Posted on 12/03/2013 10:13:35 AM PST by armydoc
The Catholic Church's recent history of sympathizing with, and even supporting, Marxist progressivism is clear, sad, and indicative of a deeply irrational and anti-individual streak within the modern Church hierarchy. Catholics who care about the Church, its history, and its future -- and also about humanity, reason and freedom -- must stop making excuses for their current spiritual leadership's collectivist authoritarian impulses.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Mr. Jonescu does not seem to have all the necessary information to write an unbiased article on this topic.
Ad hominen. Less than worthless remark.
The liberal bishops love the poor differently from conservatives and libertarians. They literally believe Jesus when he said, “Blessed are ye poor” in Luke 6:20-21.
That’s why they advocate for social programs, regulations, and taxes that are ensured to make more people poor. Poverty is a blessing, and the bishops want more of it.
I wouldn’t ascribe motives to them. It’s just that they don’t know what they are talking about. They are just mouthing worn out platitudes.
That’s a great analysis...
too bad leftists can’t be shamed by their obvious lack of reasoning and ability to see the results of their advocacy.
No, there is factual information missing from that article which gives a wrong impression. Have you not heard that there are dissident priests and lay persons in the Church?
Did you read the article? It is spot on.
Last I checked,
thou shalt not steal or covet
are still in there...
And socialism cannot be reconciled with these.
The article does not claim Catholic theology is hopelessly wrong-headed, but rather I see it as challenge to confront Church leadership when they speak in support of what is so clearly wrong in the secular world.
It’s rather a straight line, however, from a works-based theological construct, to socialism,
because works based righteousness so easily morphs into advocacy based righteousness.
I’ve been saying this for years on FR. But the puritans disavow evidence.
And envy is the organizing principle of socialism.
Socialists wouldn't stand a chance with the argument that the State will take the fruit of your labor and distribute it according to the needs of the State. However, many people are attracted by the argument that the State should take the fruit of another's labor and distribute it to them.
Oh, it’s more devious than having the State take it from another and give it to me,
it’s that I (if I were a liberal) can feel righteous by advocating that the State take from person A and give to “needy” person B.
We can take some comfort that Francis just issued excoriation of capitalism as an apostolic exhortation.
If I understand correctly, encyclicals trump exhortations.
Well, that, too ... That’s why it is culturally so much easier to be liberal or a leftist. One can feel all self-righteous without having to do anything.
A priest in the North Korean totalitarian state acts as a marionette for the tubby little third generation dictator Kim Il Birdbrain and that becomes the platform for Jonescu's attack on the Roman Catholic Church since Mr. Jonescu apparently regards Adam Smith or maybe even Ayn Rand as the authors of his personal scriptures rather than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, and Peter, tyo say nothing of the Old Testament.
The late and unlamented Fr. Robert Drinan, S. J., and Fr. Charles Curran and a handful of others were advocates of abortion but, I trust, Mr. Jonescu does not imagine that the fact that they were not silenced and defrocked and excommunicated or even burned at the stake as in those dear dead days of yore (as I would have preferred) does not make the Roman Catholic Church in the United States pro-abortion. Fr. Drinan, after many years of scandal producing behavior as Barney Frank's predecessor in Congress, was ordered by John Paul II to his face to leave Congress (which he did) and Curran was stripped of his status as theologian.
Pope Francis (not my favorite contemporary pope but pope nonetheless) lived his entire adult life in Argentina where the choices in politics seem to be essentially between Peronist fascists such as Juan and Evita OTOH and faux Peronist Marxists and social revolutionaries against human nature like the Kirchners OTO. Understandably, given the choices available, then Father,Bishop, Archbishop, Cardinal Bergoglio, tended toward the imperfect fascist model rather than toward the utterly unacceptable Kirchner model. Try to remember that he is, despite MSM sensationalism to the contrary, a RELIGIOUS leader and not a politician and it shows.
Both of those choices are quite unacceptable to normal American conservatives of a free market persuasion but Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and Ho Chi Minhism and Kim Il Birdbrainism are MORE unacceptable and, indeed, totally unacceptable (despite one North Korean priest's idiot imaginings and substitute of "nationalism" vis-a-vis South Korea's often admirable alternative.
That there are child-molesting individual priests (certainly a grave evil) does not make the Roman Catholic Church a church devoted to child molesting any more than the idiot North Korean priest's ravings define Catholicism in North Korea much less anywhere else.
Would more stringent discipline of wayward priests serve the Roman Catholic Church well? No doubt! Catholic leaders and even popes are fallen human beings and probably do a better job at their jobs than would Mr. Jonescu and or anyone sharing his profile as intellectual at large with few real responsibilities in life.
Oh, and conveniently, Mr. Jonescu warns us NOT to rely on soon to be Saint John Paul the Great as a counterexample justifying support of the Roman Catholic Church as an enemy of Marxism just as Ronald Reagan should not be an excuse for supporting the GOP or Margaret Thatcher ought not justify support for the Tory Party in Great Britain.
Mr. Jonescu should be reminded that Saint John Paul, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are, each in his or her own sphere, the ideal (however imperfect) of what a pope, a president or a prime minister might be. They are the each standards against whom all successors are judged and those successors are likely, in the foreseeable future to fail against such respective standards.
Mr. Jonescu is just another (apparently) fallen away cradle Catholic, favoring his own inner fallacies rather than the accumulated wisdom and teaching magisterium of the Church in which he was privileged to be baptized. That is also the Church which Friedrich von Hayek, Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer entered as death drew near. I believe but am not sure that it was also the Church of Ludwig von Mises.
Mr. Jonescu seems to fancy himself an "American Thinker" by association with that publication but, if the cited article is any evidence, we will wait in vain for him to attain the stature of von Mises, von Hayek or Frank Meyer. If that seems unfair to Mr. Jonescu, that would be because I am applying his own standard to Mr. Jonescu.
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