I’m sorry you don’t have time to follow up on my suggestion to read direct quotes instead of reading what others have to say. Otherwise, you would not have responded as you did.
Pointing out abuses of the poor in a capitalistic society doesn’t make one a socialist. The poor, indeed all of us, are abused by bank bailouts etc. which debase our currency rob our savings. Pointing out that we have an obligation to help the poor does not make one a socialist either - it is simple Christian charity.
Thank you for the link to ncr.com - I will look at it later. In return, please read this article: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/is-the-pope-a-socialist-95558/
Thanks very much for finally signing on here! Welcome, welcome! I hope you will be an active participant. I think the linked article was posted at the time of its release. I know I remember reading it.
God bless.
The poor ARE often abused IN (not by) a capitalistic society, no more so (considerably less so actually) than they are abused in and by socialist Argentina, socialist Western Europe or in and by the thankfully terminated soviet unionand its puppet satellite states. That seems lost on Bergoglio who is to economics as Mao Tse Tung was to theology. An ignoramus and one whose efforts will prove quite negative and harmful.
We are all abused by bank bailouts which DO debase our currency and rob our savings more and more as the idiots (or worse) who lead our nation lean us ever further toward the manifest economic ignorance of Bergoglio (a subject as to which he enjoys absolutely no divine mandate and absolutely no competence and absolutely no talent). Yet, because he is now pope rather than some obscure Archbishop of Buenos Aires, we and our society must be regularly afflicted by his economic and political ignorance. "Even Pope Francis says....."
Most popes seem to demonstrate some degree of economic ignorance. Bergoglio elevates it to a high art form while having little use for the conservative moral positions which are the hallmark of his recent predecessors.
We DO have an INDIVIDUAL obligation to help the poor according to our respective means. We cannot expect the poor to pony up cash out of their actual poverty. They can volunteer to help others. Our obligation is NOT met by paying taxes to government which deprives us of our means to help the poor and gives those means to the likes of Obozo to see to it that the poor will have access to abortionists. As a side benefit to Obozo and other servants of Lucifer, Christians are thereby deprived, dollar for dollar, of the ability to actually help the poor.
I have no problem with legitimate charity. I have a BIG problem when government, either supported by Bergoglio and/or by many other hierarchs, steps all over us, deprives us of our God-given free will, takes our resources and applies them often against charity (defined as love) rather than in its favor. Not a peep out of the worst excuse for a pope in modern times about that.
Then there is the matter of his contempt for the very notion of national borders by way of urging us to take in "the (quite expensive) stranger" times 100 million and counting, from populations determined to eradicate Christianity itself, the United States, Western Civilization, did I mention Israel?, as an exercise in gushy brain dead liberalism. Maybe he will be satisfied when they destroy the Pieta and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, and The David, etc. Is there any doubt that the Islamofascists intend exactly that?
I pride myself on not being a border obsessive BUT.... we have quite enough Latin American undocumented immigrants for us to assimilate in the next 25 years and some few of them may commit some old-fashioned individual crimes but I have yet to hear of a shopping center or movie theater full of innocent Americans being blown to Kingdom Come by an Hispanic "suicide bomber." Islamofascists OTOH..... Sorry Frankie, nice try but no cigar.
Then there is the little matter of trying to turn the shutting down of productive industry according to the upper class fantasies of the white glove, ohhhhhh so pristine and clean left, as to "global warming" or "global climate change" or "global population "crisis" or other globaloney designed to reduce the population of peasants whom they despise, somehow into a Catholic moral imperative. No sale! And I'm not reading that pseudoCatholic propaganda either.
I will read you link so long as it is not too burdenee with the mental effluvia of Bergoglio.
As you may have discerned, I am no fan of Bergoglio. I almost left the Church during Montini's Reign of Prudential Error, thought better of it and was rewarded with Popes John Paul I, Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I am no kid anymore but I expect to outlive Bergoglio. I won't let him and his kind drive me from my Church. Maybe the end of Bergoglio will bring us a new genuinely Catholic pope who minds his own beeswax on matters economic and rawly political and confines his attention to legitimate papal business.
Progressivism is the itch that just can never be adequately and finally scratched. I would gladly see a revival of the Inquisition to deal with anyone colluding with Bergoglio in his ongoing destruction of the Church. Maybe we could make it a multidefendant, ummm inquiry, of Walter Cardinal Kaspar, Reinhold Cardinal Marx, Archbishop Blase Cupich, most of the Gang of Eight cardinals (other than Pell) Obozo, Biden, Pelosi, every prominent "Catholic" pro-abort. Ropes, stakes, an adequate supply of kindling, a few blindfolds, and away they go!
He would garner a lot more respect (as in any at all) if he would stick to the moral business of his office. When he is done, they will kick his coffin into the crypt which is also an old tradition and a valuable one.