it in the way that Martin Luther originally envisioned. He didn’t have a new denomination in mind; he was hoping to raise awareness within the Roman church. I hope that lefties would learn to reach rightward, and that righties would learn to reach leftward, and unite in a balanced, harmonious whole that, on the way, excludes idols. And governments are a very problematic idol today. I see God reaching through Donald, a man who isn’t even overtly religious and yet very affirming towards Christian faith’s role in America. The more God we embrace, the less government is going to be needed. People today are so hard wired into “the government ought to” that they forget “by the grace of God acted upon, the people ought to.”
A Christian society would have, in part, a kind of small-government leftism. Nobody would have to be taxed for benevolent purposes because all would be inspired to share in other ways, for the sake of the supernatural reach of gospel. It would break past many of our own earthly ideas.
And now I need to get back to working so that I may wisely share the results.
Because it was godless.
People in their pride often go for godless lefty schemes and the cause is not far to seek. That would make the glory theirs. But it never works. The people are sinful, and so the people’s republic of whatever turns out to be another flavor of hell on earth.
Rerum novarum... doesn’t that mean “new things”?
Of course they are very old things. But we keep having to learn them over and over anew after getting ourselves all wrapped up in earthly things once more. Praise to the Lord that He is so patient.
God created a grand, grand balanced system. Not a grind stone for some narrow minded politician’s axe. The lefty has to learn the virtues on the right, and vice versa the righty.
Worth repeating.
So the Pope said this shortly after meeting with Trump&Co?
Suppose a leader had no position on global warming or some Progressive issue. Then shortly after meeting with Obama that leader made positive statements on that Progressive issue. You’d better believe the media and other Obama supporters would give Obama the credit, whether deserved or not.
ah sooo
you know my heart
‘I am longing to stray’............
He still doesn’t get it. The only reason a businessman hires a worker is if the worker will help him make more money and the only reason a worker will work for him is if the worker thinks he’s getting the best deal available to him.
It is all driven by mutual self interest not by any sense of “altruism”. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!
Altruism doesn’t exist. The “common good” comes out of individuals finding ways to satisfy their self interests - by freely entering into mutually agreed contracts, and not by some higher authority dictating anyone to act against their self interest.
Whoa, my bad typo! I means we have an obligatiom to “pray” for him, not “pay” for him!!
Your "hypothesis" is the central working thought of Roman Catholicism. Properly understood, the Pope is no different from any other "man in the street" UNLESS he rules on a matter of faith. The RC church takes God's word seriously..."the gates of Hell shall not prevail...". God Holy Spirit) simply won't permit the Pope to screw things up AFAIK, Francis has never, thus far, issued such a teaching.
“Sure. After all, who else is going to pay the taxes to fund the socialist Utopia?”
And where is Popie going to get the bucks to line his churches with gold while the parishioners scrape to put food on their tables. US Catholics need to travel to foreign countries to see how “their church really helps the poor!” And they need only go down to Mexico to the backwater villages to see this policy in action.
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