Posted on 03/08/2009 9:04:22 AM PDT by stfassisi
You may be right. You may also be surprised at who isn't...if they actually take time to read the encyclical vice the NY Slimes description.
“...if they actually take time to read the encyclical vice the NY Slimes description.”
ALWAYS good advice. The encyclicals are available in English at the Vatican website as those of the other Patriarchs are on their Church websites.
The Church in the United States has done a poor job of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years. And now we’re harvesting the results — in the public square, in our families and in the confusion of our personal lives. Our republic was not designed to survive with a Godless people. It is far more important that the church become a political force than a political party.
You wrote:
“I thank God that The Church, especially now with +BXVI as pope but with the EP and the other patriarchs too, will speak out on the situation of the people and societies and even all of creation in a way which challenges the immoral, self centered, materialistic and pagan conceptions which have come to dominate our thinking as societies.”
Amen to that!
“It is far more important that the church become a political force than a political party.”
Far more important that The Church bring about a metanoia in men than being a political anything. If The Church can bring about that change, all else will fall into place.
“Worldly thoughts and the cares of life have the same effect on the understanding as a veil draped over the eyes, for the understanding is the eye of the soul. So long as we leave them there, we cannot see. But when they fall away as we remember that we are to die, then we shall clearly see the true light which illumines every man as it comes into the world from on high.” +Symeon the New Theologian
For later
I doubt there will be any great change from other Papal writings on economics. The basic argument will still be that an economic system must be rooted in the dignity of the person. And that there is a right to private property and that we should strive for a fair distribution of goods.
Here’s a challenging piece from an Orthodox perspective.
MD, this might be helpful to you:
http://www.st-philip.net/presentations/wealth_and_virtue.pdf
Pope Had `Prophecy’ of Market Collapse in 1985, Tremonti Italian Finance Minister) Says
Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) — Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system, a ``prophecy’’ dating to a paper he wrote when he was a cardinal, Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said.
``The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found’’ in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became pope in April 2005, Tremonti said yesterday at Milan’s Cattolica University.
German-born Ratzinger in 1985 presented a paper entitled ``Market Economy and Ethics’’ at a Rome event dedicated to the Church and the economy. The future pope said a decline in ethics ``can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.’’
Pope Benedict in an Oct. 7 speech reflected on crashing markets and concluded that ``money vanishes, it is nothing’’ and warned that ``the only solid reality is the word of God.’’
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aGSJzqaJm_b0&refer=europe
“...a decline in ethics ``can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.’’”
and
“...``money vanishes, it is nothing’’ and warned that ``the only solid reality is the word of God.’’”
Hints of what we probably will read from the Church Father of the 21st century...and many here won’t like it one bit. That in itself probably isn’t surprising. The substitution of political ideologies for religious belief and conviction as the operating assumptions of life in this country has had a devastating effect on our society.
The pope does not discuss economic theories; he discusses values which are expressed through economic systems. When a succession of popes condemned socialism, it is not through the eyes of whether socialism harms the stock market by destroying incentive, but that it is natural law that one should prosper by the works of his own hands, and not have his wealth subject to confiscation by the government.
Reagan rarely used the word, “capitalism.” He spoke instead about “free markets.” Regulation, anti-competitive behavior, and contract conditions can all resurrect artificial barriers to new entries and make capitalism tend to be more plutocratic than free. If the pope calls for living wages, that’s not enough to say that all Catholics must support “living wage” laws. The same encyclical also condemned importing workers for the purpose of suppressing wages. In some cases (and this is admittedly, to their eternal infamy, not the way US Catholic bishops have interpreted it), “living wage” laws are only “necessary” because illegal aliens have destroyed the natural economic forces.
My understanding is that subsidiarity is an economic theory supported by a brilliant clicque of Catholic apologists including Belloc, Chesterton and Tolkein. I think it’s a brilliant theory and comprised of noble ethic, but you make it sound like a once-universal doctrine.
To relate my responses to Kansas58 and Gumdrop, I would suggest that any free market, unhindered by artificial market barriers and preserved by a minimal but sufficient governmental role (you can’t have a free market if you’re invaded) would trend towards subsidiarity. Even network effects are preserved, in the long run, only by copyright and patent regulations which should endure only for a finite period (far less than the obscene “Disney” standard).
Facebook will go the way of AIM, without brilliant lawyers.
Google will be interesting: Right now, it depends on an army of hundreds of thousands of computers to index the web. It’s not a violation of subsidiarity if you can’t get your search engine to function as efficiently. (Most Google alternatives run on Googe’s infrastructure.)
Subsidiarity was accepted Church doctrine, and was never officially discarded by the Church.
Several Popes have spoken against Socialism.
Not so much, anymore, and it is a shame.
You seem to equate subsidiarity with a rejection of socialism. Certainly, socialism violates the principles of subsidiarity, but just bebcause it is doctrine that socialism is a grave evil does not mean that subsidiarity is Catholic doctrine.
Is there anyone you know of who has asserted subsidiarity is doctrine.
By the way, the Pope I first learned about subsidiarity through was John Paul II, but that was a rallying cry of Gdansk dock workers as a method of dealing with communist oppression; it’s nothing I understood the be Catholic doctrine. (I think it is universally applicable, as did Belloc and Chesterton; I just never got the sense that John Paul II ever meant to say, “Hey, America, you need to do this, also!”)
I don't know about "doctrine," but subsidarity seems to have a strong Catholic basis -- and not just for economics -- in Aquinas (only the abstract of the paper seems to be available on the Web):
This article closely examines the way in which Thomas Aquinas understood the relationship between the various forms of human community. The article focuses on Aquinas's theory of law and politics and, in particular, on his use of political categories, such as city, province and empire, together with the associated concepts of kingdom and nation, as well as various social groupings, such as household, clan and village, alongside of the distinctly ecclesiastical categories of parish, diocese and universal church.The analysis of these categories is used in the article to help explain Aquinas's role in the development of theories about subsidiarity, federalism and mixed constitutionalism. In the first place, it is argued that a close inquiry into Aquinas's discussion of the many and various forms of human community sheds light on the origins and development of the idea of subsidiarity within Catholic social teaching. Second, while Aquinas certainly did not advance a theory of federalism as that idea is presently understood, it is argued that recovering what Aquinas had to say about the categories of human community helps us to understand the origin and later development of federal ideas. Finally, it is argued that far from endorsing a system of absolute monarchy as is sometimes alleged, when understood in this way, Aquinas supported a particular kind of mixed constitution in which monarchy is tempered by a variety of constitutional constraints founded upon a conception of the body politic as itself constructed out of a plurality of smaller, intermediate corporations and communities of a political, ecclesiastical and social character.
I searched "Aquinas" and "subsidiarity" because I seem to remember hearing about Aquinas and the principle of subsidiarity in high school or college.
I refer you to the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Subsidiarity
and collectivism: 1885
contents: 1883-85
in the relationships between society and family: 2209
see also:Social Doctrine of the Church
-— nice reading.
sad but true. The richness of Catholic social teaching is steamrolled under a partisan agenda all too often here.
Well, thanks! It certainly seems better established than I knew.
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