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.
“The poor you will ALWAYS have with you.”
No ‘economic theory’ given for it, and no explanation given.
Just the facts.
We get to fill in our own blanks, according to our boogieman du jour.
Of which; some are more equal than others.
I’m surprised you can find your way to a keyboard.
You do.
>> That in turn means they will LOSE in a free market. <<
I wouldn’t want you as an investment advisor. There are roles for safe but moderate as well as for high-yield, but high-risk. And therein is one pro-free-market reform: bailouts of high-risk investments encourage more high-risk investments.
>> In a free market, people make great wealth by doing a very good job of providing people with what they want at a price they are willing to pay. <<
Speculators are not producers. As explained in other posts, some form of speculators may provide important services. Other forms of speculation destroy product.
>> Please explain in what sense government regulation, across borders, constitutes “FREE-MARKET solutions and INDIVIDUAL CHOICES”. <<
Where do you see the word, “regulation” in anything the Pope wrote? A lot of 3rd-world nations have comparably small geographic areas and subsequently non-diversified economies. Thus, international trade is provides even essential foodstuffs. Any basis of trade, thereofore, is inherently international. I don’t doubt, however, that the pope may also be looking to the IMF, World Bank, and international banks.
I also tend not to focus on the economic threads here. Having said that, maybe I should be.
That is about the most fitting post yet. In the light of yet another debate on what the pope meant, and what they and Rome meant in the past, it is evident that while RCs hold relegate the Scriptures to being a incoherent dead letter without Rome to interpret them, the fact is that RCs must often interpret their interpreter as she herself often lacks perspicuity.
Here the pope quotes Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a pupil and friend of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the “father” of Latin-American liberation theology. [On] a visit to Peru in 1988, when the then Archbishop Müller met Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, regarded as the father of the movement, convinced the him of its orthodoxy. “Liberation theology wants to make God’s liberating actions visible in the Church’s religious and social practice ... It would stop being genuine theology if it were to confuse the Christian message with Marxist or other social analysis,” he explained.
Asked by FAZ if liberation theology was meanwhile recognised as a form of thought on an equal footing with the other traditional forms of theology, Cardinal Müller explained that liberation theology’s basic concern was congruent with the Gospel for the Poor – “for those on the periphery”, as Pope Francis never tired of emphasising, he said.
He also said "the Catholic Magisterium is far from denying an ecclesial character or an ecclesial existence to ‘the separated Churches and ecclesial Communities of the West." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Ludwig_M%C3%BCller#Peter_Kramer_controversy
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
I hardly see much clarity here impact investing itself lacks clarity. Though the web is full of its PR evangelists, there seems to be little critical analysis.
Felix Oldenburg, the Europe and Germany director of Ashoka, an association of social entrepreneurs was quoted as saying, "Quite frankly, impact investors are sitting at the end of an oil pipeline, waiting for the riches to gush out, but they are finding few deals. The most common complaint from impact investors is the low deal flow in their industry, since there are so few social enterprises that meet their [often narrow] requirements for investment. Some investors invest anyway, producing not only failing deals but also damaging the investees with their stringent requirements." http://www.fa-mag.com/news/the-dangerous-problem-with-impact-investing-9678.html
The Catholic Church has changed radically. The fact that the Syllabus of Errors is still "theoretically" in force and still locked up in some musty old archive doesn't change the fact that post-VII papal and conciliar statements have said the exact opposite and are the basis of life in the Church today.
An unchanging church would be just that--unchanged. The post-VII church is so different from its predecessor that it isn't even recognizable as the same religion.
All good points and spot on, especially the bolded. For actual changes in doctrine one should look to religious liberty, false ecumenism/religious unity and the Church's views on non-Catholic religions as opposed to the usual hot button, political topics of abortion, homosexuality and women's ordination. When one truly investigates pre-Vatican II teachings on the former topics it is very difficult to walk away saying "doctrine did not change" or "the Catholic Church did not change". I do understand, however, why most Catholics prefer not to go down that route.
There is nothing amazing at all when no one replies to a post that fails to make an argument. Citing a texts against greed can be used for the very Marxist liberation theology that you must defend the pope against favoring, yet that itself does not eliminate the problem, with greed. It simply favors a greedy state.
Yet capitalism is Biblical, and advocates personal buying and selling and investing, including in the parable of the talents, (Mt. 25) which presupposes it, and does not necessitate greed, but is a practical means of enabling supply for all.
So just what is your argument? Is Rome against capitalism?
Where exactly in Cardinal Newman's writings does he offer opinions regarding doctrine which fail St. Vincent's threefold test of Catholic orthodoxy?
"As developments which are preceded by definite indications have a fair presumption in their favour, so those which do but contradict and reverse the course of doctrine which has been developed before them, and out of which they spring, are certainly corrupt; for a corruption is a development in that very stage in which it ceases to illustrate, and begins to disturb, the acquisitions gained in its previous history.
...A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption."
From "An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine" - John Henry Newman
And as Webster states ,
At first, this clear lack of patristic consensus led Rome to embrace a new theory in the late nineteenth century to explain its teachings — the theory initiated by John Henry Newman known as the development of doctrine. In light of the historical reality, Newman had come to the conclusion that the Vincentian principle of unanimous consent was unworkable, because, for all practical purposes, it was nonexistent. To quote Newman:
It does not seem possible, then, to avoid the conclusion that, whatever be the proper key for harmonizing the records and documents of the early and later Church, and true as the dictum of Vincentius must be considered in the abstract, and possible as its application might be in his own age, when he might almost ask the primitive centuries for their testimony, it is hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result. The solution it offers is as difficult as the original problem. — John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., reprinted 1927), p. 27.
And from your brethren,
Roman Catholicism, unable to show a continuity of faith and in order to justify new doctrine, erected in the last century, a theory of "doctrinal development." Following the philosophical spirit of the time (and the lead of Cardinal Henry Newman), Roman Catholic theologians began to define and teach the idea that Christ only gave us an "original deposit" of faith, a "seed," which grew and matured through the centuries. The Holy Spirit, they said, amplified the Christian Faith as the Church moved into new circumstances and acquired other needs.
...On this basis, theories such as the dogmas of "papal infallibility" and "the immaculate conception" of the Virgin Mary (about which we will say more) are justifiably presented to the Faithful as necessary to their salvation. - http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/ortho_cath.html
But history, tradition and Scripture mean whatever Rome autocratically decrees they mean, as "The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour." ( Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, p. 228) “All that we do [as must be patent enough now] is to submit our judgment and conform our beliefs to the authority Almighty God has set up on earth to teach us; this, and nothing else.” (Henry G. Graham, "What Faith Really Means") "...the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors." (Vehementer No, an Encyclical of Pope Pius X)
And thus as Newman also said,
“For myself, I would simply confess that no doctrine of the Church can be rigorously proved by historical evidence:.. It is the Church's dogmatic use of History in which the Catholic believes;...there are doctrines which transcend the discoveries of reason; and, after all, whether they are more or less recommended to us by the one informant or the other, in all cases the immediate motive in the mind of a Catholic for his reception of them is, not that they are proved to him by Reason or by History, but because Revelation has declared them by means of that high ecclesiastical Magisterium which is their legitimate exponent.” — John Henry Newman, “A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation.” 8. The Vatican Council lhttp://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section8.html
Does that include the Vatican’s investments?
Illiteracy? It’s downright sin. Violating the Ten Commandments from the bottom up.
“Where do you see the word, “regulation” in anything the Pope wrote?”
He said: “It is urgent that governments throughout the world commit themselves to developing an international framework capable of promoting a market of high impact investments...”
Do you know how governments around the world can create a framework that does not involve regulation?
“Speculators are not producers.”
They enable production. Speculators make money by risking theirs on the chance that the producer will make them money - or they enable lenders to do so. No one is forced to deal with a speculator. They take chances on markets, and win or lose based ultimately on production and what people choose to buy. Freedom: it’s a good thing...unless you are Pope Peron.
Just noticing the word “international”.
One world government?
Indeed. Thanks for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!
"If it be said that the Real Presence appears, by the Liturgies of the fourth or fifth century, to have been the doctrine of the earlier, since those very forms probably existed from the first in Divine worship, this is doubtless an important truth; but then it is true also that the writers of the fourth and fifth centuries fearlessly assert, or frankly allow that the prerogatives of Rome were derived from apostolic times, and that because it was the See of St. Peter.
Moreover, if the resistance of St. Cyprian and Firmilian to the Church of Rome, in the question of baptism by heretics, be urged as an argument against her primitive authority, or the earlier resistance of Polycrates of Ephesus, let it be considered, first, whether all authority does not necessarily lead to resistance; next, whether St. Cyprian's own doctrine, which is in favour of Rome, is not more weighty than his act, which is against her; thirdly, whether he was not already in error in the main question under discussion, and Firmilian also; and lastly, which is the chief point here, whether, in like manner, we may not object on the other hand against the Real Presence the words of Tertullian, who explains, "This is my Body," by "a figure of my Body," and of Origen, who speaks of "our drinking Christ's Blood not only in the rite of the Sacraments, but also when we receive His discourses," and says that "that Bread which God the Word acknowledges as His Body is the Word which nourishes souls," — passages which admit of a Catholic interpretation when the Catholic doctrine is once proved, but which primâ facie run counter to that doctrine.
It does not seem possible, then, to avoid the conclusion that, whatever be the proper key for harmonizing the records and documents of the early and later Church, and true as the dictum of Vincentius must be considered in the abstract, and possible as its application might be in his own age, when he might almost ask the primitive centuries for their testimony, it is hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result. The solution it offers is as difficult as the original problem."
--------------
He is affirming the dictum of Vincentius as true, while pointing out its limitations as a practical tool. I suggest that anyone interested in an accurate picture of Newman's theories read past the introduction from which you quoted.
And from your brethren
I'm not a member of St. Nectarios American Orthodox Church.
("Truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself")
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.