Posted on 07/09/2009 11:42:11 AM PDT by markomalley
You’re a good man, Charlie Brown. You’ve got more stamina than I. I rest my case.
Can’t copy and paste at the moment in Firefox. sheesh. I hate buggy software.
. . . I think your last 2 paragraphs particularly are quite accurate.
Thanks.
>>> the encyclical is not a brief for your NWO <<<
Quix’s idea of a NWO is no doubt indebted to extreme eschatological fancies, but I’m trying to figure out what fantasy land you live in when you write:
“subsidiarity is for real”
Yup, it’s for real. It’s even in our own 10th amendment. And how respectfully do you think that’s been treated the past century or so? “Subsidiarity” is treacle.
“We face a greater threat to our freedoms from the bureaucratic tyranny of our own US government. And that tyranny will oppress Catholics who, bolstered by love of Life as taught in this encyclical, will refuse to knuckle under.”
Do you really think a reformed UN _et al_ would be any less beholden to the Culture of Death than our current US government? Let’s not forget that, with UN support, 30-40 million abortions occur worldwide every YEAR. A reformed UN would have a much greater power to tyrannize good Catholics than the US govt, at the very least because under a UN-policed “family of nations” good Catholics would have nowhere to run.
A really reformed UN would be a great good.
I don’t expect to see a really reformed UN any time soon.
If I were the pope, I wouldn’t put much hope in seeing a really reformed UN.
But then, I’m not the pope. He’s the expert on hope. (Not hope and change—the Church develops but does not change.)
So it all depends on whether one accents the “really reformed” or the “UN” part.
You accent the “UN” part. I agree, the present UN is evil.
But the pope did not write about the present UN. He wrote about a reformed UN.
If there ever were a truly reformed UN along the lines outlined by Pope Benedict (which would mean that the Truly Reformed UN would respect subsidiarity), it would indeed be a good thing.
That’s a big IF.
But you ignored the IF. I didn’t.
So your critique of me is totally off target.
As I was careful to say in my first post, _Caritas in Veritate_ suggests the NEED for a reformed UN AND economic institutions AND international finance.
>>> If I were the pope, I wouldn’t put much hope in seeing a really reformed UN.
But then, I’m not the pope. He’s the expert on hope. (Not hope and change—the Church develops but does not change.) <<<
Ah, so in your view Pope BXVI is the expert on “fruitless hopes.” That’s a pretty insulting thing to suggest.
>>> But the pope did not write about the present UN. He wrote about a reformed UN. <<<
No, he wrote about the NEED for a reformed UN AND economic institutions AND international finance. Reformed enough to do the Herculean (and toothy!) labors that need to be done to realize the ideal of a family of nations.
>>> If there ever were a truly reformed UN along the lines outlined by Pope Benedict (which would mean that the Truly Reformed UN would respect subsidiarity), it would indeed be a good thing. <<<
Personally, I don’t see what is being called for as “needful” by CiV as being anything more than a gussied-up version of a world empire. Let’s look at the final two sentences of Section 67:
“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.”
Aside from noting the presence of the “subsidiarity” pixie-dust (is the word UN-ese for “speedbump”?), why bother to comment further? I find the last sentence to be especially troubling. Might have saved some ink by just writing “It’s high time we immanentize the eschaton.” This isn’t what I would call a good thing, although I admit my view is open to argument.
>>> That’s a big IF.
But you ignored the IF. I didn’t.
So your critique of me is totally off target. <<<
Sorry, I didn’t see any “IF” when Pope BXVI wrote that the reformed UN _et al_ were NEEDED. He didn’t write IF they were needed. Once again, IF what you say about the irredeemable nature of the UN IS true, it can only be true if we assume that the Pope is a peddler of false hopes — which is a pretty nasty slander, and one which I do not believe.
IF the defenders of CiV respond by being captious, then perhaps Pope BXVI needs better defenders.
Lighten up. Saying a reformed UN is needed includes an IF. It is not an endorsement of the present.
The pope’s the expert on hope because his second encyclical was Spes salvi, saved by hope.
Hope is different from optimism. You don’t get it. You only know optimism/pessimism. You introduce “fruitless” where I simply wrote hope. In doing that you have reduced hope to optimism and concluded optimism is unwarranted. I conclude optimism is unwarranted but that’s the point at which hope takes over.
You don’t believe in hope. Only in optimism, so where there’s no grounds for optimism (and I agree there are none), you have nothing left.
I am a Christian. So I am obligated to hope even where humnanly speaking I have no, zero, nada optimism.
But since hope does not even exist in your way of thinking, you and I are on different planets.
But since you are unwilling to even stipulate for the purpose of discussion, the world of hope that the pope believes in, you really have no business criticizing his encyclical. You are reading it through mere-optimism eyes. It was written with eyes of both human optimism/pessimism and eyes of divine hope.
So stow your bashing of the defenders of CiV. If you are not willing to engage the pope’s thought in its own context, you should go and engage things with which you do have enough common presuppositions to permit discussion.
You know the future and that the future is hopeless.
That’s more than the pope knows.
However, they do not, for me, mollify the troubling ones …
Once you've had a chance to read the whole document, then we can talk about it. The trouble is that you may stress upon the couple of "troubling statements" out of their overall context (just as we saw with your review of Populorum Progressio -- not that your concerns were completely resolved, but a lot of them, in fact, were after dealing with the actual document).
Having said that, let me repeat one thing I said back on 1 July, before the release of the document, Please withhold judgment until you have a chance to read the document for yourselves (after all, how often does the MSM get anything right about the Church?)
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.
LOL
>>> Lighten up. Saying a reformed UN is needed includes an IF. It is not an endorsement of the present. <<<
Your partly right. It’s not a full endorsement of the present UN. It IS an endorsement of the UN Charter (which includes the past and present) and a reformed UN (and OTHER internnational financial and economic organizations)
I don’t buy your argument that Pope BXVI’s support for using international organizations to underwrite and enforce his “family of nations” is just a “what if” exercise. This is a complete distortion of the Pope’s obvious statement that there is a need for MUCH greater control of the world’s nations.
>>> You don’t believe in hope. Only in optimism, so where there’s no grounds for optimism (and I agree there are none), you have nothing left. <<<
You don’t know me from Sam Hill. The hope I most, and ultimately, believe in comes from Jesus Chist my Lord and Savior. I am sure that I and Pope BXVI would agree on this matter.
Although I am not Catholic, I have a deep respect for the Catholic Church, its teaching and its history. However, that doesn’t mean that I have to assent to every encyclical, past and present, in all of its parts. I find section 67 of CiV especially troubling, for the reasons I have stated. That I place no hope in the UN Charter does not make me a man without hope, just as a person who doesn’t buy Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign isn’t a man with no hope.
>>> So stow your bashing of the defenders of CiV. If you are not willing to engage the pope’s thought in its own context, you should go and engage things with which you do have enough common presuppositions to permit discussion. <<<
I’m certainly willing to engage the Pope’s thought in it’s own context and its own terms. That’s why I engaged those who thought they could hide that context by nitpicking at the translation. If his defenders are neither willing nor able to engage criticisms of CiV effectively, then perhaps they should be doing something else.
But why should we be surprised? They rationalize the wisdom of Scripture into foolishness. This is just more of the same. It's how they were taught.
“You don’t know me from Sam Hill.”
You apparently accused me of mind-reading to the Mod. When I wrote that you know optimism/pessimism but not hope, I did not have to read your mind. What I wrote was based on what you wrote. It was an attempt to explain the difference between optimism and hope. You accused the pope of foolishly relying on the UN as it is because you decided that you know the pope’s mind well enough to know that the pope’s call for a reformed UN is a pipe-dream.
And, by the way, you also appear to read the mind of several of us on this thread when you accuse us of hiding behind discussion of translation problems when our real goal is to gussy up (defend) what in your view are the pope’s hopelessly indefensible views on the world economic and political situation.
You entitled to be convinced that the pope is wrong about economics, politics, the UN etc. But why must you attribute impure motives, shilling, to those of us who believe he’s right?
“Gussied up” is not the language one uses in civil discussion.
I would hope that the Religion Moderator would address the same admonition to you that he or she addressed to me. You came on to a thread dealing with a very specialized aspect of the encyclical and made global accusations against the pope.
A worthy request and points.
Thanks.
Do you have a link for the best English version—the whole document? I’m a bit confused by the ‘core dump’ of links.
Actually . . .
no escatalogical fancies at all.
I’ve persistently let Scripture and the available puzzle pieces lead where they will.
Farrrrr tooooo true.
However, some RC’s have realized such sentences as are in this encyclical are not very rationalize-able.
Praise God for those with the courage to wake-up.
“Gussied up”
has been used most of the decades of my 62 years in a countless number of civil discussions public and private.
I might depend on the region one is in or comes from.
It’s not very formal, snooty or high falootin.
It is civil and very communicative.
In this context it was pejorative. In most contexts it’s pejorative, though I’ll grant you that it can be used non-pejoratively.
But please don’t tell me you did not intend it pejoratively when you said that those who find the encyclical defensible are merely gussying up world domination.
My bad. It was Poe White who used “gussied up” pejoratively. You came to her/his defense. The two of you make a nice tag-team.
>>> You apparently accused me of mind-reading to the Mod. <<<
Actually, I read the Religion Moderator’s warning to you before I posted, and decided that he/she was right. I have had no contact with the Relig. Mod.
As for Pope BXVI, if he thinks that the world is in need of a reformed UN (and other international groups) in order to establish an “authentic fraternity” of human peoples or to achieve the “summit” of the process of human development, I would argue that he is in error, not that he is foolish. My disagreement with him relies upon my understanding of what was written in CiV, not some ability to mindread. If you believe that my interpretation of CiV is in error, or that I am being unfair to Pope BXVI or the Magesterium of the Church, please show how and where.
And, for the record, weren’t you the one who called the reformation of the UN a pipe dream?
Your words, from post #44:
“I don’t expect to see a really reformed UN any time soon.
If I were the pope, I wouldn’t put much hope in seeing a really reformed UN.”
>>> hiding behind discussion of translation problems when our real goal is to gussy up (defend) what in your view are the pope’s hopelessly indefensible views on the world economic and political situation. <<<
Yep. “Hiding behind” as in throwing out an argumentative red-herring about mistranslation when, as I have argued, the rest of Section 67 of CiV sits well with the notion of “giving teeth.” I never said Pope BXVI’s views that I addressed here were hopelessly indefensible, just that I found them in error and needful of a defense. So far, the only defense that seems pertinent was markomalley’s Post#23. He seems to rely upon the notion that Section 67 has to be read in the context of all of CiV in order to see how it is acceptable; thus I am currently finishing my reading of it (along w/ “Populorum Pregressio” and “Sollicitudo rei socialis”).
>>> You entitled to be convinced that the pope is wrong about economics, politics, the UN etc. But why must you attribute impure motives, shilling, to those of us who believe he’s right? <<<
You’re mindreading again, not to mention misreading and misrepresenting my previous post.
>>> You came on to a thread dealing with a very specialized aspect of the encyclical and made global accusations against the pope. <<<
I came unto a thread that was not limited to RCs, as far as I could tell. If I am in error, please let me know. The thread is a self-acknowledged “vanity” which frames an apologia for the CiV. I found the basis for the defense unconvincing, and have argued so. If you want to discuss how I am in error in regards to CiV, please address the points I have made. I’d be happy to discuss them. If you want to engage in _ad hominem_ attacks against me or anyone else, or to draw me into such attacks, then don’t bother me to address me.
Let’s just say that you tread down paths where I cannot follow. Although our paths appear to be intersecting here!
By the way, the copy of CiV (in English translation) that I’m using (from a pdf. file) can be found here:
http://www.cathnewsusa.com/article.aspx?aeid=14987
It’s pretty long, and cites Pope Paul VI’s _Populorum progressio_ and JP II’s _Sollicitudo rei socialis_ fairly often. Time to put on your reading glasses!
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