IMO yes and he will only turn on the ignorant. Makes it tough to be Catholic right now.
Yes, Captain Obvious. He most certainly does.
The more that governments and society take care of the needy, the less the church has to expend on those obligations.
It’s the reverse side of capitalism. Save your money by having government do the work.
Yes, Captain Obvious. He most certainly does.
Next question, please.
Shaking my head. Since when did envy merit being called an intellectual system, much less a powerful one.
bookmark & ping ...
We are supposed to sell what we have and give it to the wanting...
Of course, Catholics have been supporting her all her life.
It’s a mistake to criticize a Pope’s pronouncements. It’s sort of like Bill O’Reilly challenging the Pope to “come on the Factor” and defend himself.
Does Francis have a Marxism problem?
No, he does not.
“Ultimately, many believed Jesus was the one who had come to deliver them from the Roman oppressors. And yet others said, “Isn’t this the son of a carpenter?”
So too, many have misunderstood who this bouncer-turned-cardinal-turned-pope is. Some believe he has come to “at last” set the Church free from the patriarchal oppression of past popes. Others say he is the new champion of Liberation Theology.
Some say a conservative, others a liberal, still others a Marxist or one of the Communists.
But when Jesus asked who do you say that I am? Peter replied, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”2
Who, really, is Pope Francis? In his own words, “I am a son of the Church.”
PREPARING FOR PASSION
After Jesus entered Jerusalem and the din of praise simmered, His true mission began to be revealed—to the dismay of the people. His first act was to cleanse the temple, overturning the tables of the money-changers and seats of the sellers. The very next thing?
The blind and the lame approached him in the temple area, and he cured them. (Matt 21:14)
After being elected, Pope Francis set about preparing his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. In it, the Holy Father likewise began turning over the tables of the money-changers, attacking “an economy [that] kills” and the “dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.”4 His words, based on the Church’s social doctrine, were an indictment particularly of “unbridled consumerism” and a corrupt stock exchange system that has created “a new tyranny” and a “deified market”, “a new idolatry of money” where “ethics has come to be viewed with a certain scornful derision.”5
His accurate and stinging depiction of the imbalance in wealth and power immediately (and predictably) drew the anger and ire of those who had only applauded him weeks before.
As for the Pope, he continued to shun opulence, choosing instead to be with the people.
I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. —POPE FRANCIS, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 49
It was after His entry into Jerusalem, also, that Jesus taught the “greatest commandment”: to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart… and your neighbour as yourself.”6 Likewise, the Holy Father made “love of neighbour” through service to the poor and evangelization central themes of his Exhortation.
But after exhorting the people to live the great commandments, Jesus did something else seemingly out of character: he publicly denounced the Scribes and Pharisees in no uncertain terms calling them “hypocrites… blind guides… whitewashed tombs…” and took them to task for seeking titles,7 keeping silent,8 and self-indulgence.9
Likewise, the gentle Pope Francis has also boldly challenged those who have lost the meaning of authentic Christian love, most especially the clergy. He has admonished those who are “obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.”10 He has criticized religious and clergy for buying new vehicles encouraging them to “choose a more humble one.”11 He has lamented those who take “over the space of the Church” for “programmes of self-help and self-realization” and12 churchmen with a “business mentality, caught up with management, statistics, plans and evaluations whose principal beneficiary is not God’s people but the Church as an institution.”13 He has called out the “worldliness” of the Church that leads to “complacency and self-indulgence.”14 He has framed homilists who do not properly prepare their sermons as being “dishonest and irresponsible” and even “a false prophet, a fraud, a shallow impostor.”15 He described those who promote and imbibe clericalism as “little monsters.”16 And, as for titles, Francis, in an effort to curb careerism in the Church, has abolished the honor of “Monsignor” for secular priests under the age of 65.17 Last, the Holy Father is planning to renovate the Curia, which no doubt, will upset the balance of power that has built-up over years among many “career Catholics.”
http://www.markmallett.com/blog/francis-and-the-coming-passion-of-the-church
The entire article is well worth the read. ;-)
Capitalism without God is just as bad as Socialism without God.
This is the root cause of many of our problems since the cultural revolution of the 1960’s.
The Pope is speaking on this just as JP2 called out Communism for its failures.
This is the first article I have read where the author has some idea of what Marxism was and is. All the others especially those who won’t read the article and respond to the headline and especially that much worshipped radio blabbermouth who declared that what the Pope expressed is “pure Marxism” speak out of nothing more or less but pure ignorance.
Somehow “income” is like the money on a collection plate, no one knows exactly where it comes from or what it took to produce it. The only question is how/who to “redistribute” this strange stuff called “income”.
Statements like this mean the writer s a philosophical quack. Capitalism is not God.
Capitalism is an economic system. It is not the root of reality. Saying otherwise proves you don't know what metaphysics is.
Capitalism is a political philosophy that privileges and promotes policies which benefit capital. Why anyone would worship that is mind-boggling to me.
No, there have been many articles that this assertion is incorrect.
No. He’s heavily influenced by Communion & Liberation, an Italian movement made up mostly of older academics and wealthy leftists, so he’s probably heavily skewed left - but he’s not a Marxist.
The thing that bothers me most about him is that he seems very government friendly. That is, most of the theft he complains about is done by governments in league with companies or wealthy individuals, such as Michelle Obama, who contracted her college buddy for the “Obamacare” website - a woman whose Canadian company had already been excluded from doing business with the Canadian government because of their screw-ups and overbilling. But the Pope will never notice that.
His problem is not that he’s a Marxist, but that he’s firmly stuck in the late 80s. This was a recovering time for the Church, after VII, but not a good time. He needs to move on.
1)Materialist philosophy is not the creation of the "proletariat," who historically have been too busy just making a living to engage in such intellectual abstraction. It is the creation of middle class or even wealthy intellectuals who have never had to worry about making a living.
2)The idea of the non-owning laboring classes being the force of teleological progress in history has long since given way to a sort of racial mysticism, in which the more melanin one possesses, the higher one's place in the hierarchy of the oppressed. Regardless of wealth or poverty, Asians are thus considered to the left of whites, Hispanics to the left of Asians, and Blacks as the absolute pinnacle of revolutionary action. Even illiterate Biblical Fundamentalists who are Black are considered to the left of Marx, to the left of Castro, to the left of Mao, to the left of Enver Hoxha. There is certainly no ridicule of Black religiosity on the Left, though granted, the Black clergy for the past few decades has shown no evidence of still believing in supernatural realities to begin with.
Of course Francis is not a Marxist. Those who claim otherwise focus only on specific parts of a broader message and mistakenly associate Marxism with anti-Capitalism. I hope the first half of this essay showed Marxism is more than a criticism of capitalism. Francis does not preach revolution, a communist political system or atheism. In reality, the above-cited passages are just a few paragraphs from an eighty-four page document. And the Catholic Church, long before Marx, long before Liberation Theologians, dedicated itself to serving the poor. In another essay, I showed that Marx was shaped by Christian doctrine, so concordance between Marx and Francis are symptomatic of Christian influence on Marx, not vice versa. Even if I don’t like some of the concepts he employs, Francis’ ends are consistent with the Gospel and his means are not Marxist.
IBTPWM
France has a French problem.