Papal candidates - Short List?

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LisaA said:
Given that I don’t listen to EITHER Obama or Limbaugh, I don’t know what they believe about social justice. The problem with that term is the many interpretations. For example our Social Justice Committee thought it was essential to pass out squiggly lightbulbs as a priority…let’s just say their “social justice” is very green. For others ‘social justice’ has a strong redistributive bent. This is the concern I had with respect to (at least!) one of the potential Popes. There is a segment of Catholicism that is very much Liberation Theology, Redistributiive, Class Warfare in focus. Father Pflager ring a bell? He is an ally of Jeremiah Wright and sadly I thought one of the Cardinals sounded a LOT more like Jeremiah Wright than Blessed John Paul II or Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
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And other “social justice” is just, reflexively, Vote Democrat. Doesn’t matter what they’re selling (or what addiitonally they’re selling, as a price for that vote (your soul?), just Buy It.
 
Cojuanco said:
Social justice is not class warfare, no matter what Barack Obama or Rush Limbaugh thinks it means. If anything, it is class collaboration. And nothing in this thread should be taken to support Liberation Theology. Involvment in politics, yes, but even in this country our bishops are the same (see the citizenship guides, the Fortnight for Freedom, the referendum in Minnesota).
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Social justice tends to morph into the Social Gospel. IAC. we have forgotten the concrete situation that shaped the encyclicals of Pope Leo. Too many people have taken his teachings and those of the later popes and form this general theory which when applied to the particular events of out time lose the insights that Pope Leo brought to the political conversation.
 
Cojuanco said:
Lisa,

Here is a link to Kacszor, who can explain it better than I ever can:

catholic.com/magazine/articles/seven-principles-of-catholic-social-teaching

It is neither Democratic, nor Republican.
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Sorry you apparently didn’t understand. I KNOW what is involved with respect to Catholic Social Teaching. I’m on the RCIA team and this is “my” subject that I teach every year.

What I want to understand is YOUR interpretation of “social justice” and the role of the clergy, most importantly the leadership (Cardinals and the Holy Father). As I said, in my experience the term has VERY different meanings depending with whom you are speaking to and on what subject. As I also said our Social Justice committee was all wrapped up in squiggly lightbulbs and other environmental causes. When I was part of that team, my interest and focus was on Life and Migrant Worker Outreach. I frankly could not have cared LESS about lightbulbs or Volts or solar panels.

So what is YOUR interpretation?

Lisa
 
My interpretation? Environmental causes within reason are important (remember that our children deserve to inherit a world that doesn’t look like an East German uranium mine), standing up for life issues and marriage are important, ensuring just wages for all are important, ensuring that families don’t starve on the street is important. Will that involve redistribution? To some extent, that is likely. Within reason property rights are to be respected. But they are not absolute, and may be justly limited with an eye to the common good.

Now people can prudentially disagree on to what policies ought to be pursued to ensure the worker and the poor and the vulnerable getting their due. But that must be the goal, which, unfortunately, is lost on a) the various university Marxists and classical liberals (I speak from recent experience) and b) our politicians (both parties included), who seem to only appeal to this Catholic tradition when it’s convenient.

You say you do not care for the kind of environmental activism done by your colleagues. That is all well and good - just as a Franciscan can’t be a Jesuit, we all have differing abilities to bear on this effort. It seems our interests are actually more similar than you think. 😛

RobbyS, a good philosophy will in general contours be relevant even in the present time. And the Popes are no different. After all, I know too many people of wealth who believe that they have no moral obligation to the less fortunate except for what they provide personally to the poorbox.

The problem, especially in the global north, is that it seems too many people, especially in politics, have forsaken the Almighty for the Almighty Dollar. Contrary to the stereotype, it isn’t just the Koch caricatures of the right that do this - Madison Avenue and their liberal allies do this, only more subtly (look at Planned Parenthood, and how they act like another conglomerate, only with more viciousness).

And before anyone accuses me of being a leftist: I am not a leftist. Far from it - I am actually a moderately conservative Republican on balance (which here in California makes me apparently somewhere to the right of Francisco Franco). I have little patience for this Administration, with their almost cultish devotion to abortion, contraception and same-sex “marriage”, almost like blasphemous parodies of the sacraments.
 
LisaA said:
So while the Pope is the leader of the Church and must present our message of “good news for the poor,” marshall its own resources, personnal and the faithful to fulfill their duties, he cannot change the political realities on this earth. His real mission is the salvation of souls, not regime change in various countries.
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If you use the argument that corrupt governments cannot be changed so theres’ no point in pushing for social justice, you may as well say that as there seems to be little chance of changing abortion laws in most Western nations, we might as well keep quiet there too.

As well as the untold human misery and suffering caused, souls are being lost as a result of selfish, uncharitable, behaviour. Behind every uncharitable act on Earth, behind every injustice, behind all oppression and exploitation, there are sinners as the root cause of it. Souls are being lost as a result.

To sit by and maintain that none of the misery caused in the world is as a result of the activity of large corporations abusing people in the third world in order to make a huge profit for their shareholders, pay themselves enormous salaries, and provide us with cheap goods, is simply being blind to the reality. For instance, how much of what we buy comes originates from exploitative Third world sweatshops? Then we have to situation where we say to someone from a poverty-stricken region that he cannot come to our countries (that have so much comparative wealth) and say he is an ‘economic migrant’ as if this is something dirty and look on him as wanting to scrounge off us. We have so much in the West, yet we give so little. Even within our own countries, how much of the economic hardship we now see is as a result of greed and corruption within the banking system, politics and big business, as they seek to manipulate markets and the economy to suit their own personal desires? How many innocent lives in our own countries have been wrecked by that?

It’s not about Right or Left politics. To get into a discussion about individual politicians and political parties (from whatever country) misses the point and simply polarises people along party political lines. It’s not about ideologies, about our fellow man and how we treat him. Do we really love our the poor and dejected neighbours on this planet as ourselves? Or do we just say we do, and then focus on other aspects of our Faith which we don’t feel require us to give so much? Are we guilty of being deliberately blind, because to open our eyes and act would mean less material wealth for ourselves?

Catholic social policy is about treating our neighbour as ourselves (on both a local and global scale), and it would really be admirable if our next Pope was someone who really took this to heart and promoted it on a global scale.
 
people who think they can “foretell” whom the next Pope will be should do well to remember the old Catholic saying- “He who enters a conclave as a prospective Pope almost invariably leaves it still as a Cardinal!”

Terry
 
LisaA said:
sadly I thought one of the Cardinals sounded a LOT more like Jeremiah Wright than Blessed John Paul II or Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
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In fact I thought Cardinal Tagle sounded a lot like Pope Benedict. If you read “Caritas in Veritate”, you will notice this, too.
To use only one example:
Lowering the level of protection accorded to the rights of workers, or abandoning mechanisms of wealth redistribution in order to increase the country’s international competitiveness, hinder the achievement of lasting development. Moreover, the human consequences of current tendencies towards a short-term economy — sometimes very short-term — need to be carefully evaluated. This requires further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals[84], as well as a profound and far-sighted revision of the current model of development, so as to correct its dysfunctions and deviations. This is demanded, in any case, by the earth’s state of ecological health; above all it is required by the cultural and moral crisis of man, the symptoms of which have been evident for some time all over the world.
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vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html
Sadly, I’ve seen people who used to wonder about the “leftism” of Pope Benedict whenever they heard him say anything about social justice or about protecting the environment. For such people, anyone who dares even to pronounce words such “social” or “environment” is suspect of communist thinking.
 
Simply a good man. Why does the catholic and non-catholic world demand a rock star who knows many languages and travels all over the world? Did the world drive Benedict XVI to exhaustion with its demands? All that is needed is a simple fisherman. - Kathie 🙂
 
vames said:
For such people, anyone who dares even to pronounce words such “social” or “environment” is suspect of communist thinking.
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Ignoring aspects of Catholic social teaching regarding the environment, unfairness in the distribution of wealth, failure of multi-national corporations to respect the human rights of workers, the wrongness of risky investments by bankers, and the corruption and illegality in the conduct of the economic and political classes in Western countries etc., because it doesn’t fit with their own political viewpoint, is every bit as wrong as ignoring aspects of the Church’s teaching on promiscuity because it doesn’t fit with someone’s own hedonistic viewpoint.

The Church’s teachings are the Church’s teachings, we are not free to ignore the bits we don’t like.
 
Lisa, I hate being forced to watch videos in order to get the story. Apparently there is no readable transcript available, I take it. What I was most interested in were the headlines about “some Church traditions which oppress the poor?” What are those supposed “Church traditions?”
 
Brendan_64 said:
Ignoring aspects of Catholic social teaching regarding the environment, unfairness in the distribution of wealth, failure of multi-national corporations to respect the human rights of workers, the wrongness of risky investments by bankers, and the corruption and illegality in the conduct of the economic and political classes in Western countries etc., because it doesn’t fit with their own political viewpoint, is every bit as wrong as ignoring aspects of the Church’s teaching on promiscuity because it doesn’t fit with someone’s own hedonistic viewpoint.

The Church’s teachings are the Church’s teachings, we are not free to ignore the bits we don’t like.
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You know setting up a strawman is really an ineffective way to make your point. No one is saying IGNORE the issues regarding the environment. Per your other questions I don’t think you understand or have read the actual material on the USCCB site regarding the specific focus of Catholic Social teaching. I don’t think the Church weighs in on the risk of investments by bankers.

Please do a little research before making such vast claims.

Lisa
 
Brendan_64 said:
Ignoring aspects of Catholic social teaching regarding the environment, unfairness in the distribution of wealth, failure of multi-national corporations to respect the human rights of workers, the wrongness of risky investments by bankers, and the corruption and illegality in the conduct of the economic and political classes in Western countries etc., because it doesn’t fit with their own political viewpoint, is every bit as wrong as ignoring aspects of the Church’s teaching on promiscuity because it doesn’t fit with someone’s own hedonistic viewpoint.

The Church’s teachings are the Church’s teachings, we are not free to ignore the bits we don’t like.
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👍
 
Cojuanco said:
My interpretation? Environmental causes within reason are important (remember that our children deserve to inherit a world that doesn’t look like an East German uranium mine), standing up for life issues and marriage are important, ensuring just wages for all are important, ensuring that families don’t starve on the street is important. Will that involve redistribution? To some extent, that is likely. Within reason property rights are to be respected. But they are not absolute, and may be justly limited with an eye to the common good.

Now people can prudentially disagree on to what policies ought to be pursued to ensure the worker and the poor and the vulnerable getting their due. But that must be the goal, which, unfortunately, is lost on a) the various university Marxists and classical liberals (I speak from recent experience) and b) our politicians (both parties included), who seem to only appeal to this Catholic tradition when it’s convenient.

You say you do not care for the kind of environmental activism done by your colleagues. That is all well and good - just as a Franciscan can’t be a Jesuit, we all have differing abilities to bear on this effort. It seems our interests are actually more similar than you think. 😛

RobbyS, a good philosophy will in general contours be relevant even in the present time. And the Popes are no different. After all, I know too many people of wealth who believe that they have no moral obligation to the less fortunate except for what they provide personally to the poorbox.

The problem, especially in the global north, is that it seems too many people, especially in politics, have forsaken the Almighty for the Almighty Dollar. Contrary to the stereotype, it isn’t just the Koch caricatures of the right that do this - Madison Avenue and their liberal allies do this, only more subtly (look at Planned Parenthood, and how they act like another conglomerate, only with more viciousness).

And before anyone accuses me of being a leftist: I am not a leftist. Far from it - I am actually a moderately conservative Republican on balance (which here in California makes me apparently somewhere to the right of Francisco Franco). I have little patience for this Administration, with their almost cultish devotion to abortion, contraception and same-sex “marriage”, almost like blasphemous parodies of the sacraments.
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A good philosophy can be misapplied, just as good science can. Pope Leo had to deal with the “Liberals,” who were in those days, the capitalists whose avarice was unlimited, with the traditional landowners, who were more of a mixed bag. (Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited show them at their best). With the socialists and anarchists, who had no respect for law or property, even those belonging to the middling sorts. Looking back, Leo drew on St. Thomas’s social and political commentary, and with the same whiggish distrust of Leviathan government, of whatever sort, tried to describe the Christian’s situation in the midst of all this. He was something of a genius and his encylicals remain good guides. But I suggest that we go to the source rather than listen to more recent voices, who think there is no limit to the power that government ought to have. The welfare state, need we say, was the creation of a highly nationalistic, conservative Protestant monarchy. The Church can work within such a framework, and even within that of a social democratic state. But never let us forget how dangerous Caesar is.
 
Cojuanco said:
My interpretation? Environmental causes within reason are important (remember that our children deserve to inherit a world that doesn’t look like an East German uranium mine), standing up for life issues and marriage are important, ensuring just wages for all are important, ensuring that families don’t starve on the street is important. Will that involve redistribution? To some extent, that is likely. Within reason property rights are to be respected. But they are not absolute, and may be justly limited with an eye to the common good.
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Catholic Social Teaching has a bit of a hierarchy in that the major focus is “Life and Dignity of the Human Person.” This manifests itself in the abortion/euthanasia debate (not within the Church but between the Church and the secularists). It seems that all of the other teachings trace back to that essential foundation. IOW if babies are killed in the womb through abortion or if they are never allowed to be conceived due to contraception, it’s a rather moot point if we are using sqiggly lightbulbs or the minimum wage. What I see in many interpretations of CST is the very pick and choose. Many love Solidarity but being a fan of federal government programs, like to ignore the concept of Subsidiarity. Further a LOT of people on the Left consider paying taxes (or better yet OTHER people paying taxes) a form of charity. Thus they can wash their hands of any obligation to personally involve themselves with these issues or the people who are impacted by them just as you noted those who think their obligation to their fellow man is putting a few bucks in the basket during Mass.

As to redistribution, I think the issue is HOW…is this done through force where a small elite takes from one group it does not favor to give to another group it DOES favor. Although Robin Hood is a positive image, redistribution in the case of big loans to solar power companies or big tax credits for $100,000 cars is IMO not what was envisioned by the teaching that people are entitled to have those things necessary to a decent life…food, clothing, shelter, medical care. As it is our income tax system is VERY redistributionist and we can argue whether that is truly just but the reality is that despite the nasty rhetoric spewing forth from Washington the American people are extremely well off, particularly in comparison to many other countries.
Cojuanco said:
Now people can prudentially disagree on to what policies ought to be pursued to ensure the worker and the poor and the vulnerable getting their due. But that must be the goal, which, unfortunately, is lost on a) the various university Marxists and classical liberals (I speak from recent experience) and b) our politicians (both parties included), who seem to only appeal to this Catholic tradition when it’s convenient.

You say you do not care for the kind of environmental activism done by your colleagues. That is all well and good - just as a Franciscan can’t be a Jesuit, we all have differing abilities to bear on this effort. It seems our interests are actually more similar than you think. 😛
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I think you misinterpreted my comment about the squiggly light bulbs. I have no problem with environmental concerns and and on a personal basis do my best to recycle, repurpose, and reuse. My dismay with respect to the Social Justice Committee was the set of priorities. With limited time and a limited budget, giving a parish full of middle and upper middle class folks lightbulbs they could BUY themselves seemed silly. I’d prioritize basic human needs instead. We are in a semi rural area and I used to head up the Migrant Worker Outreach. Anyone who saw the conditions of the camps would have gladly turned in their lightbulbs and spent the money on food and toiletries IMO. What I find among the environmentalists is a zeal that borders on fanaticism and IMO focuses on speculation and theories rather than what is in front of us now. They are modern day crusaders and to some extent I think “one issue” warriors.
Cojuanco said:
RobbyS, a good philosophy will in general contours be relevant even in the present time. And the Popes are no different. After all, I know too many people of wealth who believe that they have no moral obligation to the less fortunate except for what they provide personally to the poorbox.

The problem, especially in the global north, is that it seems too many people, especially in politics, have forsaken the Almighty for the Almighty Dollar. Contrary to the stereotype, it isn’t just the Koch caricatures of the right that do this - Madison Avenue and their liberal allies do this, only more subtly (look at Planned Parenthood, and how they act like another conglomerate, only with more viciousness).

And before anyone accuses me of being a leftist: I am not a leftist. Far from it - I am actually a moderately conservative Republican on balance (which here in California makes me apparently somewhere to the right of Francisco Franco). I have little patience for this Administration, with their almost cultish devotion to abortion, contraception and same-sex “marriage”, almost like blasphemous parodies of the sacraments.
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Love your last paragraph particularly. “Reproductive Rights” like Environmentalism, Money, and Celebrity are modern day religions for those who have either never learned or who have rejected the Truth. I believe Chesterton said something to the extent that people who don’t believe in God, believe in something else. For the secular Left these causes border on sacred.

Getting back to the thread, I want a Pope who can communicate living the Gospel as the way to a joyful, peaceful and beautiful life. Someone who appeals to our better angels and inspires us to follow him to this better world.

Lisa
 
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