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 ...
All I know (at this point in his papacy) is that to the Western ear, the Church, it’s history, its small “t” tradition, and large “T” Tradition, have always deplored socialism, blaming it for morphing into Marxism/communism.
That FACT is very important and tells me that the Church is over here, set apart, and that Pope Francis is over here and speaking independently of the Church. The reason he speaks as he does is speculation, but “liberation theology” business though new to the West, was soundly rejected by Benedict xvi.
Catholics are bound to the Pope on matters of Faith and Morals. Other contexts, personal opinions, personal experiences, or political ponderances that they may express have no binding or real bearing on the faith itself.
These are some of the reasons that grounded Catholics can vigorously disagree with their pope, but will be Catholics forever, ‘til the lights go out. :)
LOL!
Kiss my ring.
Thanks, will check this out tonight note, 3 months ago some one commented it reminded them of P Francis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngN2y6i_SOc
You’re right. His grand pronouncements aren’t clear, nor do they clarify.
It's our choice. I believe God wants us to love God, but that only freely given love, from one’s own heart, given as one’s individual free choice, is true love.
My point being that in my view God has given us the act of charity as a way of showing love, and charity is especially meaningful because it is a choice of each of us as individuals to be charitable. Given that choice, many are charitable, and the Church's collections each Sunday reflect that. The money and aid that flows into countries where natural or man-made disaster strikes is another example of that charity.
On the other hand, forced ‘redistribution’ of wealth is not charity, and it is not consistent with God's embracing free will.
On a separate and pragmatic note, it seems to me that ‘fairness’ is much more likely to be achieved when individuals, acting from their hearts and consciences, decide who to give charity to, and to who in their view are most needy. Why should we trust governments, ALL of which are peppered with self-interested narcissists and corruption, to do better than we as individuals can do.
Why don't you set the example and redistribute all the wealth The Vatican holds and sell all the real estate The Catholic Church owns in New York and redistribute it.
Thanks. As a Catholic I have been struggling with this and your explanation has been most helpful.
No say it ain’t so, I have been fighting with Catholics for years on FR that the church supported and advocated for socialism, and was assured over and over again that it wasn’t the case.
You are misleading people, the pope isn’t calling for charity, he is calling for governments to TAKE people’s earning and wealth from them by means of force to redistribute.
In the Christian faith it is referred to as stealing.
hehe
All anyone needs to do is review historical position papers on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops web site.
Which, as we learn from Catholic FReepers, doesn’t represent the position of the Church. In fact, the Vatican doesn’t speak for the Church, and now neither does the Pope!
Envy is "sorrow for another's good," according to St. John Damascene—who protected icons and holy pictures from Moslem-influenced fanatics who were destroying them in the 8th century. But St. Thomas Aquinas says no—envy is when we see another's virtue or good fortune, and feel sorrow at the evil or inadequacy we see in ourselves. In any case, it's kind of open-ended what will burn envious people up about a person or an institution. You see it a lot in anti-Semitism. If a claim seems illogical or obsessive, I figure envy is at least an element.
Yes, I know the definition of envy, thanks. It’s still unclear how you mean it in the context of your post, however.
Envy of the Vatican’s wealth? Who and why on earth would anyone envy that?
How much money is the Vatican giving away?
Don’t get between Mooch and her food!
I, too, am tired of this crap from the Pope. I've been giving him the benefit of the doubt to this point, but his pronouncements are too consistent with Marxist dogma, period.
The Lord did not intend for Man to setup an authoritarian version of His Kingdom on Earth. If he had intended to do so, he would have said it. And I would have opposed Him.
As such, any attempts to endorse such involuntary redistribution of wealth by government should be met with the same derision which any run-of-the-mill authoritarian Communism merits.
Talk about fallible! I don't care how well-meaning the Pope's rhetoric is, it's both misguided and wrong.
Apologists come forth!
Protestants, mostly. Leftists, too. But the wealth is just an excuse. It's bus fare on the world scale. The main envy is of the Vatican's stature as an institution whose message can't be ignored, after being written off so many times in 2000 years.
But you knew that.
“LEGITIMATE REDISTRIBUTION’ OF WEALTH BY THE STATE” IS AN OXIMORON.
Papal infallibility is in the realm of faith and morals, not in political or economic matters.
Argentinean “pope Francis has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system that excludes so much of humanity.”
Isn’t it a fact that the countries that exclude the capitalistic system are so poor for just that reason? Even Communist China, by embracing capitalism, is becoming an economic super power and has begun eliminating the famines and abject poverty endemic to it for centuries.
The same is being seen in India, South Korea and Taiwan. 60 years ago, the last two of the aforementioned countries were poorer and had less natural resources than most of the Latin American countries, but they embraced capitalism and became a prosperous part of the first world community.
What is it that His Holiness is advocating in order to eliminate poverty in the World? Jesus Christ said that the poor will always be with us, but, Jesus was not alluding only to economic poverty, He was also referring to moral and spiritual poverty as well.
Since the beginning of his election, Pope Francis has been involved in a continuous barrage of misrepresentations and attacks against the free enterprise system, which together with political and religious freedom, are the main tenets of modern capitalism. In spite of its defects and shortcomings, no system in human history has reduced poverty more in the world and helped to raise the standards of living for Humanity as a whole, than the free enterprise capitalistic system.
Thus far, I have yet to hear Pope Francis condemn the socialist regimes that continue to keep their people subjugated and in a state of misery, as is the case in Cuba and Venezuela, and these are just two of the many other well known apprentices of tyrannical socialist regimes in Latin America.
Is Pope Francis’ Peronist vision of a third way between Socialism and Capitalism the way to eliminate poverty in the world? Peronism, a populist hybrid between Socialism and Fascism reduced Argentina, a very rich country with a numerous well educated middle class, to the present waste basket state it is today.
Isn’t the so called “redistribution of wealth” one of the main tenets of the Marxist doctrine and a slogan used ad nauseam by demagogues throughout history?
As soon as he took power, Pope Francis has been trying to rescue the Marxist liberation theology from the dust bin of history where it was relegated by Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, a movement that supported the Marxist guerrillas in Latin America and was used by the Cuban regime to expand communism in this hemisphere.
It seems that Pope Francis disagree with the Magisterium since It is a long time settled matter the repudiation of socialism by the Church.
In Quod Apostolici Muneris, the great Leo XIII condemned socialism as a Satanic counterfeit of the Gospel.
Pope Pius XI affirmed in his Encyclical letter “Divini Redemptoris on Atheistic Communism”:
58. “See to it, Venerable Brethren, that the Faithful do not allow t hemselves to be deceived! Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever. Those who permit themselves to be deceived into lending their aid towards the triumph of Communism in their own country, will be the first to fall victims of their error. And the greater the antiquity and grandeur of the Christian civilization in the regions where Communism successfully penetrates, so much more devastating will be the hatred displayed by the godless.”
By orders of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger, a prefect of the CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH, issued the following INSTRUCTION ON CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE “THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION” in which it was condemning the inclusion of the “class struggle” and other parts of the ideology and Marxist praxis under the Christian cover of a so called liberation theology.
Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, according to Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same discaterio that once condemned the movement. In the 1980s the CDF, under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, attacked liberation theology for borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought“.
Few know that cardinal Müller is also a pupil of Gustavo Gutierrez, the “father” of Latin-American liberation theology. When Müller, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, affirms that “Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology” it exposes the reason for the exaltation of Leonardo Boff and the most radical leaders of the Marxist Liberation theology with the election of Pope Francisco.
Pope Francis’ right hand, the powerful Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who was put by the Pope in charge of the reform of the Church, makes his sympathies clear when he quotes as an authority on the morality of international investment the Swiss radical Jean Ziegler – a longtime defender of Fidel Castro, who has called the United States an “imperialist dictatorship”.
According to the good cardinal: “The effects and consequences of the neoliberal dictatorships that rule democracies are not hard to uncover: they invade us with the industry of entertainment, they make us forget about human rights, they convince us that nothing can be done, that there is no possible alternative. To change the system, it would be necessary to destroy the power of the new feudal lords.”
The church will suffer because of Francis and his beliefs. We shall have to see the direction in which the Church is heading...they will lose people who do NOT support any leftist doctrine.
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