EU president’s praise for Catholic teaching welcomed as bishops urge citizens to vote in elections to stop "nationalist threat"

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What was he trying to accomplish or communicate by walking off with the mace?
 
When Estrella creates a legal chaos by trying to implement a new uniform legal system, let Juncker et co not be surprised if the void may be filled by nationalism even stricter than it seems to be today.
Estrella is chaos and Juncker just cashed in enough for a good pension.
Anyway he is water under the bridge. The new leader will most likely be Angela Merkel.
Deustchland, Deustchland uber alles! Maybe you don’t care now but you will in the future.
God bless!
 
According to what sources?
They are not available in English. So I bet on this. Let’s keep this subject open just for fun. The prize is the losing side has to say “I lost” a thousand times. Put it here in more than one thread. Face risk of suspension. I betchya?
 
I’m not confusing anything, it’s the others who are confounding the issue, i.e., I have referred to socialism not social democracy; the former is condemned in totality by the Church.
Social democracy is a political, social , and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist economy.
Social democracy is not socialism.

Here’s a good article pointing out the conflicts between socialism and church teachings:

 
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Juncker described Marx as a critic of social inequalities and said that he shared Marx’s view that “ blind, unconditional capitalism ” can be a “plague” when it doesn’t take into account human individuals.
For a man whose country was used as a tax haven for corporations while he was prime minister, it would seem that he is delivering mere lip service to the plight of individuals under blind unfettered capitalism.
In early November 2014, just days after becoming head of the commission, Juncker was hit by media disclosures—derived from a document leak known as LuxLeaks—that Luxembourg under his premiership had turned into a major European centre of corporate tax avoidance. With the aid of the Luxembourg government, companies transferred tax liability for many billions of euros to Luxembourg, where the income was taxed at a fraction of 1%. Juncker, who in a speech in Brussels in July 2014 promised to “try to put some morality, some ethics, into the European tax landscape”, was sharply criticised following the leaks.[55]
 
@josie Please read carefully. I am not going to repeat this but I sincerely ask that you heed what Pope St. John Paul II says here below, because it kills your argument dead and exposes your excuse that ‘capitalism’ (understood to mean something quite specific as with the church’s use of ‘socialism’ to refer to what John Paul II called, again more precisely, ‘Marxist collectivism’) is not inherently at odds with Christianity, as being a fundamental error. Please note in particular the HIGHLIGHTED in the second paragraph:
"In the modern period, from the beginning of the industrial age, the Christian truth about work had to oppose the various trends of materialistic and economistic thought… the danger of treating work as a special kind of “merchandise,” or as an impersonal “force” needed for production (the expression “workforce” is in fact in common use) always exists , especially when the whole way of looking at the question of economics is marked by the premises of materialistic economism…

In all cases of this sort, in every social situation of this type, there is a reversal of the order laid down from the beginning by the words of the Book of Genesis: man is treated as an instrument of production. Precisely this reversal of order, whatever the program or name under which it occurs, should rightly be called “capitalism”…Everybody knows that capitalism has a definite historical meaning as a system, an economic and social system, opposed to “socialism” or “communism.”

It should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever people are treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of their work.
Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”) , Pope St. John Paul II, 1981 #30.

In the above encyclical, Pope St. John Paul II states unequivocally and incontrovertibly that “capitalism” is a reversal of the divine order laid down by God in the Book of Genesis and he moreover reiterates, and this ABSOLUTELY crucial, that “precisely this reversal of order should rightly be called “capitalism””.

He then explains that this ‘capitalism’ - condemned in and of itself as contrary to God’s plan for creation, just as with ‘Marxist collecictivism’ under the name of ‘socialism’ - has a “definite historical meaning as a system opposed to communism”.
 
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He is speaking of UNRESTRAINED capitalism, Vouthon.
Nowhere does Pope Paul VI use the word “unrestrained”. He writes:
But it is unfortunate that on these new conditions of society a system has been constructed which considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligation… [a] dictatorship rightly denounced by Pius XI as producing “the international imperialism of money”. One cannot condemn such abuses too strongly by solemnly recalling once again that the economy is at the service of man.

Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”)
, Pope Paul VI, 1967 #26.
Pope Paul contends that “profit” should not be considered as the “key motive for economic progress” or “competition” as the “supreme law of economics” or “private property” as having no limits or as not being subject to a social mortgage that subordinates it to the universal destination of goods that natural law demands.

His description fits with the basic premises and presuppositions of ‘capitalism’, unless it is hybridised, as in social market systems with significant reforms and correctives that ‘check’ its worst impulses left to the laws of free competition, basic premises that you yourself introduced into the discusion in #post 131 of this thread:
Capitalism at it’s core is:

an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit
It is the profit motive that Pope Paul VI condemned as inherently at odds with the Catholic understanding of economics (because it is a staunchly MATERIALIST doctrine that absolutizes material, financial gain as the greatest good in economic life), which is about maximising human well-being and flourishing above all rather than maximisation of profits on the stock market, which can come at the ‘expense’ of the happiness of other human beings by treating workers like merchandise in huge multi-national companies, what Pope Pius XII referred to in one of my earlier quotations from 1946 as the “all-invading power of big business”.

What you call ‘unrestrained’ is a misnomer, as the term itself implies that there is something inherently wrong with capitalism that needs ‘restrained’ with regulation and safety nets. If capitalism wasn’t a problem but a solution to our problems it wouldn’t need ‘restrained’ to protect it from itself.

A ‘good day’ for investors and financial speculators on the stock-market, or for huge corporations like Amazon and google and Facebook, is not necessarily always ‘good’ for the common good.

(continued…)
 
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And actual real capitalists of the time back in the 1960s, such as Ayn Rand, understood plainly what Pope Paul VI was saying. Ayn Rand recognised the church’s actual position.

It was in her 1967 essay “Requiem for Man”, written to condemn Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical Populorum Progressio (because it was critical of capitalism).

From The Objectivist, July, August and September 1967, reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, ch. 24, pp. 297-319.
I have said and stressed for years that capitalism is incompatible with altruism and mysticism. Those who chose to doubt that the issue is “either-or” have now heard it from the highest authority of the opposite side: Pope Paul VI.

The encyclical “Populorum Progressio” (“On the Development of Peoples”) is the manifesto of an impassioned hatred for capitalism; but its evil is much more profound and its target is more than mere politics…On the question of capitalism, the encyclical’s position is explicit and unequivocal…

The Vatican is not the city room of a third-rate Marxist tabloid. It is an institution geared to a perspective of centuries, to scholarship and timeless philosophical deliberation. Ignorance, therefore, cannot be the explanation.

Capitalism is condemned, not for some lesser characteristics, but for its essentials, which are not the base of any other system: the profit motive, competition, and private ownership of the means of production…

So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism—. [Rand, CUI, p. 316.]
Ayn Rand ‘saw’ this. Yet you can’t @josie because your defending the ‘term’ capitalism, when Catholic Social Doctrine includes encyclicals that condemn capitalism as a “reversal” of God’s divine plan in the first pages of Sacred Scripture and say that the word ‘capitalism’ is precisely used and rightly should be used for describing this ‘reversal’ of God’s divinely ordained order.
 
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For the umpteenth time the Church does not condemn capitalism as incompatible with church teachings, it is condemning the excesses of capitalism, unrestrained capitalism, liberal capitalism and this is explicit in the manner in which they describe these excesses in their encyclicals.

Furthermore it would be absolutely LUDICROUS to condemn that which has its origins within the Catholic Church or at the height of Catholic thought during the medieval era:


RELIGION & LIBERTY: VOLUME 10, NUMBER 3

How Christianity Created Capitalism​

BY MICHAEL NOVAK • JULY 20, 2010​

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"Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism. Max Weber located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today’s historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life.

It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings.

talism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact, the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was the main locus for the first flowerings of capitalism. Max Weber located the origin of capitalism in modern Protestant cities, but today’s historians find capitalism much earlier than that in rural areas, where monasteries, especially those of the Cistercians, began to rationalize economic life.

It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings."

It is inconceivable to believe that capitalism is inherently incompatible as socialism is when the very origins of capitalism were brought to bear by CISTERCIAN MONKS.
 
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For the umpteenth time the Church does not condemn capitalism as incompatible with church teachings, it is condemning the excesses of capitalism, unrestrained capitalism, liberal capitalism and this is explicit in the manner in which they describe these excesses in their encyclicals.

Furthermore it would be absolutely LUDICROUS to condemn that which has its origins within Catholic Church or at the height of Catholic thought during the medieval era:
I had much more to contribute but your flagrant refusal to concede that Pope St. John Paul II flatly stated that ‘capitalism’ is a reversal of God’s divine plan in the first pages of Sacred Scripture is what is truly ludicrous here.

He couldn’t have been plainer if he’d tried, basing his exegetical argument on the first book of the Bible itself.

The church uses the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” to refer, not to everything floating under these names, but to specific economic systems that it regards as contrary to the divine plan.

If you don’t want to accept this, then you ought to contact the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and take it up with them.

I’ll give you one final chance to tell me what the Pope states here below:
In all cases of this sort , in every social situation of this type, there is a reversal of the order laid down from the beginning by the words of the Book of Genesis: man is treated as an instrument of production. Precisely this reversal of order, whatever the program or name under which it occurs, should rightly be called “capitalism” …Everybody knows that capitalism has a definite historical meaning as a system, an economic and social system, opposed to “socialism” or “communism.”
What does this say?

And then I’m finishing up and wish you a very goodnight, because if you can’t see the clear statement being made above then we really aren’t going to get anywhere going forward and it would be a fruitless endeavour for both of us.

And no, capitalism did not emerge from Catholicism. Novak is a well-known proponent of this patently unevidenced proposition, which conflicts with that of other historians of economic thought and with the facts.
 
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For the record, Pope St. John Paul also stated in that same encyclical that:
[Church teaching on the right to private property], as it was then stated and as it is still taught by the church, diverges radically from the program of collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism. At the same time it differs from the program of capitalism

Christian tradition has never upheld this right as absolute and untouchable.
On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.

Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), Pope John Paul II, 1981 #64.
So Catholic Social Doctrine on property ownership aligns with neither Marxism or capitalism, again contrary to your interpretation.
 
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Yes, it did have its origins in Catholicism and there are many historians who have conceded this as per what I have read.

The only reason you refuse to believe it is because it fails to coincide with your interpretation of Church teaching.

https://www.crisismagazine.com/1988/the-catholic-origins-of-capitalism-max-weber-clarified

And I never stated that there aren’t any issues with capitalism nor that there shouldn’t be a more regulated form of capitalism, nor that the Church never criticized aspects of it. I am denying that it is condemned in like manner that socialism is.

And although capitalism was never part of God’s original divine plan (pre-fall), it is not a system which is incompatible with fallen man and church teaching, a system which has its origins in Catholicism.

There is nothing at the core of capitalism that violates Catholic doctrine.
 
I never said it ALIGNED perfectly, but socialism is condemned in toto unlike capitalism because it absolutely denies the right to private property.
 
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I never said it aligned perfectly, but socialism is condemned in toto unlike capitalism.
Can someone help me help Josie understand that when Pope John Paul II states, in unequivocal terms, that “capitalism” is a reversal of God’s divine plan - not simply ‘never part’ of it as she delicately but profoundly re-phrases his words - he really means that it is ‘reversing’ what God intended and purposefully willed for human beings to live like i.e. that it violates his natural law which is synonymous with his divine plan of creation, dictionary definition:

reversal

/rɪˈvəːs(ə)l/


noun

1. 1.

a change to an opposite direction, position, or course of action.


Thus, he is unequivocally claiming that capitalism represents a “change in the opposite direction” to what God intended when he created the human race.

Just admit the plain meaning of what he is saying. I mean, it won’t hurt you! 😂

For what I sincerely hope is the last time, in that 1980s encyclical Pope St. John Paul II stated:
In all cases of this sort, there is a reversal of the order laid down from the beginning by the words of the Book of Genesis: man is treated as an instrument of production. Precisely this reversal of order should rightly be called “capitalism”
 
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I never said it ALIGNED perfectly, but socialism is condemned in toto unlike capitalism because it absolutely denies the right to private property.
And capitalism denies the right to the universal destination of goods on the part of all people, which precedes any right to a private share (or “ownership”) in the order of hierarchy within natural law as designed by God, and to which private property is supposed to be ‘subordinated’.

Thus, both capitalism and Marxism “offend” different elements of the natural law.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
2403 The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.
To quote the encyclicals again:
Christian tradition has never upheld this right [to private property] as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: The right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.
Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), Pope John Paul II, 1981 #64.
23.These words indicate that the right to private property is not absolute and unconditional.

No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life. In short, “as the Fathers of the Church and other eminent theologians tell us, the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good.” When “private gain and basic community needs conflict with one another,” it is for the public authorities “to seek a solution to these questions, with the active involvement of individual citizens and social groups.”
Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”) , Pope Paul VI, 1967

Hence why Pope John Paul II bluntly stated that the church’s teaching on private property “differs from the program of capitalism”.
 
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socialism is condemned in toto unlike capitalism because it absolutely denies the right to private property.
And capitalism denies the right to the universal destination of goods on the part of all people, which precedes any right to a private share (or “ownership”) in the order of hierarchy within natural law as designed by God, and to which private property is supposed to be ‘subordinated’.

In Populorum Progressio, Paul VI said: ‘“God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people. Thus, as all men follow justice and unite in charity, created goods should abound for them on a reasonable basis” (Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 69). All other rights whatsoever, including those of property and of free commerce, are to be subordinated to this principle. They should not hinder, but on the contrary, favour its application. It is a grave and urgent social duty to redirect them to their primary finality.’ Populorum Progressio – “The Development of Peoples” (1967), paragraph 22, as found in The Social Agenda, paragraph 202; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2402.

Thus, both capitalism and Marxism “offend” different elements of the natural law.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
2403 The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.
(continued…)
 
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