“Too many Catholic bishops are spineless cowards, nothing more than backslapping democrat politicians. Dolan and Wuerl come to mind.”
Pardon me if I speak as a non-Catholic/non-Christian, but it seems to me that the Catholic Church puts undue emphasis on “the poor” at the expensive of Christ’s other teachings, and at the expense of the whole corpus of Divine wisdom found in both the Old and New Testaments.
The overarching emphasis on “the poor” seems to easily lead the Catholic clergy into naive collaboration with various shades of manipulative Communist philosophies and politics which ultimately help neither the poor, nor society, nor the appeal of Christianity at all.
As an outsider, I’m curious to hear if others on the inside notice this.
The Catholic Church has never waivered in teaching the truth
about abortion, homosexuality, marriage and women ordination. That’s why the Church is hated by the secular world. Catholic Charities is the biggest charity in the history of the world. Feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, treating the sick.
One of the seminal books of Liberation Theology is "Marx and the Bible" by José Porfirio Miranda --- I read it in the early 70's but still remember the way he put forth his theme. In fact the Bible is FULL of concern for the poor, sometimes called just that ("the poor") and sometimes categorized as "the widow, the orphan, and the sojourners in the land." Go to a Bible search engine and give it a spin: it's a truly pervasive Biblical theme.
And it carried right through from Deuteronomy, the Prophets of Israel, the Gospels and Epistles, the Fathers of the Church, the Lives of the Saints, etc. etc.
HOWEVER. The category "the poor" has been mishandled in a Marxist-toned ideological way. There's the "interesting poor" (a distinct sociological class, the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, felons, Third Worlders, etc.) and the "unintersting poor" (dispossessed white Zimbabweans, murdered Cambodians, starving Soviet kulaks, Ukrainians, North Koreans, and oh, Down Syndrome people, your insurance-less underemployed Republican aunt and uncle, etc.)
The secular response to the poor is almost always entirely materialistic and skewed by the crudest partisanship; and it mostly centers on reducing them to, or maintaining them in, a degrading state of lifetime dependency.
All this is 100% unBiblical, unChristian, ands frankly unCatholic, if you go by the actual doctrines of the Church.
But the clerical and lay bureaucracy of the Church are very much the swarming grandchildren of Jose Porfirio Miranda.
Hard to see how to turn this around, except by God Almighty treating us with tough love like in most of the OT (famine and foreign conquest) and God Almighty raising up exemplary saints.
Oremus.
I have had practicing Catholics tell me to my face that the reason they vote democrat, in spite of the dems pro-abortion stand, is because the "democrats are for the poor". And that's a quote and that was not only a good 30 years ago, but also recently in an entire difference location.
So IOW, being *for the poor* trumps church teaching and doctrine.
Pardon me if I speak as a non-Catholic/non-Christian, but it seems to me that the Catholic Church puts undue emphasis on “the poor” at the expensive of Christ’s other teachings, and at the expense of the whole corpus of Divine wisdom found in both the Old and New Testaments.
I have had practicing Catholics tell me to my face that the reason they vote democrat, in spite of the dems pro-abortion stand, is because the "democrats are for the poor". And that's a quote and that was not only a good 30 years ago, but also recently in an entire difference location.
So IOW, being *for the poor* trumps church teaching and doctrine.