Posted on 06/17/2014 9:05:04 AM PDT by Gamecock
I am pretty sure the editors of the Wall Street Journal would be disinclined to endorse Pope Francis' call for international regulation of markets via state action, to promote impact investment. Yet, that is just what he called for yesterday in speaking to a meeting at the Vatican on the theme "Investing in the Poor," which was organized, in part, by the University of Notre Dame. The pope said:
No spinning that is there. I am sure our libertarian friends think this pope just keeps wandering down the road to serfdom.Advances in technology have increased the speed of financial transactions, but in the long run this is significant only to the extent that it better serves the common good. In this regard, speculation on food prices is a scandal which seriously compromises access to food on the part of the poorest members of our human family. It is urgent that governments throughout the world commit themselves to developing an international framework capable of promoting a market of high impact investments, and thus to combating an economy which excludes and discards.
There are almost no Protestants in Germany. We had a German exchange student live with us for a year in New Mexico. He said our tiny town had more churches in a 2 block radius than his home city.
“With 25,100,727 members in 2006, around 30 percent of all Germans belong to a member church of the EKD. Average church attendance is lower, however, with only around a million people attending a service on Sunday.”
IOW, 4% of the nominal Protestants in Germany attend church regularly.
I saw a clever cartoon in the Investor’s Business daily a few weeks ago.
It had the Pope up there on the altar read from the Gospel according to Marx.
Comrade indeed... your post sheds light on that fact. Francis is a liberation theologian from Argentina, plain and simple, a flat out Marxist.
Yet the RF, supposedly a conservative forum, anti-marxist and pro-free market, is flooded with Francis fawners, go figure.
Pope Peron I follows his Argentine roots yet again.
Maybe this paragraph is taken out of context but it sounds to me like he is giving up on church charity and now expecting an all powerful government overlord to see to charity.
Yet the RF, supposedly a conservative forum, anti-marxist and pro-free market, is flooded with Francis fawners, go figure.
First of all, some conservatives do put too much emphasis on economic issues rather than religious and moral issues. We suffer most of all because we do not live by the Laws of G-d, to which we are each and every one bound. And for all its virtues, capitalism is not a utopian system. It has failures and there are people who under it have nothing. Believe me, I know from personal experience.
That being said, the Catholic Church has been around a long time. It pre-existed the United States and the "American way of life." Its "good old days" are the middle ages and its organic/corporate/guild culture (which many Catholics regard as utopia).
According to Marxism, "socialism" is the final state of historical development, following feudalism and capitalism. Without these intervening stages, socialism cannot come into existence. Capitalism, therefore, must replace feudalism in order for socialism to then replace it in turn. Many Catholics point out that had capitalism not replaced feudalism, Marxism would not even have been a "dirty thought."
Capitalism does indeed have a modernizing and corrosive side. It also has a side of promoting innovation, social mobility, and freedom. But it is not utopia. Only a Theocracy, a Kingdom of G-d on earth, can be a "utopia."
It is not so much Francis' critiques of capitalism that I don't get. It's his theological liberalism that makes FReeper Catholic apologists for him so hard for me to understand.
How long will it be before he starts promoting abortion and advocating gay marriage?
Do they call it "racist" or a "hate crime?"
Peron called his ideology Justicialismo, which came from the expression justicia social (social justice).
There have been American organizations that advocate for this European/Latin form of Rightism, for example, various Falangist and National Syndicalist parties. Some of these consider not only Peron a hero, but also Father Coughlin and Huey P. Long. One such web site had a link to the John Birch Society, which is supposed to advocate libertarian/Austrian policies. Hmm.
Other systems are not dysfunctional because they aren't as good. They fail to work because they aren't as realistic. It is starkly rational to appeal to fallen humanity, because it is reality. Humanity is fallen.
The third model of human nature is found in the thinking of the American founders. “If men were angels,” wrote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in Federalist Paper No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” But Madison and the other founders knew men were not angels and would never become angels. They believed instead that human nature was mixed, a combination of virtue and vice, nobility and corruption. People were swayed by both reason and passion, capable of self-government but not to be trusted with absolute power. The founders’ assumption was that within every human heart, let alone among different individuals, are competing and sometimes contradictory moral impulses and currents.
A free market can also better our moral condition—not dramatically and not always, but often enough. It places a premium on thrift, savings, and investment.
This last view of human nature is consistent with and reflective of Christian teaching. The Scriptures teach that we are both made in the image of God and fallen creatures; in the words of Saint Paul, we can be “instruments of wickedness” as well as “instruments of righteousness.”3 Human beings are capable of acts of squalor and acts of nobility; we can pursue vice and we can pursue virtue.
As for the matter of the state: Romans 13 makes clear that government is divinely sanctioned by God to preserve public order, restrain evil, and make justice possible. This, too, was a view shared by many of the founders. Government reflects human nature, they argued, “because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”4
The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment philosophies of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Francis Hutcheson both informed and aligned with the views of the American founders and Christian teaching. Smith was himself a professor of moral philosophy; The Theory of Moral Sentiments5 preceded The Wealth of Nations.6 Smith and his compatriots did not believe in the perfectibility of human nature and thought it foolish to build any human institution on the possibility of attaining such perfection. Neither did they believe that human nature was irredeemably corrupt and devoid of virtue. http://american.com/archive/2010/december/human-nature-and-capitalism/
Probably another reason atheistic socialism hates capitalism is that the success of capitalism is another proof that the Bible is a true revelation from God.
Again, I am not surprised, and again a Roman Catholic Pope refuses to speak bluntly and directly on what he means, using religious and theological euphemisms you are supposed to make your own direct economic theory and political theory ties to just so the Roman Catholic Pope can knowingly promote Marxism/Socialism and get away with saying that is not what he meant (because he made sure he did not say it directly).
When it comes to economic issues no one protects, insulates themselves with lawyers and P.R. writers more than Roman Catholic Popes.
To be sure, the contents of the letter to Ryan weren’t just a product of Dolan’s need to appease both sides in the intra-Church struggle. It was also a classic example of a style of ecclesiastical document that the Vatican employs in complicated situations....This style of writing aims at “studied ambiguity,” a Vatican diplomat explained to me, noting that the people who write such letters are trained to think in terms of centuries, not sound bites. “So you always need to be able to say fifty years on, ‘Well, of course we never meant that,’” the diplomat said.
-- from the thread Mixed Blessing: The Ryan budget and the raging battle within the U.S. Catholic Church
You can't divorce. But we will give you an annulment.
Prolife. But proabortion Pols are welcome at the rail.
No artificial contraception. But you can play around with ovulatory cycles to figure out when it is safe to have sex without getting pregnant.
Its "good old days" are the middle ages and its organic/corporate/guild culture (which many Catholics regard as utopia).
Puts me in mind of what Admiral Doenitz' Nazi U-boat sailors called their "happy time," in the battle of the Atlantic WW2. Later in the war, they looked back at the time they had control of the Atlantic shipping lanes, it was their "good old days." Too bad both totalitarian regimes, Hitler and the middle ages RCC, lost their control.
The popes thoughts on economics are his own, not Catholic Church doctrine. That’s why as a Catholic I could care less what he says. What cracks me up are non Catholics making a big issue over his every thought. You are not Catholic and his personal thoughts carry no weight whatsoever so why even post the article. Be about like me in the heyday of Billy Graham being obsessed with everything he said, when it didn’t affect me in the least.
Please tell us all about his theological liberalism? Why you’re at tell us all about the changes in doctrine on abortion, homosexuality, and women ordaination. Did he change Catholic doctrine while I was sleeping?
“It’s telling that, per the article I linked, the Venezuelan gov won’t allow peaceful protests”
‘Do they call it “racist” or a “hate crime?”’
I don’t think they’ve got that base finessed. Now the shameful, petty, manipulative & venal Dem/progressive party of the Northern Hemisphere, are totally on top of that excuse. Right now, anything short of a compliment you say about Obama is ‘racist’. Pretty soon, if conservatives even breathe air, it will be ‘racist’.
I imagine the reason Adam Smith and compatriots disbelieved in the perfectibility of human nature and thought is that they did believe in the constancy and persistence of human nature as an already "given" thing that does not change much, if at all, over time. Human nature represents a universal pattern repeated by every generation of human beings since Day One. As any fair reading of human history and culture readily attests.
What is most striking to me about Darwinism is its fundamental and absolute denial of human nature as such. Evolution theory stipulates that man is an animal who is like all the other animals. That is, essentially man is "just" a biological entity; thus he does not have a "fixed" nature, but an "evolving" one, like any other other animal, from amoeba and bacteria on up "the food chain"....
The great leap of faith that Darwin took was that evolution is necessarily "progressive"; that is to say, things are just progressing from a lesser state to a better one — measured according to the criteria of fitness for survival of the species to which man is categorically assigned, not according to any consideration of the natural (not to mention spiritual) requirements of any individual human being. Those main criteria: random mutation and natural selection, as they contribute to fitness for/success in breeding.
It all seems pretty mindless to me....
Talk about the grotesque reduction of actual Reality being performed in these mental maneuvers!!
The cultural leap to Freud — and Marx — was a done deal from that point....
Thank you so very much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
The medieval RCC was not a totalitarian institution. The Middle Ages were simply saturated by and assumed Catholicism, just as the Bible Belt is saturated by and assumes Fundamentalist Protestantism.
Not everyone could own weapons and there wasn't much social mobility, but aside from occasional predation by barbarians or the rogue liege lord medieval life was probably far less regulated and far freer than life in American today.
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