>>> 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.
“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.