Good observation, WM. The hierarchy of the Church teaches that it has a Divine right to lead all Christians. Therefore, all Christians should submit. That is liberalism, just as you said.
I know we have a lot of RC posters who are conservative, but their church is not.
You never cease to amaze me brother. You are so patient in responding to some posters and you methodically work your way through all posts that have been sent to you.
I hope Resurrection Sunday was a joyous time for you.
It was for me. We did a lot of singing and Amazing Love brought tears to my eyes.
***The hierarchy of the Church teaches that it has a Divine right to lead all Christians. Therefore, all Christians should submit. That is liberalism, just as you said.***
It is the word of Jesus. I didn’t think that he could be labelled as liberal, but nonetheless, His instruction is what we need to do. After all, His instruction is how we shall be judged.
Conservatism is not about freeing the individual. It is a reversion to a past state, by the way.
The liberalism of the RCC is probably rooted in it's historic relation to the state ...
The Catholic Church is a LOT older than the nation-state, or even than the idea of the nation state. Some rulers have made martyrs of Catholic clergy. Rulers wanted to be able to appoint bishops, and in some places they got what they wanted. In some places the Church was able to cow rulers and in others to persuade them. In some places, like Inquisitorial Spain, the courts of the Inquisition were so much more merciful (not every court, not all the time) than those of the king that suspects would claim to be heretics in hopes that they would be tried by "the Inquisition" rathern that the King's judges.
I really think that there's a lot of anachronistic thought here, and a lot of bragging because others made the mistakes from which we have learned, thereby saving us the trouble of making the mistakes, but not excusing us for thinking we are so much wiser than they.
There's lots of horror (much of it just by the far more humane standards of our age) over the 13th century massacre of the Cathars by Simon de Montfort. It is hard (for me at least) to think that Simon was all about serving the Church. I have a feeling that the real estate of the Albigensian Nobility may have had its own entirely secular charms.
Compare and contrast the US tendency to have the Feds invovle themselves more and more with public edumication, and the Hillarious desire for single-payer (hah hah) health care administered by the same folks who brought you the IRS to the principle of subsidiarity, as mentioned in this post contrasting the Catholic Church with the liberal welfare state:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
In spite of this clear warning, the United States Catholic Bishops remain staunch defenders of a statist approach to social problems. ...
(emphasis blah blah)