Fox News opinion piece BLASTS Pope Francis as “the Catholic Church’s Obama” [Fr. Z]

  • Thread starter Thread starter Catholic_Opinion
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Birdpreacher said:
Ahhh…I understand your position now. You see how free markets if left unregulated then gives people the opportunity to act immorally. its just that you are ok with immorality, even if it brings about the denial of an individual’s human rights- be it to a living wage or ability to work for a living.

How do you feel about prostitution laws? If a woman wants to sell her body to buy crack its her decision right? Viva Free Markets!
Click to expand...
I think it’s just as immoral to force someone to do something, with their own property, that they do not want to do. How is forcing someone to sell a house to someone that they do not want to moral?

As for prostitution. If she wants to sell her body for money, that’s her business. As for crack, again if she wants to use crack that’s her business.

The War on Drugs has done for more harm than good.
 
Birdpreacher said:
Ahhh…I understand your position now. You see how free markets if left unregulated then gives people the opportunity to act immorally. its just that you are ok with immorality, even if it brings about the denial of an individual’s human rights- be it to a living wage or ability to work for a living.

How do you feel about prostitution laws? If a woman wants to sell her body to buy crack its her decision right? Viva Free Markets!
Click to expand...
Systematic implementation of one’s immoral view in the economic exchange, is not the same as the lone individual being immoral…

The Right to Property is very important, just because some may deprive or exercise their use of ownership unjustly people start think it is unjust for anyone to have any property at all.
A woman’s right to sell her body, would not fall into the view of St. Thomas Aquinas or the Popes promulgations on the inherent right to property. So there’s that.
 
Grace & Peace!

Regarding all of this nonsense that the Pope has suddenly gone Marxist, I wonder why no one has brought up Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno from 1931, which is itself a comment on Leo XIII’s encyclical on the condition of workers from 1891. Nothing that Francis has written contradicts either Pius or Leo. I urge anyone who is concerned about the Church suddenly endorsing socialism to check out Quadragesimo in particular. (Find it here: vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html). It includes gems like this:

…] One class, very small in number, was enjoying almost all the advantages which modern inventions so abundantly provided; the other, embracing the huge multitude of working people, oppressed by wretched poverty, was vainly seeking escape from the straits wherein it stood.
  1. Quite agreeable, of course, was this state of things to those who thought it in their abundant riches the result of inevitable economic laws and accordingly, as if it were for charity to veil the violation of justice which lawmakers not only tolerated but at times sanctioned, wanted the whole care of supporting the poor committed to charity alone. The workers, on the other hand, crushed by their hard lot, were barely enduring it and were refusing longer to bend their necks beneath so galling a yoke; and some of them, carried away by the heat of evil counsel, were seeking the overturn of everything, while others, whom Christian training restrained from such evil designs, stood firm in the judgment that much in this had to be wholly and speedily changed.
Or this:
  1. Those, therefore, are doing a work that is truly salutary and worthy of all praise who, while preserving harmony among themselves and the integrity of the traditional teaching of the Church, seek to define the inner nature of these duties and their limits whereby either the right of property itself or its use, that is, the exercise of ownership, is circumscribed by the necessities of social living. On the other hand, those who seek to restrict the individual character of ownership to such a degree that in fact they destroy it are mistaken and in error.
  2. It follows from what We have termed the individual and at the same time social character of ownership, that men must consider in this matter not only their own advantage but also the common good. To define these duties in detail when necessity requires and the natural law has not done so, is the function of those in charge of the State. Therefore, public authority, under the guiding light always of the natural and divine law, can determine more accurately upon consideration of the true requirements of the common good, what is permitted and what is not permitted to owners in the use of their property. Moreover, Leo XIII wisely taught “that God has left the limits of private possessions to be fixed by the industry of men and institutions of peoples.”[32] That history proves ownership, like other elements of social life, to be not absolutely unchanging, We once declared as follows: “What divers forms has property had, from that primitive form among rude and savage peoples, which may be observed in some places even in our time, to the form of possession in the patriarchal age; and so further to the various forms under tyranny (We are using the word tyranny in its classical sense); and then through the feudal and monarchial forms down to the various types which are to be found in more recent times.”[33] That the State is not permitted to discharge its duty arbitrarily is, however, clear. The natural right itself both of owning goods privately and of passing them on by inheritance ought always to remain intact and inviolate, since this indeed is a right that the State cannot take away: “For man is older than the State,”[34] and also “domestic living together is prior both in thought and in fact to uniting into a polity.”[35] Wherefore the wise Pontiff declared that it is grossly unjust for a State to exhaust private wealth through the weight of imposts and taxes. “For since the right of possessing goods privately has been conferred not by man’s law, but by nature, public authority cannot abolish it, but can only control its exercise and bring it into conformity with the common weal.”[36] Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them.
  3. Furthermore, a person’s superfluous income, that is, income which he does not need to sustain life fittingly and with dignity, is not left wholly to his own free determination. Rather the Sacred Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church constantly declare in the most explicit language that the rich are bound by a very grave precept to practice almsgiving, beneficence, and munificence.
Catholic social and economic teaching steers well clear of the extremes of capitalism or communism. That some folks should accuse the Church of communism when she kindly re-iterates her commitment to avoid extremes, enjoining the faithful to follow her example, speaks to how entrenched those folks are in their own ideologies. Francis’ exhortation is a wake-up call, like Pius’ encyclical and Leo’s before him: sure, you can be an acolyte of the Cult of Capital or you can be an acolyte of the Cult of Communism–but why not try being a Christian instead?

Under the Mercy,
Mark

All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
 
Deo_Volente said:
Grace & Peace!

Regarding all of this nonsense that the Pope has suddenly gone Marxist, I wonder why no one has brought up Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno from 1931, which is itself a comment on Leo XIII’s encyclical on the condition of workers from 1891. Nothing that Francis has written contradicts either Pius or Leo. I urge anyone who is concerned about the Church suddenly endorsing socialism to check out Quadragesimo in particular. (Find it here: vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html). It includes gems like this:
. . .

Catholic social and economic teaching steers well clear of the extremes of capitalism or communism. That some folks should accuse the Church of communism when she kindly re-iterates her commitment to avoid extremes, enjoining the faithful to follow her example, speaks to how entrenched those folks are in their own ideologies.
Click to expand...
Thanks for that.

A lot of these and many Catholics have been told so many times certain assumptions about the idolatry of money, and Cult of Capital as you say, and on a larger extent Conservatism as a whole – that they think they have to choose to disagree with the Pope now on this, or realize that they’ve been upholding a flawed economic paradigm as some sort of ideal that is not this great “liberator” or “sacred cow”

The irreverence of many hosts and commentators saying* “Pope doesn’t know anything about economics”

“I come to Church to save my soul, not hear how to vote”*

Have exposed the Americanist heresy thriving, because one hears the same mentality and error that John F Kennedy espoused about one’s practice of the faith, just on the Right side now.

This bought and paid for PUNDITRY and Politicians on the Right did the same thing to JPII ten years ago , when it came to his condemnation of the Iraq War and urging for another way.
 
What’s the old saying?

The flak is heaviest when you’re over the target?

Both the left and the right will be critical of Pope Francis at some point.

Proves that his message is purely Catholic.
 
Deo Volente #41
you can be an acolyte of the Cult of Capital or you can be an acolyte of the Cult of Communism–but why not try being a Christian instead?
Click to expand...
Instead, why not heed the immense knowledge and realism of Bl John Paul II?
Centesimus Annus, 42, 1991:
‘If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”.’

Since here capitalism = free economy, and reaffirmed by Bl John Paul II is the ‘fundamental human “right to freedom of economic initiative.” ’ (*Sollicitudo Rei Socialis *(On Human Concerns), Encyclical, 1987, #42), and initiative = enterprise, it is clear what the pope means.

On Caritas in Veritate Fr John De Celles points out that Pope Benedict XVI clearly states that “The Church does not have technical solutions to offer” [CV 9]. Also…it does refer repeatedly to the ‘market economy,’ a term of art which Pope John Paul II used to refer to that form of capitalism that is ‘the path to true economic and civil progress.’ "

As Pope Benedict XVI affirmed: “Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations…Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility.” (Caritas et Veritate, Benedict XVI, 2009, #36).

It is not the first time that what Pope Francis has written has appeared obscure or doubtfully translated. The reality:
'For all that, however, important sections of Evangelii Gaudium will strike many Catholics as less than convincing. To be very frank (which Francis himself is always encouraging us to be), a number of claims made by this document and some of the assumptions underlying those statements are rather questionable.

‘Some, for example, will single out the pope’s remark that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence” (253). As one of the most authoritative Catholic commentators on Islam, Pope Francis’s fellow Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir (who is no knee-jerk anti-Muslim), writes in his *111 Questions on Islam *(2002), Westerners who assert that groups like the Taliban are acting in a manner contrary to the spirit of Islam “usually know little about Islam.’ " [My emphasis].
Pope Francis and Poverty
By Samuel Gregg November 26, 2013
m.nationalreview.com/corner/365004/pope-francis-and-poverty-samuel-gregg
 
I think this is a subset of a larger issue, that of the unfortunate tendency by the media to try to fit all institutions (including the Papacy and the Church) into a Left vs Right mentality. It makes for easily-written, quickly-digested headlines. You and I, as informed human beings, know that it’s mutant schlock dribble to try to cast Catholic teaching on most things within the spectrum of Liberal vs Conservative, but the media do not know this.
Havard said:
Anyone who lauds the Pope because he happens to fit their political motives, whether liberal or conservative, is exalting him for the wrong reason.
Click to expand...
The Liberal press have been assaulting the Church for decades. Perhaps now it’s time for the Conservative press to do so. Remember that the World is your enemy - Right or Left. They may be friends, but only for so long as they perceive our teachings to be winds blowing favorably to them.

One more thing to note - a profound difference between the Marxism/Capitalism dialogue and the teaching of the Church is the matter of whom the teaching is primarily incumbent upon. Marxists and Capitalists will debate endlessly the role of the government and what the government can or should force someone to do, and when.

Catholic Social Teaching nearly always begins with the individual, and is focused on his or her moral choices and the consequences he or she bears for making them. Thus a government may decide that a homeowner must sell to an ethnic minority if the minority offers the highest bid on the homeowner’s house, but Catholic teaching will judge both the homeowner for racial prejudice and the minority for using force and mislabeling it justice.
 
losh14 said:
I think this is a subset of a larger issue, that of the unfortunate tendency by the media to try to fit all institutions (including the Papacy and the Church) into a Left vs Right mentality. It makes for easily-written, quickly-digested headlines. You and I, as informed human beings, know that it’s mutant schlock dribble to try to cast Catholic teaching on most things within the spectrum of Liberal vs Conservative, but the media do not know this.

The Liberal press have been assaulting the Church for decades. Perhaps now it’s time for the Conservative press to do so. Remember that the World is your enemy - Right or Left. They may be friends, but only for so long as they perceive our teachings to be winds blowing favorably to them.

One more thing to note - a profound difference between the Marxism/Capitalism dialogue and the teaching of the Church is the matter of whom the teaching is primarily incumbent upon. Marxists and Capitalists will debate endlessly the role of the government and what the government can or should force someone to do, and when.

Catholic Social Teaching nearly always begins with the individual, and is focused on his or her moral choices and the consequences he or she bears for making them. Thus a government may decide that a homeowner must sell to an ethnic minority if the minority offers the highest bid on the homeowner’s house, but Catholic teaching will judge both the homeowner for racial prejudice and the minority for using force and mislabeling it justice.
Click to expand...
Will GOd also judge us for zoning laws?
 
I’m sick and tired of the misinterpretations of the Pope. It can be so difficult to be Catholic when all of the media bashes the Pope, you stand by yourself when you try and say what the Pope is really saying.
 
Grace & Peace!
Abu said:
Instead, why not heed the immense knowledge and realism of Bl John Paul II?
Centesimus Annus, 42, 1991:
‘If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”.’

Since here capitalism = free economy, and reaffirmed by Bl John Paul II is the ‘fundamental human “right to freedom of economic initiative.” ’ (*Sollicitudo Rei Socialis *(On Human Concerns), Encyclical, 1987, #42), and initiative = enterprise, it is clear what the pope means.
Click to expand...
I think you would do well to read the entire encyclical by Bl. John Paul II. Centesimus Annus (1991), like Quadragesimo Anno (1931) before it, is a celebration of Rerum Novarum (1891), its wisdom and its boldness. None of the Popes, not Leo, not Pius, not John Paul, are suggesting that faithful catholics must toe the capitalist line or that capitalism writ large is unconditionally the only economic system by which and within which human beings can best fulfill themselves. Bl. John Paul II, for his part, makes that clear. Here is the entirety of section 42 from which you have extracted your quotation:
  1. Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?
The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”. But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.

“The answer is obviously complex.” Indeed. It is complex. And it should be complex. And we should welcome that complexity instead of asserting (either implicitly or explicitly) that capitalism and Catholicism are unconditionally compatible or that one should be a capitalist if one is a Catholic. Communism (or at the very least, communism in the form in which it was historically realized) didn’t work. Clearly. Now we get to see if capitalism will work for anything like the long term. If capitalism is the best way to serve the common good and the common good is actually being served via capitalism (or at the very least, via capitalism in the form in which it has been historically realized), then great. If not, then clearly something needs to be changed.

Indeed, Bl. John Paul II points this out very clearly in the following section (43):

The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another.84 For such a task the Church offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation, a teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these need to be oriented towards the common good.

Here is where anyone interested can find Centesimus Annus:
vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html

Under the Mercy,
Mark

All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
 
The Pope and the Catholic Church are in the spotlight of international media attention, not because of scandal, but because of the message. Misunderstandings may happen, but overall how could this NOT be a good thing?
 
losh14 said:
I think this is a subset of a larger issue, that of the unfortunate tendency by the media to try to fit all institutions (including the Papacy and the Church) into a Left vs Right mentality. It makes for easily-written, quickly-digested headlines. You and I, as informed human beings, know that it’s mutant schlock dribble to try to cast Catholic teaching on most things within the spectrum of Liberal vs Conservative, but the media do not know this.

The Liberal press have been assaulting the Church for decades. Perhaps now it’s time for the Conservative press to do so. Remember that the World is your enemy - Right or Left. They may be friends, but only for so long as they perceive our teachings to be winds blowing favorably to them.

One more thing to note - a profound difference between the Marxism/Capitalism dialogue and the teaching of the Church is the matter of whom the teaching is primarily incumbent upon. Marxists and Capitalists will debate endlessly the role of the government and what the government can or should force someone to do, and when.

Catholic Social Teaching nearly always begins with the individual, and is focused on his or her moral choices and the consequences he or she bears for making them. Thus a government may decide that a homeowner must sell to an ethnic minority if the minority offers the highest bid on the homeowner’s house, but Catholic teaching will judge both the homeowner for racial prejudice and the minority for using force and mislabeling it justice.
Click to expand...
I like this post.

I agree that putting the Catholic Church firmly in the squares of one Party or one political ideology is putting limits on it that don’t exist, and eventually the Church & Pontiff will annoy members of both political ideologies, one way or the other. When the Pope speaks, if it upsets us at first, we must first look to why it upsets us, not scramble to show how the Pope actually really doesn’t mean what he says.

Also, can I say that I really don’t like these crazy partnerships with conservative Protestants and, worse, Mormons that the Catholic Church has been doing on local levels or even on macro (Prop 8) levels on issues we agree on. They’ll gladly take our money to spend on this issue, and then they’ll immediately stab us in the back when we discuss a part of moral theology they consider anti-Biblical (such as contraception for one).
 
SMGS127 said:
Also, can I say that I really don’t like these crazy partnerships with conservative Protestants and, worse, Mormons that the Catholic Church has been doing on local levels or even on macro (Prop 8) levels on issues we agree on. They’ll gladly take our money to spend on this issue, and then they’ll immediately stab us in the back when we discuss a part of moral theology they consider anti-Biblical (such as contraception for one).
Click to expand...
Catholics seem to have been doing that with conservative Protestants for centuries. Both were staunchly Democrat for many years (albeit for very different reasons).
 
Deo Volente #50
Now we get to see if capitalism will work for anything like the long term. If capitalism is the best way to serve the common good and the common good is actually being served via capitalism (or at the very least, via capitalism in the form in which it has been historically realized), then great. If not, then clearly something needs to be changed.
Click to expand...
Free enterprise began in the ninth century with the monks as Rodney Stark affirms, and the understanding and development of the natural laws by the Catholic Late Scholastics followed.

There is a solid basis of economic Catholic thought from the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century the Late Scholastics who were Thomists (followers of St Thomas) “writing and teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain, sought to explain the full range of human action and social; organization.” They “observed the existence of economic law, inexorable forces of cause and effect that operate very much as other natural laws. Over the course of several generations, they discovered and explained the laws of supply and demand, the cause of inflation, the operation of foreign exchange rates, and the subjective nature of economic value…” For these reasons Joseph Schumpeter applauded them as the first real economists. (Thomas E Woods Jr, The Church And The Market, Lexington Books, 2005, p 8).

What happened When No Stimuli Were Applied in the 1920 Crash in the U.S.A.?
After inflating the money supply during and after World War I, the U.S. Federal Reserve began raising the discount rate (to the banks) and the economy slowed. By the middle of 1920 production had slumped, falling by 21% over the following 12 months – conditions were worse than after the first year in the yet to come Great Depression of 1930. The federal government and federal Reserve refrained from using any Keynesian macroeconomic tools – public works spending, government deficits, inflationary monetary policy – resulting in a drastic cleaning up of credit weakness, a drastic reduction in the costs of production and the free play of private enterprise, through keeping spending and taxation low and reducing the public debt.

The common good has always been served by free enterprise principles. It is individuals – people who lie, cheat, swindle, against whom laws are formulated – who need to be controlled as Pope Emeritus Benedict has confirmed.

So what needs to be changed is government finagling. Free markets arose from the principles developed by the Catholic Late Scholastics essentially “to favour the common good…and policies to attain the common good should never run against the natural order and natural human rights….” [Dr Alejandro Chafuen, *Christians For freedom, Ignatius, 1986, p 159-160].

“Freedom” does not mean licence, and never has the free market meant that laws should not be enacted, in the writings of the Late Scholastics and the Popes. They exist in most countries. Among groups of economists and governments views vary on the extent of government intervention – hence the booms and busts through government finagling.

To face reality it is essential to get out of the rut of confusing the principles of free enterprise with some unscrupulous participants in the market.
 
CrossofChrist said:
Catholics seem to have been doing that with conservative Protestants for centuries. Both were staunchly Democrat for many years (albeit for very different reasons).
Click to expand...
But conservative Protestants were the ones who were trying to snuff out our schools and kick out our religion from the US in the early 20th century; we partnered with them THEN too???
 
“With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: ‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs’.”

I have a question that no one seems willing to answer: WHO are “the poor”?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top