Mr. Jonescu does not seem to have all the necessary information to write an unbiased article on this topic.
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.
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.
I’ve been saying this for years on FR. But the puritans disavow evidence.
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.
Good article.
I view most of the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church as the enemy of my Church (the Catholic Church) and the U.S. Constitution.
This Pope has yet to demonstrate that he has anything intelligent to say about political or economic policy. He has proven that he knows something about straw men and clichés.
The emphasis on communitarian concerns is not a recent perversion of renegade "liberation theologians," (though leftwing liberation theologians certainly exploit the false connection). You see anti-laissez-faire attitudes among some of the most conservative and traditional Catholics as well, who have championed distributism, falangism, corporatism, etc. as alternatives to both Marxist socialism and capitalism. Many libertarians falsely attribute any criticism of laissez-faire to Marxist influence, when in fact some of these ideologies boil down to advocacy of a kind of social order that predated capitalism and republican government.
Seems like the American Thinker's keyboards have a special key that just types out the whole word "Marxism." Really, it's not enough now to wildly accuse people of being socialists? They have to be whole-hog Karl Marxists nowadays?
Religions don't translate or divide directly into secular ideologies. There's alway some remainder that resists such oversimplifications.
So Catholicism or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism can't be reduced to laissez-faire capitalism in a simplistic fashion. They talk about different things and deal with matters that aren't reducible to economics or politics.
Only an idiot would conclude that that makes them Marxist.
JP2, B16 and yes Francis have all spoken out against liberation theology. Francis was exiled to the far reaches of Argentina as a result.