Replies

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.

>>> 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.