Posted on 11/10/2013 4:46:26 PM PST by ebb tide
Vaticanologists are making much of a major speech by one of the eight cardinals the pope has designated as leaders of reform, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.
The speech is ambitious: It offers a comprehensive re-reading of the Church’s role in politics, and of the government in economics. The cardinal makes bold, sweeping assertions in a tone as confident as Karl Marx or Ayn Rand: “With the New Evangelization we restart (start anew) from the beginning: we once more become the Church as proclaimer, servant, and Samaritan.”
Does the cardinal really mean that the Church ever ceased to be these things? If so, when? And by what authority does the speaker makes this implicit attack on all his predecessors? By the experience of the Church in Latin America, where large swaths of his flock have fled to Pentecostalism?
Which popes, precisely, is he accusing here:
Too many times [the Church] gives the impression of having too much certitude and too little doubt, freedom, dissension or dialogue. No more excommunicating the world, then, or trying to solve the world’s problems by returning to authoritarianism, rigidity and moralism, but instead keeping always the message of Jesus as her sole source of inspiration.
Such grand and unsupported attacks on an institution’s past are a common rhetorical device of revolutionary movements, which demonize the past, thus gaining the power to shape the future.
Power is the point here: For all his protestations of “humility” and “service,” the cardinal imagines a Church that will have extensive political and economic power, wielded through laymen and politicians whom it can mold. In what shape political and economic principles does he hope to mold them?
Cardinal Maradiaga makes his sympathies clear when he quotes as an authority on the morality of international investment the Swiss radical Jean Ziegler – a longtime defender of Fidel Castro, who has called the United States an “imperialist dictatorship”:
The globalization of the exchange of services, capital and patents has led over the past ten years to establish a world dictatorship of finance capital. . . .The lords of financial capital wield over billions of human beings a power of life and death. Through their investment strategies, their stock market speculations, their alliances, they decide day to day who has the right to live on this planet and who is doomed to die.
Ironically, Ziegler here denounces foreign investors for threatening poor people with death; on other occasions he has condemned the United States for forbidding its citizens to do business with Cuba.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga makes a point Globalization has helped tens of millions in long-impoverished places like India and China move from grinding poverty to relative prosperity – even as wealth stagnated or shrank in Europe and North America. Talented people in developing countries are no longer doomed to subsistence agriculture or foreign-aid handouts; increasingly, they can compete against better-paid, comparatively privileged workers in richer countries. This reality is something Jean Ziegler prefers to ignore.
The Cardinal elaborates on Ziegler’s conspiracy theory, writing himself:
The effects and consequences of the neoliberal dictatorships that rule democracies are not hard to uncover: they invade us with the industry of entertainment, they make us forget about human rights, they convince us that nothing can be done, that there is no possible alternative. To change the system, it would be necessary to destroy the power of the new feudal lords. Chimerical? Utopian?
The Church decidedly bets on living the globalization of mercy and solidarity.
So democracies like ours are “neoliberal dictatorships,” which the Church will help reform through the “globalization of mercy and solidarity,” that is, by helping governments to seize wealth from some people, skim its own share off the top, and distribute that wealth to others. Those “others” will doubtless be grateful, as Hugo Chavez’s supporters were in Venezuela; indeed, they will form powerful voting blocs dependent on state redistribution of wealth, as directed by humble clergymen.
This shows no awareness of decades of research about the true causes of poverty: the lack of clear property rights, political corruption, crony capitalism, populist politics, and centralized bureaucracy. Such problems cannot be solved by foreigners, but by local action to build up a culture of enterprise and institutions that protect small business owners. But it’s much more convenient, comfortable, and conducive to grabbing power to blame everything on the Yanquis.
The good cardinal has already shown in the past his proclivity for shifting blame. In May 2002, the cardinal explained who was really to blame for the sex abuse scandal: Jews in the media.
Tiny coteries of evil investors cause starvation in the developing world, while cabals of Jewish journalists try to smear the innocent bishops. Is it all clear now? Based on Manichean, conspiratorial analyses such as these, we humble, loving “Samaritans” must reject the pharisaical Church of the past, and march forward to use the guns and prisons of the state to enforce “mercy” and “solidarity” among the classes and the nations.
In Quod Apostolici Muneris, the great Leo XIII frankly condemned socialism as a Satanic counterfeit of the Gospel. If I might be permitted to cite this pope from the Church’s compromised past:
they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life. . . .But the boldness of these bad men, which day by day more and more threatens civil society with destruction, and strikes the souls of all with anxiety and fear, finds its cause and origin in those poisonous doctrines which, spread abroad in former times among the people, like evil seed bore in due time such fatal fruit.
We see that fruit today. And I’m not biting. Neither should you.
When those new Bishops show the guts to demand each parish make a clear and forthright presentation to ALL PARISHONERS about just what abortion is, including showing the bloody guts of the vile act...
...THEN I might take the claim that "they're orthodox" a lot more seriously.
Then I might come back.
I see you are in California. Do you still have a liberal Bishop or do you have one of the new ones?
And what "way of being" would that be? Budhism?
Do you not think Jesus Christ saw (and sees) all that you see and much more? Yet He died on the Cross for all so that many would be saved.
Have heard of the sin of despair?
I'll get back to answer that tomorrow. I have an interview to prep for tonight....
No, "kind one" (ahem), I was trying to get them to not outsource jobs to Communist China, or import H1B engineers from China and India. Or be PR agents for those who did.
Good luck on your interview.
You don’t have to like or associate with people, but don’t give up on the Sacraments. They are the path to life.
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Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Does the church belong to now have any sinners sitting in the pews? Have the ministers of that church ever committed a sin?
ALL religions can be perverted because they were devised/created by Men and not always as a product of the same Divine Inspiration as the Apostles were affected by.
Being made by Men, no matter how noble the intentions, I hold that religion in itself is sinful as it imposes its own form of The Law on the adherents despite the fact that trying to follow the Law is clearly being in a state of Fallen from Grace.
That said, the Catholic religion has probably done more to save souls than any other Christian religion (despite the long-term Latin Masses which left many of us in the dark - we knew the proper responses during Mass, but had no idea of what the priest or we ourselves were actually saying. I choose to be non-denominational because the Bible is the message and the New Covenant and Christs Love is the meat of the message - no thrills, no frills, just the Good News of Salvation and being justified by His Love vs. having to follow a bunch of Pharisee-type rituals which make one feel good about oneself, but serve no true purpose. No matter the topic of the day, my pastor always insures that Jesus is up front and center and His Love of us and our love of Him is what it's all about.
Yuk. Aliens wrote the Catechism?
Hallelujah! Praise God. I'm blessed to attend a church where my pastor does the same.
Then you’ve been out of the Church since Judas Iscarot? Picked, chosen by that erratic Jesus to be one of His right-hand men!
You do seem to have the Pharisee's Prayer down pretty good. Always good to be Scriptural, I guess.
Harry: I ain't goin' to your church, Betty. Your church is full of hypocrites.
Betty: Oh, come on. There's always room for one more.
Christ founded the Catholic Church to be His instrument for the redemption of the world. The best agents for spreading the fruits of salvation are not necessarily the priests or even the bishops, but the saints.
All of whom lived in times such as ours, or worse. Much worse.
Do not confuse the Apostolic Hierarchy wth the Clerical Bureaucracy.
Tagline.
And therein lies a great problem. At my church, if someone isn't there for a couple of weeks, they receive a call from someone asking them if everything is okay. What you're saying is that if someone leaves the Catholic church no one will notice or care! That's pretty pathetic!
My parish has 1200 families spread out over 4 weekend Masses, sometimes 5. How would anybody know if you had gone to the 5:00 p.m. Vigil Mass, or the 8:00, or the 10:00, or the 12:00 --- or the Latin Mass when we have it (twice a month)?
A small congregation is wonderful because it can be close-knit. Our daily Mass mini-congregations are like that: if Arlene misses the 7:00 a.m. Mass Monday and Tuesday, she'll get 3 or 4 phone calls or e-mails before Thursday wondering what's up! A big congregation, though, there's no way they could keep track of each parishioner's comings and goings unless you were open to fairly intrusive surveillance.
At my church, we live life together and we are all encouraged to serve our church community. Yes, it is small. And no, it isn't a parish because I'm no longer attending the Catholic church. I attend a church that ACTUALLY CARES, whether I'm there or not. I'm not just another "butt in the pew" number to be counted or "weekly envelope in the basket".
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