For your pinging pleasure.
charity is nothing if forced....
From wikipedia:
Rerum Novarum (Latin for On the New Things) is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on May 15, 1891. It was an open letter, passed to all Catholic bishops, that addressed the condition of the working classes. The encyclical is entitled: “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour”. Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning were influential in its composition.
It discussed the relationships and mutual duties between labour and obtaining capital, as well as government and its citizens. Of primary concern was the need for some amelioration for “The misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”[1] It supported the rights of labor to form unions, rejected communism and unrestricted capitalism, whilst affirming the right to private property.
Many of the positions in Rerum Novarum were supplemented by later encyclicals, in particular Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961), and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991).
The Church is supposed to oppose a strong central government unless absolutely necessary, limited to functions that lower orders of authority can not handle on their own.
The Church is supposed to oppose Socialism.
But, sadly, it often does not.
Thanks for posting this. Finding articles like this that I wouldn’t otherwise come across via most of the media is one of the things that I really enjoy about FR.
**Is capitalism Catholic?**
Wouldn’t it have been a better title to ask if capitalism is Christian?
In answer to the question, of course, capitalism is OK with Catholics — otherwise you would not have private businesses laying lawsuits of the Obama asministration about the HHs mandate.
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I wish i could find a parish with a priest like Fr Sirico.
Individuals that come to the conservatism upon leaving the
left really have a lot say that I find interesting.
I received communion from Fr.Sirico on the National Review
cruise in 2008. He is the brother of Tony Sirico who was of
course ‘Paulie Walnuts’ on The Sopranos,one of my favorite
characters. Unfortunately, they are estranged,I believe.
Capitalism is what people do when they are free.
Thus, it is Catholic.
By the time Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he saw the wonderful effect of our Founder's decision because all religions grew or fell according to their own effort.
Anytime I can get a progressive/dissenting Catholic magazine/blog like the Jesuit-run America simultaneously to quote papal documents, defend the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, embrace the Natural Law and even yearn for a theological investigation “by those charged with oversight for the Church’s doctrine” of a writer suspected of heresy, I consider that I have had a good day.
And to think that all this was prompted by two sentences of mine quoted in a New York Times story on an attempt by adjunct professors at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University to form a union! Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer asked how I made sense of the resistance on the part of Duquesne, a Catholic University, to unionizing efforts by adjunct professors in light of the Church’s teaching about unions. We had a pleasant half hour talk on the subject in which I first explained that the Church generally looked favorably on unions – certainly not all of them, at all times or in all places, and not at all they do, and not as an end in themselves, but rather for the well-being of those workers and their families (i.e., that the Church’s support for unions is contingent). This favorable bias does not mean that workers are obligated to join a union, nor that management is obligated to accept the terms of a union. The right to join a union, in Church teaching, is rooted in the natural right of association, which of course also means that people have the right not to associate. It all boils down to the details of the specific case, meaning that Duquesne was probably considering the ever-rising costs of education and its impact on the lives of students and their families.
It was in this context that I uttered what the America magazine/blog writer Vincent Miller deemed offensive when I observed that Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, “In the industrial revolution, [when] the church was concerned about communism, and not just capitalism but savage capitalism . . . People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh today.”
From this Mr. Miller jumps to the conclusion that by saying that Leo’s observations of the circumstances for workers in 1891 were historically contingent, I am somehow arguing that what Leo said has no bearing today. Now, that is a particularly odd reaction because the entire thrust of Leo’s encyclical, beginning with its title, was precisely aimed at looking around at the “new things” (Rerum Novarum) that were emerging in his day, and reflecting upon them in the light of Scripture, Tradition and the Natural Law. If the situation in Pittsburgh and the graduate students teaching part time courses in 2012 is remotely comparable to the subsistence living conditions under which many workers lived in the latter part of the 19th century, this has somehow escaped my notice.
Nonetheless, I am delighted to see Mr. Miller is vigilant about the Church teaching and his citations from magisterial texts; not a single line of any of those cited do I disagree with. I wonder if Mr. Miller would say the same about this text, from Laborem Exercens, where Blessed John Paul II wrote: “Unions do not have the character of political parties struggling for power; they should not be subjected to the decision of political parties or have too close links with them.” Or what he makes of Paul VI’s caution about unions when he wrote in Octogesmia adveniens (no.14): “Their activity, however, is not without its difficulties. Here and there the temptation can arise of profiting from a position of force to impose, particularly by strikes – the right to which as a final means of defense remains certainly recognized – conditions which are too burdensome for the overall economy and for the social body, or to desire to obtain in this way demands of a directly political nature.”
Father Robert Sirico, I know this before I opened the thread, LOL... his brother is paulie walnuts of the sopranos.
I wonder what Fr. Sirico thinks of Pope Francis