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More on the Pope and politics

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote the following about Pope Francis and politics:

…I tend to think that we often seem to get the popes that match our times. Ever notice some sort of harmonic resonance between popes and other public figures of the day?…

…[T]here’s no way for a pope to retreat from politics, unless he is going to speak on ritual matters only and never venture into a single more general statement. To paraphrase Madonna (not the Madonna, but Madonna Ciccone), we are living in a political world. When Pope Francis speaks of any world events or trends, it has political meaning and is a political statement, even if he tries to couch it in more neutral language.

So no matter how hard a Pope tries to speak non-politically, politics enters anyway nearly every time he opens his mouth, unless it’s strictly on Church business. Even then, what he says can have political repercussions.

That said, I think that Pope Francis is being quite political on this visit to the US. It wouldn’t be the first time a pope has visited this country. And it’s not the first time a pope has spoken politically, although always from a perspective of spirituality. Take John Paul II, for example:

“Be not afraid” became [John Paul II’s] rallying cry, and following a 1979 address to the U.N. General Assembly in which he challenged the free world to defend human rights, he embarked on a courageous but dangerous nine-day public pilgrimage to “strengthen the brethren” in Poland. There he warned Communist authorities that the papacy would watch them closely, and he reminded them of their responsibility “before history and before your conscience.” The people responded to John Paul II’s visit with loyalty borne of years of shared suffering””banners with the Communist party slogan “The Party Is for the People” sported the daring addition, “. . . but the People are for the Pope.”

John Paul II’s example encouraged other leading church authorities, such as the Czech Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek, to become fierce critics of Communism. His visit also inspired an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa to form in 1980 the Soviet Union’s first and only trade union””Solidarity””that in the words of French political scientist Alain Besancon gave the Poles back “the private ownership of their tongues.” Soviet authorities feared Solidarity could undermine Soviet power, and the Warsaw Pact planned an invasion and mass arrest of Solidarity’s leaders. John Paul II intervened by writing directly to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, giving his support to Solidarity and warning against the consequences of such an action. While this only delayed a crackdown, the pope had set a precedent. In 1989, when Solidarity swept available seats in a semi-free election, no one doubted who to credit for the moral fiber that had held the party together.

However, Pope Francis is the first pope to ever address an American Congress. And he’s had some curious things to say about politics in the past:

“I always was interested in politics,” Pope Francis told a journalist from his native Argentina last year. That interest was developed in childhood, in the influence on him of his grandmother Rosa, who once defied fascists in Italy while active in a church organization called Catholic Action.

As a teenager, Jorge Mario Bergoglio would drift between local political party offices as he listened to discussions. He was drawn to being a priest, but felt the tug of a political calling, too.

Beneath the gregarious, spontaneous Francis lies an unusually acute political mind. In Argentina, they speak of him as the most talented politician since General Juan Peré³n.

At first I assumed they were speaking of Vatican politics, but reading the entire piece convinced me otherwise. If the article is correct—and I have no particular reason to think it’s not, except the usual caveat about the MSM and what it publishes—then Pope Francis has some very strong political views that I would label roughly as socialist, and he has long been interested in furthering them.

Read the whole WaPo article to get the flavor of it. I was initially puzzled by the way the article uses the word “liberal,” and suspected that the author was not an American and uses the word in the European manner. Sure enough, the author, Austen Ivereigh, is a Brit who specializes in writing about the Catholic Church and has written a biography of Francis called The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

More from Ivereigh in the WaPo:

Pope Francis is not a social liberal. As cardinal archbishop, he was deeply opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, and, of course, abortion.

So, that sounds conservative, right? But it’s immediately followed by this sentence:

The idea of organizing society around the autonomy of the sovereign individual repels him.

Aha: leftist. The puzzle about the word “liberal” can be solved by saying that the Pope is neither a social liberal nor a classical liberal.

Then we have:

Nor is Pope Francis an economic liberal: he describes sink-or-swim capitalism ”” in which the elderly and the unemployed are condemned to poverty ”” as “an economy that kills.”

Once again, Ivereigh seems to be using the word “liberal” here to mean “classical liberal,” because Francis sure sounds like what we would call a “liberal” or even a “leftist” in this country.

The article goes on:

In his address in Bolivia to workers in the informal sector in July, he warned that “once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”

In the same speech he spoke powerfully of the right of all to land, labor and housing.

Well, I suppose that “once capital becomes an idol” (emphasis on the “idol” part), I’d be against that, too. But I also think that the greatest amount of “enslaving” that’s been done in the last century in connection with “capital” has been at the hands of governments that have professed to want to abolish it, and have set about forcing that “social justice” of which Francis also sometimes speaks.

I am neither a Catholic nor Christian, and certainly no expert on Jesuits—much less twentieth-century Jesuits in Latin America, although even before Francis became Pope I was familiar with the fact that there’s a strong leftist trend among the clergy in that part of the world. But it sure sounds to me as though Francis is here positing some semi-Rousseauvian state of nature in which humans would be exhibiting fraternity, would have an unruined society, and would not be “set against one another,” but for the existence of unchecked capitalism. Now, I would imagine a large part of that vision of the Pope’s comes from the idea that “unchecked capitalism” (which, as far as I know, is not operating in this country nor in most or perhaps any countries in the world today), when curbed, should be replaced by religion and the charity that Christianity preaches. But his words still sound like Rousseauvian leftism to me, with capitalism as the great evil.

Ivereigh goes on, and what he writes may shed some light on why one of the Western Hemisphere countries the Pope has visited this trip has been Cuba:

Francis does have a distinctive political outlook, one that is shaped by his experience as a Latin American Catholic nationalist whose thinking matured in the 1960s, a time of deep political ferment in Latin America provoked by the Cuban Revolution…

“Cuba vs. US” was the Manichean choice of the time and has poisoned Latin American politics since, but the Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio rejected this polarity. He was a Peronist: anti-colonial, pro-worker, offering a “third way” between capitalism and communism that was true to Latin America’s Christian-humanist traditions. That made him naturally sympathetic, in 1959, to the original “national” and “popular” Cuban Revolution, seeking social justice, political and economic independence, but it equally horrified when within two years Fidel Castro allied with the communists and fell into the Soviet orbit.

While in Cuba, Pope Francis has been helping to build a pluralistic Cuba resting on nationalist-Christian foundations. In a 1998 book reflecting on Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island, he wrote that neither “neoliberalism” nor “communism” reflected what he called “the soul of the Cuban people,” a phrase he used in his speech arriving at Havana airport on Saturday. A new politics has to be forged in Cuba, one that takes the original national-popular ambitions of the Revolution and combines them with a social democracy that cares for the vulnerable.

In other words, he wants a kinder, gentler Cuban revolution. Good luck with that; the history of socialism is very poor on that score, to say the least. It’s pretty lousy in the economic sense, too.

To go on:

This is not just about Cuba. Francis is convinced that the whole of Latin America has a key role developing such a politics in the future as it achieves greater continent-wide integration. He regularly uses a phrase first coined by early 20th-century Latin-American nationalists to capture the idea of the patria grande, or greater homeland.

As cardinal, he supported the idea of Latin America playing a key role on the world stage…

As pope, he has spoken of how Latin America can offer “new models of development” that reconcile both technological progress and Christian concern for justice and equity. Francis believes politics must be rooted in, and serve, the values and concerns of ordinary people, uniting them by focusing on the needs of the poorest…

Few realize how deep his vision for the renewal of politics runs. On Thursday, they will find out.

If all of this is true—and again, I see no reason to doubt it at this point—I think it’s fairly clear that Pope Francis has a political agenda rooted in his vision of an ideal society that he believes can actually come about, and that society is what we would call socialist and not really into protecting individual liberty or property. The models of that society are in Latin America, but a perfected Latin America. It’s one that I believe has zero chance of ever occurring in actuality, and is inherently dangerous because it can easily go in a very bad direction (look at, for example, Venezuela).

I just skimmed Pope Francis’ speech today to Congress. As one might expect, he speaks a great deal about poverty and the need to alleviate it, while paying a bit of lip service to business as “a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth…especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.” This is followed by a call to protect the environment.

The thing that seems to me to be missing is that in all the emphasis on providing for the poor there is not much about liberty. Yes, there are some words, but if you read the whole speech it’s clear that they are an afterthought compared to the rest, and their context seems rather curious.

For example, Pope Francis quotes the famous Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” phrase, only to make this further point immediately thereafter:

If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life.

But “our compelling need to live as one” seems actually antithetical to liberty, or at least strongly opposed to it. The first comes at the expense of the second, particularly when the former—living as “one”—is compelled by law rather than freely entered into in a voluntary manner, such as through the exercise of personal charity. I don’t see the Pope making that distinction clear, although he may have made it elsewhere, or in his mind. Nations ordinarily make choices, and come down more in favor of one than of the other. The US has been singular in coming down in favor of liberty (at least in the past), and therein lies its exceptionalism.

Pope Francis also mentioned liberty in this context:

A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.

If I understand what the Pope is saying, the word “liberty” is used there to mean freedom as opposed to slavery. The freeing of the slaves was certainly an excellent thing. But it’s a different thing from a government protecting individual liberty for all of its citizens against the encroachment of a welfare state or statism in general. The fact that Lincoln’s defense of liberty is followed in Pope Francis’ speech by praise for Dorothy Day, an American Catholic convert, activist, and socialist (who is being considered for sainthood by the Church) says a lot, I think.

There was no question about the sincerity of Day’s religious fervor and her desire to help the poor, but there is also no doubt about her socialism/leftism. Here’s some background about Day, in case you’re unfamiliar with her life and work:

[In her early years, before her conversion) she settled on the Lower East Side and worked on the staff of several Socialist publications, including The Liberator, The Masses, and The Call. She “smilingly explained to impatient socialists that she was ‘a pacifist even in the class war.'” Years later, Day described how she was pulled in different directions: “I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (the I.W.W.’s) and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a Socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the I.W.W. movement.”

She celebrated the bloodless February Revolution in Russia in 1917, the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a reformist government…

She maintained friendships with such prominent American Communists as Anna Louise Strong, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became the head of the Communist Party USA.

Shortly thereafter, Day had a child, converted to Catholicism, and increased her involvement with work for the poor. Of this period she later wrote:

I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?”

Day’s subsequent work with the poor was informed by her Catholicism, which deepened and became more and more important in her life. But she seems to have continued to support leftist causes, with the addition of an absolute pacifism that included advocating pacifism during World War II and rejecting Catholicism’s Just War theory.

Here’s Day’s reaction to the Cuba Revolution, which tells you a lot:

In 1960, she praised Fidel Castro’s “promise of social justice”. She said: “Far better to revolt violently than to do nothing about the poor destitute.” On January 3, 1962, a Vatican press conference revealed that Castro had excommunicated himself by his persecution of the clergy and bishops…Several months later, Day traveled to Cuba and reported her experiences in a four-part series in the Catholic Worker. In the first of these, she wrote: “I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people, a naturally good life (on which grace can build) one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.”

So violence was okay in Cuba in the cause of “social justice,” and religious persecution could be balanced by Castro’s supposed economic good intentions?

I could go on and on and on and on, but I’ll close with these two quotes from Day:

In 1970, at the height of American participation in the Vietnam War, she described Ho Chi Minh as “a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders”…

In the Catholic Worker in May 1951, Day wrote that Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung “were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.” She used them as examples because she insisted that the belief that “all men are brothers” required the Catholic to find the humanity in everyone without exception. She explained that she understood the jarring impact of such an assertion:

“Peter Maurin was constantly restating our position, and finding authorities from all faiths, and races, all authorities. He used to embarrass us sometimes by dragging in Marshall Petain and Fr. Coughlin and citing something good they had said, even when we were combating the point of view they were representing. Just as we shock people by quoting Marx, Lenin, Mao-Tse-Tung, or Ramakrishna to restate the case for our common humanity, the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.”

In 1970…she wrote:

“the two words [anarchist-pacifist] should go together, especially at this time when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. “Greater love hath no man than this.”

“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che Guevara wrote this…

It seems to me that such passages are key to the political philosophy of Day and of those who support her. She acknowledges the violent excesses these people committed in the name of social justice. But it seems that she is more deeply moved (and admiring of) what they stated as their do-good aims—which in Day’s mind doesn’t entirely absolve them but certainly mitigates things considerably. She also seems to take those stated aims at face value and does not even consider that they may be lies through which people drunk with power see their way clear towards gaining and using power by justifying that quest with the cover of a fake altruism. She also doesn’t seem to understand that, even if they were sincere, there must be something wrong with the entire leftist endeavor if it keeps leading to such egregious abuses of vast numbers of human beings.

Day never seemed able or even willing to consider making the leap toward rejecting leftism. From what I see, it seems clear that Day’s intentions were good, but she ended up placing herself in the service of some very destructive forces in the world.

[NOTE: Here is some background on the pros and cons involved in the drive to canonize Day.]

Comments

More on the Pope and politics — 90 Comments

  1. The communists claimed they were going to create heaven on earth. They created the workers paradise and put a fence around it to keep the workers in. The workers risked their lives to escape the communist paradise to the capitalist hell. That was why they built a wall around West Berlin. The east Germans would come to Berlin and then go to West Germany. East Germany was being depopulated by people voting with their feet. Couldn’t have that.

  2. So they’re seriously considering canonizing those who adulate mass murderers?

    I suppose that once may have been thought shocking.

    Or at least cause a few ripples.

    Today, with this guy holding the keys, I don’t think anyone is surprised.

    (If they are, they shouldn’t be.)

    File under: Brave New Climate

  3. I could not be more disappointed in the Pope’s visit to Cuba and his address to the joint meeting of Congress. (And it was a meeting and not a session so minus one point on his essay.)

    Fidel, like me, went to a Jesuit high school. But unlike me, Fidel has murdered and jailed his political opponents and stolen millions. My high school Spanish teacher was set for Fidel’s firing squad but he escaped. The Pope literally should have slapped Fidel silly. Fidel and Raoul are going straight to Hell.

    In 1800, many countries in South America were just as well off as the United States. But Venezula, Columbia, Argentina and Brazil today are a total wreck. Why? A rotten political system that is fixable. They need to fix their cultures; start with Mexico.

    This climate change stuff drives me nuts. It is the biggest scam in the history of the world and the Pope fell for it. Giant difference between real pollution and carbon dioxide.

    We need in the US a green freeze. Declare victory and rescind all the green regs imposed by Obama. I don’t think anyone on this board is breathing dirty air or suffering with dirty water.

    The Pope completely wasted his opportunity.

  4. Good post, Neo. There is no doubt that the Pope showed his hand in this address. The liberal Catholics in our government (Pelosi, Biden, Kerry, etc) have always supported abortion while opposing the death penalty. I distinguish between innocent and guilty life and thereby oppose abolishing the death penalty. The fact that the Pope named the death penalty but danced around abortion puts him in that camp for me. I’ve been reading the comments over at Ace and the best one was this:

    “When Paul had an audience with the worldly authorities, he took the opportunity to preach Christ, despite the fact that his life was on the line.

    I guess we’ve come a long, long ways.”

  5. As for Dorothy Day, it has always bothered me that she is so acclaimed for her political positions. As far as I’m concerned she and Peter Maurin are responsible for the church ultimately ceding what should be its role to the State. Subsidiarity is suppose to function as family, church, then state as a last recourse. Thanks to these 2 and the hierarchy’s embrace, the family and church have lost tremendous ground.

  6. Zombies are so prevelant in the entertainment industry because people like the current pope are zombies of a leftist, brain devouring ideology. How can so many well educated and intelligent people be such complete dupes for an ideology that flys in the face of baked in the dna human nature? Its a mystery to me.

  7. In the 1930s Day ran a soup kitchen for the unemployed and homeless in NYC. The story about her that always amused me– she eventually got very upset with the people she helped because instead of joining with her in utopian schemes to abolish poverty, they would eventually get jobs in the evil capitalist system and just go ahead and end their poverty on their own!

  8. The Catholic Church has been infiltrated with Leftists since at least 1930s.

    The agents were introduced via various seminary schools and latin America seemed like it took on more than its fair share of graduates.

    The child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church was also part of that, given it would take a sufficiently powerful and large network inside the church to be able to use the hierarchy to protect homos and child molestors to that extent. The Lavender Mafia I think some called it.

    As far as I’m concerned she and Peter Maurin are responsible for the church ultimately ceding what should be its role to the State.

    That’s generally what happens when heresies are allowed to gather together. The single institution that rules over the religious faithful loses their moral authority in more ways than one. Sometimes that is good, other times it is not. Depends on what the orthodox religious dogma is vs the heretical dogma.

  9. How can so many well educated and intelligent people be such complete dupes for an ideology that flys in the face of baked in the dna human nature? Its a mystery to me.

    A better computer system can handle more viruses and distributed trojans.

    People who have higher brain functions, are also better at doublethink. Instead of being able to barely hold two conflicting mutually exclusive beliefs in their head at once, they can hold 5 or 10 or 50.

    And that’s what makes a ghoul.

    A sufficiently powerful physical control mechanism can even fool people who think they are excellent, like Penn and Teller.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Fool_Us

    There are severe limitations on the human brain’s rationality function. Without spirituality, guts, virtues, and a human heart, it all falls apart.

  10. A little bit in Dorothy Day’s defense — from an article at First Things:

    Dorothy’s goodness of heart and her “radical idealism” … achieved immense things, but also caused her to occasionally lose her footing. Though most of her social views were soundly rooted in the Gospel, the saints and papal encyclicals, she sometimes made imprudent political statements (particularly about Fidel Castro), which today make one wince. Some people accused her of being a tool of the Communists, or at least a naive fellow traveler. But it is important to remember, even as we acknowledge her mistakes, that her purpose in founding the Catholic Worker was to draw people away from Communism and into the arms of Christ. …

    In an interview with Sojourners in 1976, Dorothy explained how she became enamored with revolutionary thinking, but also came to see where it led-to destructive and dystopian nightmares:

    “For me, I could never see the violence, the obliterating of a whole class. Unfortunately, in the 1940’s the whole liberal crowd were all so pro-Soviet that they wouldn’t believe any of the stories that came out about the transferral of the whole Ukrainian population to Siberia. Now we read the account in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. I mean, a liberal crowd will sort of go with the fashion.”

  11. Pope Francis is a perfect example of a man with the best of intentions, busily paving another road to hell, willfully blind to its actual destination.

    And yes, it is a case of willful blindness. He doesn’t see because he won’t allow himself to see.

    “There are three kinds of people; those who see, those who see once they are shown and those who will not see”. Leonardo da Vinci

  12. The Catholic Worker remind me of the the followers of Jesus that were looking for the Roman empire to be overtaken. The new kingdom was going to be here on earth. Ironic that the church (not to mention the individual in our current framework) has been emasculated by the burgeoning state. Be careful what you wish for….

  14. (on the lengths of Church accommodation with Napolean):
    “We are prepared to go to the gates of Hell, but no further.”
    – Pius VII

    Pius VII (1740-1823), was pope from 1800 to 1823, began his reign with some sympathy for the liberal goals of the French Revolution, but under Napoleon he withdrew to a conservatism more consistent with the traditions of his Church.

    In 1804 Pius VII suffered the humiliation of being virtually forced to crown Napoleon emperor of the French. Rome was once again occupied by French soldiers in 1808, and in 1809 Napoleon formally annexed the papal territories to France. When Pius excommunicated the Emperor and his army, he was imprisoned by Napoleon. Until the invasion of France by the Allies in 1814, Pius VII was forced to do Napoleon’s bidding, and it was only Napoleon’s ultimate defeat that restored to Pius his personal liberty and some hope for the future of the papacy.

    “No man can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist?”
    – Pope Pius XI (1931)

    The bad ol’ days were never ever so bad as the todays that have taken to applying ever more torque in making all our glorious tomorrows.

  15. Ann,

    How do you reconcile,
    “For me, I could never see the violence, the obliterating of a whole class.”

    with…

    In the Catholic Worker in May 1951, Day wrote that Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung “were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.”

    That is a perfect example of cognitive dysfunction, someone that cannot admit the unavoidable consequence of the path they support. It’s pure rationalization, that the end justifies any means, regardless of how evil the means employed.

    That is an argument that we can be certain that Lucifer employs.

  16. The FBI has a real fat file on Dorothy Day, who was a communist/fellow traveler.

    Benedict wrote about “liberation theology” as a heresy, and so did John Paul II, I believe. Whittaker Chambers rightly tagged such ideas as embodiments of the Oldest and First Temptation: “Ye shall be as gods.”

    And, of course, Jorge Bergoglio is a kindred spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.

  18. Napoleon himself announced to the Pope that he was going to destroy the Church, to which Pius VII responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do!”…

    They’re doing pretty well at the moment.

  19. Sounds as if Dorothy Day anticipated the Liberation Theology folks. I am reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s 1972 article on Argentina in the New York Review of Books,The Corpse at the Iron Gate. Naipaul met a leftist priest in a shantytown- a priest born into the upper classes.

    The priest in charge was one of the “Priests for the Third World.” He wore a black leather jacket and his little concrete shed of a church, oversimple, rocked with some amplified Argentine song. It had been whispered to me that the priest came of a very good family; and perhaps the change of company had made him vain. He was of course a Peronist, and he said that all his Indians were Peronist. “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”
    But couldn’t we try? He said Peronism wasn’t concerned with economic growth; they rejected the consumer society. But hadn’t he just been complaining about the unemployment in the interior, the result of government folly, that was sending two Indians into his shantytown for every one that left? He said he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano; some people were concerned only with GNP. And, leaving us, he bore down, all smiles, on some approaching Indians. The river wind was damp, the concrete shed unheated, and I wanted to leave. But the man with me was uneasy. He said we should at least wait and tell the father I wasn’t an American. We did so. And the father, abashed, explained that Peronism was really concerned with the development of the human spirit. Such a development had taken place in Cuba and China; in those countries they had turned their backs on the industrial society.

    Development of the human spirit in a totalitarian society- what fool the priest was to believe that. [The article also quotes a leftist on turture: “Depende de quien sea torturado.” It depends on who is being tortured.Which shows that the military torturers of that decade were not the outliers in Argentine society that the left likes to believe they were. Similarly, the military torturers weren’t the only thing wrong with Argentina of the 1970s. The 1972 article was written several years before the Dirty War came to full boil.]

    In a follow-up article 20 years later in the NYR, Naipaul interviewed a man who had been a follower of that particular priest, who was named Padre Mujica. Padre Mujica was killed several years later while fighting in a guerrilla band. Father Mujica’s fate was similar to that of Camilo Torres, the Colombian priest cum guerilla, a decade earlier.

    Ironically, those who would try to place the Pope with such Liberation Theology priests would be surprised to find out that at the time of his becoming Pope, there were some rumors floating about that the future Pope had some involvement with the military government- false rumors, IIRC.

    [Family friends knew Camilo Torres when they were working in Colombia. Reading between the lines, I suspect that their time in Colombia was the beginning of the end of their marriage. One point of disagreement was that the wife was a vehement supporter of Camilo Torres, whereas the husband saw him as an innocent who didn’t realized what danger he was getting into. ]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilo_Torres_Restrepo

  20. Really, Dennis? It’s been a lot worse than this in Catholic history. I spent 12 years with the Evangelicals before returning to my Catholic roots 18 years ago, as a result of my study of history while I home-schooled my children. The reason I’m sticking is the institution of the Lord’s supper the night before his death, and the fact that the gates of hell shall not prevail against his church. The sole thing that can be said about Christianity from its inception is that the gathering proclaiming “This is my body” and “This is my blood” has been going on non-stop, eventually around the world, for more than 2000 years

  25. Left-wing ideology is about establishing monopolies and shifting responsibility. Their interest is redistributive change is to reduce personal liability and to compensate for the urban ghetto effect, while exploiting democratic leverage. Their brand of environmentalism is a lobbying front for special interests, notable the so-called “green” industry, and is not about natural conservation or risk mitigation. Their interest in social issues only extends so far as to marginalize or suppress their competing interests, which is why they don’t support equality under “=”, but rather congruences under the pro-choice religious doctrine. They support excessive and illegal/unmeasured immigration to depress the influence of native people, and, apparently, to sustain the dysfunctional conditions in their homelands. They don’t respect individual dignity, and so promote class diversity. They don’t acknowledge intrinsic or exception value, and so choose to debase human life through indiscriminate killing.

    Individual dignity, intrinsic value, and natural imperatives. And, science is a philosophy necessarily constrained to limited frames of reference. Go forth and reconcile.

  26. Sharon W Says 5:08 pm:

    “Really, Dennis? It’s been a lot worse than this in Catholic history.”

    I’m not a Catholic basher. There have been some very good popes, but then again there have been some real disasters. I have no illusions that Protestants are immune to the same type of nonsense but events like this make me happy that those of us who are committed to Christ but are not committed to one religio-political organization have choices. Ah the beauties of free markets in religion – religious capitalism if you please.

  28. I would recommend as an antidote to the Pope, this 1860 collection, “Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution”, by Frank Moore. It’s available as an E book on iTunes and perhaps elsewhere.

    The sermons by these members of the so-called Black Robed Regiment, present a theological (albeit Protestant) argument for liberty. These men were well educated as after all Harvard and Yale were founded as seminaries. The knew politics, history and theology well. The arguments stand to this day. The current Pope is not their equal in logic or eloquence

  29. Don’t mean this to sound condescending but I feel very sorry for politically conservative Catholics. It’s bad enough to have an economic fascist for a president and now your Pope is a Peronista. We do live in interesting times.

  30. I’ve tried a few times to post a comment but keep getting the message: “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!”

    ???

  31. KLSmith – it’s worse than you think. But oh well.

    What is SO bothersome is that the Church has been VERY anti-communism/socialism in the past. Encyclicals have been written against the overwhelming nature of the state.

    Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen (d. 1979) was instrumental in converting me to the Church (via reruns from the 50’s-60’s on EWTN) and you cannot find a more staunch anti-Communist.

    But all that seems forgotten.

    One big part of the “problem” is that the Church doesn’t have an economic plan. Over the last couple hundred years, redistributionist theories have been discussed as a 4th way. (I’m skipping 3rd way since that title has been claimed by others.)

    I see no reason why the Church must endorse anything. There’s room for criticism of both crony capitalism and socialism/communism. The Church is here to preach Christ crucified, not to set up an ideal society. There is no ideal society in this valley of tears.

    I can’t wait until he goes home.

  32. KL Smith, I’m one of those you are feeling sorry for. Since last January I have taken to reading the Pope’s words directly rather than respond on the basis of what someone has written. 9 times out of 10 I have come away with something excellent and encouraging, a tremendous boost to my faith and a wonderful directive for Lent or Easter and so forth. I read his indiction on the Jubilee Year of Mercy which will begin on Dec. 8 through next November and I do not see how it would be anything but a blessing to any believer in Christ who reads the words and takes them to heart. So, while I may feel disappointment with his address to Congress, I won’t let it overshadow the spiritual plus that I have enjoyed in his address to the bishops as well as his homily at yesterday’s Mass.

  33. Sharon W, with respect to your comments on the Protestant Reformation, this is the second time in discussions that I have seen the Lord’s supper and Christ’s declaration that Peter was the rock upon which he would build his church invoked to suggest that the Catholic Church is the only legitimate expression of Christianity. Do I misread? I will say that in pure scripture there is nothing that suggests that Christ’s church should be a hierarchical organization that in any way resembles the Catholic Church. If the Church satisfies the needs of particular people, well and good; but let us dispense with the fiction that it alone represents Christ’s plan for his church on earth.

    With respect to Day, it seems to me that she represents the muddled thinking that is so often exhibited by ideologues–even if they do wander from one ideology to another.

  34. Oldflyer–I have never said the Catholic church is the only legitimate expression of Christianity. In the other thread, I said quite the opposite, having relayed portions of the prayers that are part of the celebration of the Eucharist, in fact. In this thread, I referred to the reason that I returned to the Catholic church, with reference to the Last Supper the night before Christ died. As for muddled thinking and ideologues, I am sorry to say that they appear to be cropping up among so many of the pastors and flock that I formerly worshiped with in the evangelical church. But God assures us that he is judge, and we are not, and he will make his people to stand. Great promises to count on.

  35. Geoffrey Britain:

    If you read that complete piece of Day’s written in 1951, whose title was “The Incompatibility of Love and Violence”, you’ll see she’s not justifying what the Communists did, but rather they’re included in a musing on the idea that all men are brothers, all in it together, and have the same hope for it. The piece is rather rambling, but I think I see where’s she trying to go with it. Here’s how the piece starts:

    With the May issue of the paper we are beginning our nineteenth year. And with this beginning we wish to state again our faith, in this our life here on earth, that All men are brothers. It is our faith, our conviction, and we do state it again solemnly, in regard to Russians, Chinese, Indians, all the people of the east and the west, and we must treat them so, and love them so. It is only in this way that we can show our love for God. To love God and to love our brother as Christ loved him, to the laying down of His life for him—this is the great command, and Christ also said, “Do this and thou shalt live.”

    It is because of this affirmation that we write as we do in the Catholic Worker month after month, year after year, and why we tell of houses of hospitality, farming groups, retreat houses on the land, and the works of mercy that are the life of these communities. It is not enough to say it, to repeat it, to hear it sing in our hearts, as in that great chorus in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It must be translated into act, into flesh and blood, into our eating and drinking and working and loving.

    It is the great and glorious hope of all men, the longing of all hearts.

    She then goes on to talk of how Mao, Lenin, and Marx also had that longing, which then leads to the paragraph you quoted:

    These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.

    Which she follows up immediately with this:

    Our Lady of Fatima says we must do penance.

  36. Ann:

    My point about Day and Mao, et. al., is that she ASSUMED that they were motivated by good intentions. Why? Should one assume it, just because a murderous tyrant says it? Surely she was not unaware of the existence of psychopaths or of evil.

    My second point is that she assumed their intentions matter. Why, when their actions were evil? I would say leave it to the deity to take into account their good intentions, and look into their hearts. On earth, they were power-mad, murderous tyrants.

  37. JuliB Says @5:49:
    “The Church is here to preach Christ crucified, not to set up an ideal society”

    Aye, and there’s the crux of it all. And when last, and how often, had a Pope, prelate, priest, adverted so much as that. Second to that is that sin is death without resurrection. Third, that evil abounds. Everything else is, well, to put it in terms Thomistic and in view of the vision of Aquinas — nothing but straw. He then laid down his Summa Theologica, never to finish it.

  39. These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.

    This is a result of fanaticism and zealotry. Some people have already seen it in those who Trump appeals to, but it’s not exclusive to Republicans. Democrats, Jihadists, and multicultural SJWs are like that too.

    The idea that a Hero King will sacrifice the world to save some wretched family that can’t help themselves, has long been a human dream and desire.

    The idea that a ‘Great Man’ like Kennedy or Clinton is great and thus their flaws only make them greater or excuses their majesty, is fanaticism, pure and simple.

    It has nothing to do with good intentions or Christian charity.

    When a feminist says that it was necessary that a girl die due to Kennedy’s car drowning incident, because Ted Kennedy is a ‘lion of a man’ in the fight for feminism is… it’s unspeakable that is what it is. That great leader of yours isn’t human, and neither are you, when you keep pushing for them no matter the costs.

  40. Neo–That really is instructive about Day’s assumptions. I’ve always felt reservations about her, but never have had the time to dig into it. I was raised in a family of Italian and Irish Catholics that absolutely opposed the welfare system, unions, etc. Working class people that believed in the individual and the family as the source of support. The church assisted my Irish grandmother who came over at age 17, as she worked in the Priests’ rectory. My father said he never knew he was poor until his first day of school and clothes were given to him. My Italian grandfather railed against FDR so much that even I knew of it and I was born in 1960. The latest thing an Aunt told me was that they discovered that he changed his birth date and it wasn’t discovered until his death. Apparently it was the same day as FDR’s and he couldn’t countenance that.

  41. I mean, a liberal crowd will sort of go with the fashion.

    Zombies do that, sure.

    Free, independent, human beings are different. That’s why zombies aren’t human.

  42. Well, Jesuit are very strong in my land (they were founded a hundred kilometers of my house) and I even had some family in the order, so I heard quite a bit about them.

    And you’re slightly wrong about them.

    Jesuits are neither leftist nor conservative. They are… Jesuits. That means that they’re quite open-minded as long as you put Church interest, and specially Jesuits interest, first.

    They quite famous for accepting only brilliant people in the order. With Jesuits, the only thing you can be sure is that they’re smart and incredibly loyal to their order.

    In general Jesuits use to tell you what you want to hear to get what they want from you. So consider the option the Pope is just saying what the media wants to hear so the Church can recover some lost prestige. I’m not sure he’s speaking his mind, but what he thinks he must speak up right now in order to benefit the Church.

  43. The latest thing an Aunt told me was that they discovered that he changed his birth date and it wasn’t discovered until his death. Apparently it was the same day as FDR’s and he couldn’t countenance that.

    Imagine your birth day being the same as Stalin, Hussein Obola here, and a Clinton all rolled together.

  44. I’m not sure he’s speaking his mind, but what he thinks he must speak up right now in order to benefit the Church.

    Is that something a religious head of Christian noted for its seven virtues, should be doing or what a politician should be doing that wants world peace?

  45. 1. It’s abundantly clear now how Protestants got their start
    2. On “climate change”, perhaps he is not as smart or as thoughtful as he thinks. And definitely doesn’t learn from history. I seem to recall one famous matter of science the Vatican weighed in on in 1615 regarding the motion of the planet earth with respect to the sun. They didn’t get that right either. Everyone knew the earth was at the center of the solar system except one or two trouble making deniers, whose heretical views threatened to unravel society. Similar to the the climate change deniers, who aren’t on buying the argument that man made global warming is a foregone conclusion.
    The times haven’t really changed much. Like his brother Pope Urban VIII in 1615, this pope is showing himself to be an educated dunce. It would be nice to see the pope turn his sharp and inquistive mind toward matters of spiritual enlightenment, assuming he can fit that into his busy lecture schedule on politics, science, economics.
    I didn’t hear his speech to congress today – just wondering if his agenda also included a reminder to them about state sponsored abortion, or if that’s not as big a deal to Jesus now as global warming and economics?

  46. Neo,

    Day never seemed able or even willing to consider making the leap toward rejecting leftism. From what I see, it seems clear that Day’s intentions were good, but she ended up placing herself in the service of some very destructive forces in the world.

    Day, like many human weaklings that sold their soul for material wealth and thus became a zombie or demon, couldn’t change herself. So she sought a God King to change the world for her, to make the world fit her thoughts and beliefs. Which requires a lot of killing and terror and slaves.

    The intent to “change the world” is not “good”. It’s often a result of internal weakness, corruption, vice, and pathetic nerves.

  47. Cry prolix, and let slip the dogs of words! The pope is so much yada yada utopian dreamer. A wasted position of influence, he ain’t no JP 2.

  48. Ann Says:
    “She then goes on to talk of how Mao, Lenin, and Marx also had that longing, which then leads to the paragraph you quoted:
    These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe…”

    What a pile of crap. Was she also willing to admit that Hitler was motivated by love of brother? What about Genghis Khan? Or is only monsters on the left who are motivated by love? To think that the Catholic church is thinking about sainting this woman!

  49. Is that something a religious head of Christian noted for its seven virtues, should be doing or what a politician should be doing that wants world peace?

    Each order has its own view of christian virtues. For Jesuits, the main virtue has always been intelligence. Think that Jesuits had a couple of books in their bedside table, one would be the Bible, the other one would be Machiavelli. In general, Jesuits is likely the most respected order in the Catholic Church. They can get along with everybody, conservatives and leftists, but they’re only loyal to themselves.

  50. Ann at 6:12 pm,

    More rationalization. neo’s response puts it perfectly.

    Yann,

    “Jesuits are neither leftist nor conservative. They are… Jesuits. That means that they’re quite open-minded as long as you put Church interest, and specially Jesuits interest, first.
    …
    In general Jesuits use to tell you what you want to hear to get what they want from you. So consider the option the Pope is just saying what the media wants to hear so the Church can recover some lost prestige.”

    If so, Francis is acting on the premise that the end justifies the means. As are the Jesuits.

    IMO, this is the exact same rationale that led to the Church covering up its pedophile priest scandal. In that case the rationale being that potentially billions of souls were at risk should humanity ‘shortsightedly’ reject the Church.

    On the other hand, if he’s serious about his stated positions on illegal immigration (he’s NOT referring to legal immigration), economic inequality, socialism and his opposition to the death penalty… then he is appallingly ignorant and negligent in his willful blindness.

  51. Sharon W said: I’ve always felt reservations about her, but never have had the time to dig into it. I was raised in a family of Italian and Irish Catholics that absolutely opposed the welfare system, unions, etc. Working class people that believed in the individual and the family as the source of support.

    It really is impossible to pigeon-hole Day; for instance, she, too, was against the welfare state — from a 1945 column in the Catholic Worker:

    We believe that social security legislation, now balled as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. It is an acceptance of the idea of force and compulsion. …

    But who is to take care of them if the government does not? That is a question in a day when all are turning to the state, and when people are asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Certainly we all should know that it is not the province of the government to practice the works of mercy, or go in for insurance. Smaller bodies, decentralized groups, should be caring for all such needs.

    The first unit of society is the family. The family should look after its own and, in addition, as the early fathers said, “every home should have a Christ room in it, so that hospitality may be practiced.” “The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.” “If your brother is hungry, it is your responsibility.”

  53. @ Yann very interesting post on Jesuits & very insightful, I was very intrigued by that assessment.
    One of our pastors. when I was growing up was a Jesuit, & boy he knew how to *run * a parish !
    But he was a Godly man & hardly fit the image of the
    clandestine, sinister motives of the blog’s novel readers & movie watchers ! LOL

  54. If your ‘brother’ is hungry, 9 out of 10 it is not due to misfortune your brother has suffered. 9 out of 10 it is because he or his single mother of multiple baby daddys made self-destructive choices. I donate locally to food banks, otherwise, my give a damn is busted. And I deeply resent every penny I donate with the gun held at my head by the IRS used to support those millions who made self-destructive choices.

    ”The ultimare result of protecting people from their own folly, is to fill the world full of fools.” – Herbert Spencer

  55. @ Molly

    Forget the sinister image. That could be the Opus Dei, but Jesuits never had that image. On the contrary, they always has been highly respected, even by non religious people. Jesuit schools were among the best ones in Europe for centuries. Descartes, or Voltaire, for example, studied with them. And modern mathematics notation (like the use of decimal point) was invented by a Jesuit whose textbooks were famous all over Europe.

  56. Consider too that Europe & the catholic church is rooted in the social system of the Middle Ages.
    America is unfamiliar & novel & iconoclastic.
    The rest of the world believes we are *born* to a *class*, there is no upward mobility in their mindset. (A poster on a blog about being a Brit & moving to America
    actually said that she told her school advisor in the UK that she wanted to be a barrister, the advisor responded without missing a beat “You were not born to the proper family to consider a career like that”) & THIS happened lately !
    And further I remember conversations with my European born grampa who escaped Europe pre WW1, “why did you come to America”? Response was “there was no opportunity there”
    The oldest son would inherit the land, the sisters were married off, the younger son could join the army. There were no monies to send other sons for schooling & no jobs. In America you could work in the cotton mills of the Northeast, he had OJT he became a weaver a semi skilled position but times got tough in NE too & he did for a time travel to somewhere in NJ to work in a mill & only came back to NH on weekends.
    Alas no EBT or welfare perks for these guys!

  57. @ Molly

    Yeap, I know. My grand-grand father was the second son of a VERY rich family. He got nothing. But that had a sense: until one century ago, business was family-oriented. The way to increase wealth through generations was not to split it. Big old companies in Europe started that way.

    One thing: Catholic Church is not rooted in the social system of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Catholic Church is a copy-paste of the Roman Empire structure. It was designed that way by a roman emperor, Constantino, that made it the state religion. Indeed, modern post-Constantino Catholic Church was to Roman Empire the same that Anglicanism has been to British Monarchy.

  58. Starlord, I would dig a little deeper into the Galileo issue. The actual truth tells a different story. The “history” that is accepted would fit in nicely with “Bush lied, people died”, or “Benghazi was due to a Muslim uprising over a film” and on and on. Making the church that founded the university where he studied look backward and stupid is still the stuff that is pushed today about both Christians and Republicans.

  59. Ben Franklin had it thought out better than the pope:

    –Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, as quoted in The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review (November 1803 – April 1804; 1811). This has also been quoted in several other variants of Latin or French expression, and been translated into English in various ways. Though it has probably incorrectly been cited as a remark of 1775, the earliest published reference to it appears to have occurred in April 1778.

    “Franklin often told his disciples in Paris, that whoever would introduce the principles of primitive Christianity, into the political state, would change the whole order of society. An absolute equality of condition; a community of goods; a Republic of the poor and of brethren; associations without a Government; enthusiasm for dogmas, and submission to chiefs to be elected from their equals,–this is the state to which the Presbyterian of Philadelphia reduced the Christian Religion.” [Translated from the original French]

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Quotes_about_Franklin

  60. This article, “what is Pope Francis thinking?”is a Q & A with an editor of a recent edition of one of Dorothy Day’s books. It explores what liberals and conservatives can learn from Day.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423832/pope-francis-dorothy-day-syrian-refugees

    The pope made this trip as a pastor, not a politician. He is reaching out to everyone, and I can’t help but think that by mentioning issues like climate change and the environment he is capturing the attention of millennials or others who might otherwise dismiss or ignore a broader message that they desperately need to hear.

    It’s also been interesting to watch his actions. He met with the Little Sisters of the Poor in DC, which seems like a clear message to the Obama administration. While some were complaining that he didn’t meet with Cuban dissidents or read Castro the riot act a couple of days ago, Francis was speaking with Castro about the Jesuit teacher of castro’s youth and providing him with a copy of the teacher’s writings and recorded homilies.

    It appears that his aim is to reach individual hearts and minds, and it seems to be working. It’s astounding how people of all religious persuasions (or those without any at all) are responding to him.

  61. Like a dummy, I posted my comment in the wrong thread (the previous one).

    Here is my comment.

    Utterly brilliant essay on one reading. It is the type of essay which deserves at least one more reading to fully grasp.

    And so I am going to re-read it now with one observation before I do.

    What Neo does is not samizdat, but it is.

    Fernandez and Greenfield do the same thing, though less intensively, and it is the daily (6/7ths) extraordinary intellectual dedication which makes her a treasure.

    There is no lazy thinking or cant. In a just world the recognition would be proportionately astronomical.

    But we live in a bizarre leftist world where propaganda is as deep as it gets.

  62. Sharon W:

    I wrote a piece about Galileo, here. The relevant part about the Church and Galileo is on the second page.

  63. Copernicus espoused a solar centric universe & he was a catholic clergyman, a canon, not a priest. So the Church in that era had a hard time struggling with *errors* (how shocking) in the Bible.

  64. I have still not re-read Neo’s post because I had not read the comments.

    Now I have read the comments.

    Here is what I have to say about the comments.

    For me, so deeply satisfactory and pleasurable, even in the disagreements.

    Is it possible to read anything equivalent on the left? Impossible to say. I think not.

    A program of activism by non-leftists needs to be based on the (popularly, propagandist based) unacknowledged intellect of conservatives.

    Now to re-read Neo.

  65. For those of you who *think* the Reformation gives the Protestants one up on the Catholics I have to chuckle. These are European attitudes,
    Angela Merkle is a Lutheran, Sweden opening its doors wide to non Swedes is a Protestant/agnostic country. Europe continues to
    adhere to a *class system* & is against upward mobility, especially us peons who are not of appropriate lineage. Reaching *beyond* your class is frowned upon.

  66. Though the Church were not exactly saints, there’s quite a dark legend around it.

    The Inquisition has become the paradigm of murders by religious fanaticism. Truth is that Inquisition murdered about 10,000 people, which is not such a big number. Nazi Holocaust killed 6 million people. Muslim Genocide in India, for example, killed 80 million infidels.

    Same happens with science. Nobody wonders how would have been possible that, would have been really true the most powerful organization in Europe had so strongly opposed science, science could flourish in Europe as never before.

  67. The madness over the Church and Galileo just never ends. Back in 2008, Pope Benedict was set to give a speech at Italy’s La Sapienza University but protests by professors and students forced its cancellation. Why? Because when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, he had given a speech that contained this statement about Galileo:

    “The Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.”

    A statement not even Ratzinger’s own but someone else’s — the Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, “one of the most subversive and controversial postmodern thinkers of the late 20th century”.

    Plus, it was a statement that Ratzinger didn’t even agree with! Oh, and the speech he would have given was on how to encourage dialogue between faith and science.

    There’s more in a piece titled “The Death of Irony: Benedict and the Enemies of Reason”, which is worth a read.

  68. @yann actually the Church did not oppose science
    (perhaps some individuals within did) but many churchmen were the scientists of their day
    Greory Mendel who gave us the start of *genetics*
    was a Monk
    Copernicus was a Canon
    The *Big Bang theory* was postulated by a
    Catholic Priest
    Basel Valentine was a Monk who through his observations & notes became the first chemist
    Monks developed the worlds first champaign
    The monk who tended the wine noticed that this particular batch wasn t just an inert liquid that it sparkled & bubbled when describing it to the abbot he remarked “We have brought the *stars* down from the skies!”

  69. As an agnostic, I have no desire to insult or impugn the faith of those who believe in a ‘higher power’. However, absent the direct manifestation of God/gods, it is impossible for me to assign degrees of revelance to most religions, except islam, which is a rabid dog pissing on all attempts to establish a world society based up the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

    Francis is antithetical to that basic, non-negotiable principle. He desires a world of collective/tribal one world utopia. Defend his ideology to your heart’s content, but you will have to kill me to impose that cruel fate upon me or mine.

  70. Yann–It is a total canard that the church was opposed to science. Utter nonsense. They built and supported the universities. History rewritten by those that wanted to co-opt the culture.

  71. Having re-read: an amazing essay, so coherent and beautiful. The comments are equally and amazingly insightful. It is a pleasure to read, a personal delight, to read them.

    We are in a dark age with flares of light.

    Something might spark and that is what we hope for.

    The essential misunderstanding of the pope and so many others is their blindness to government.

    There is a paradox they do not get.

    Human life will never be without government, the monopoly or attempted monopoly of violence and coercion.

    This reality is why life is corrupt and always will be corrupt. “God” gave us innate corruption, because we must be necessary endorsers of violence and coercion. There is no utopia of no government.

    The question is, what do we do with the innate corruption?

    Life goes on with the poor, the relative disadvantaged, the bereft of spirit.

    A compromise, the best compromise, acknowledged this fact of life. A bunch of intellectually deep men addressed reality, keeping in mind the happiness of every human.

    Jesus addressed each person. Each person was (is) significant according to Jesus.

    Respect for each person is necessarily incompatible with government. Government requires that one size fits all, or else.

    The essential understanding of government (and its necessary implications for life) was broached in the founding of America. That apparently was (is) the last we will hear of it.

    In 2015, humanity is not close to recognizing the dignity of any human.

    The pope thinks coercion and violence is the answer to according dignity, without seeing the paradox.

    Coercion and violence cannot be escaped, as long as humans are humans. Government is government.

    A pope is a man, and it is unlikely he will be a Washington.

  73. The idea of organizing society around the autonomy of the sovereign individual repels him.

    So essentially, this Pope reject modernity. Rejects the separation of the political, economic, social and religious/ideological spheres with the individual centric and making their own choices and combinations of the spheres.

    It makes sense that the Pope would be hostile to capitalism is you take a more explicative definition

    Capitalism is a system in which the individual is permitted to retain their personal earnings over that required for subsistence and use this “profit” to purchase additional productive capacity, such as training, machines, real estate, etc., i.e., capital, to better themselves vice spending it on non-productive consumption. Capital is nothing more than retained “old labor” that is put to use producing additional income.

    Socialism in contrast uses government to limit the individual ownership of productive capacity up to total socialism where the individual is permitted no ownership of productive capacity except for their direct personal skills and may be prevented by the government from using their skills a job that requires them.

    Ironically, the capitalism he rails against is when practiced a very good inhibitor of consumerism, consumption for consumptions sake.

    On the other hand, socialism when it permits earning more than subsistence does not permit that “profit” to be used to improve the individuals conditions, except as immediate consumption.

    First, what is the best the socialists, in their writings, can offer us? What do the most optimistic of them say? That our subsistence will be guaranteed, while we work; that some of us, the best of us, may earn a surplus above what is actually necessary for our subsistence; and that surplus, like a good child, we may “keep to spend.” We may not use it to better our condition, we may not, if a fisherman, buy another boat with it, if a farmer, another field ; we may not invest it, or use it productively ; but we can spend it like the good child, on candy – on something we consume, or waste it, or throw it away.

    Could not the African slave do as much? In fact, is not this whole position exactly that of the … slave? He, too, was guaranteed his sustenance; he, too, was allowed to keep and spend the extra money he made by working overtime; but he was not allowed to better his condition, to engage in trade, to invest it, to change his lot in life. Precisely what makes a slave is that he is allowed no use of productive capital to make wealth on his own account. The only difference is that under socialism, I may not be compelled to labor (I don’t even know as to that – socialists differ on the point), actually compelled, by the lash, or any other force than hunger. And the only other difference is that the … slave was under the orders of one man, while the subject of socialism will be under the orders of a committee of ward heelers. You will say, the slave could not choose his master, but we shall elect the ward politician. So we do now. Will that help much? Suppose the man with a grievance didn’t vote for him?
    –“Socialism; a speech delivered in Faneuil hall, February 7th, 1903, by Frederic J. Stimson

  74. The US has its first commie President and the Catholic church has its first commie Pope. President Reagan and Pope John Paul II must be rolling in their graves.

  75. About that “Personal relationship with jesus is dangerous says the pope”
    Here is part of a remark made on John C. Wright’s blog by an evangelical protestant (*)
    (a-private-opinion-of-pope-francis/#comment-12015)

    “The other quote[mine] had a citation, for which I do not salute them. Having a citation is merely the first required step. For the headline, they simply pulled the part of the sentence most likely to stir up evangelicals, of which I am one. “Pope Francis says a personal relationship with Jesus is a dangerous heresy.” When reading the full article from an online library of papal documents, the full quote is there. And all of the above words can be found in it. In fact, the full paragraph was in the yellow article, yet the comments were viscous.

    “There are those who believe they can maintain a personal, direct and immediate relationship with Jesus Christ outside the communion and the mediation of the Church. These are dangerous and harmful temptations.” Pope Francis, General Audience, Wed. June 25, 2014

    And you know what? Not only is the full quote orthodox and Catholic, it extremely close to something that I have heard hundreds of evangelicals teachers, writers, and pastors say. Whenever anyone asks me (as a pastor and writer) if one can have a personal relationship with Jesus outside the church, I tell them that Scripture flat out warns us against trying such (Hebrews 10:25).”

    As a general observation. When it comes to the CC I notice that even the best of blogs are infested with Jack Chickers or Chick-a-likes. To wit in this thread “Inquisition”, “Constantine” (fun fact: this BS condems, logically speaking, the Orthodox as well as the CC, but only the CC gets whipped), “Galileo”. The “scandals” are not mentioned (yet) or perhaps I missed it. It would be funny if the same nonsense weren’t recycled by atheists, the “left” and muslims as well (example: “Muslims Against Crusades” , a (forbidden) muslim “Anti-Crusader” group in the UK).
    I came in contact with the phenomena of the Chickers when I got internet at home in 2003 and I am still disgusted and amazed by it.
    However, the positive thing about it is that it makes me realize that while I may be a very lapsed Flemish Catholic I will always be either a lapsed Catholic or (hopefully) Catholic (again).
    BTW, I loath and despise the “Spirit of Vatican II” so I’m no admirer of this pope who has a bit too much of that “Spirit”.

    (*) I hope I’m within the rules in quoting someone from another blog.

  77. It is more than heartening to read the comments on this post. One considers a thing as somewhat just ordinary – or a bit above – until the ordinary presents itself as remarkable. The post was remarkable and the comments rose to the occasion. A special citation to Phil D.

    Nothing is purely bad but evil. Prolixity, in good hands, may be as wonderful as a rose — even the thorny ones.

  78. The first unit of society is the family. The family should look after its own and, in addition, as the early fathers said, “every home should have a Christ room in it, so that hospitality may be practiced.” “The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor.” “If your brother is hungry, it is your responsibility.”

    That sounds good on paper and in a speech but what did she actually do? Using the power of the state or promoting organizations that force people to be good, isn’t going to promote bottom up initiative or virtue.

    If she was using Stalin and Mao as a model, while excusing her own weakness and good intentions, fantasizing that she can do it better no matter what the costs are, then her speech is overridden by her actual deeds.

    My grand-grand father was the second son of a VERY rich family. He got nothing. But that had a sense: until one century ago, business was family-oriented. The way to increase wealth through generations was not to split it. Big old companies in Europe started that way.
    Yann:
    The Japanese zaibatzu are like that as well, they are corporate companies where the inheritor becomes the next leader and their entire life is groomed towards this purpose. It is a kind of Primogeniture, a medieval feudal law of succession. Gavelkind and the rest were tried, but they fragmented the realm into warring states, brother against brother in those olden days, so I’m not surprised that European companies still utilize a form of that. Having the second or third son go into a monastery or the military, was considered a mercy. Since the normal method of the Greeks were to castrate or blind pretenders to a title. And the Islamic Jihadists did even worse than that. And various German tribes often had fights between one branch of the family, creating kinslayers.

    On the note of the Jesuits, my sources spoke little of them and my own simulations do not accurately include their influence, thus it is difficult to tell truth from fiction there. For now at least, given this data point source, it should be easy to extrapolate further projections later on for experimentation.

    This kind of system, primogeniture or family clan businesses, is not very compatible with internet based true harmony or de=centralized C4 chains of command or hierarchies.

    Sharon W

    You’re right about Galileo and the Pope. The Pope actually liked Galileo and did not go out of his way to get rid of the astronomer. It was Galileo that broke the rules at the time, because Galileo had a kind of idiot savant ability the same as Art here, or what people called Asberger’s. Thus Galileo began making enemies because of his unintentional insults. If the Pope really wanted to get rid of Galileo, he would have excommunicated him and called a Crusade on Gal’s gently caressing rear end. Galileo would have been hanged, burned, and Inquisitioned as a heretic then. The Catholic Church had moderated much since the times of the Albigensia Crusades and the crusades vs various heresies. They were very much focused on scholarship and theology, rather than anti heresy protocols.

    Galileo suffered little more than house arrest, after directly writing a book making fun of and criticizing Papal Authority. If you something funny like that in Waco Texas against the Law Enforcement Community, a SWAT team would bust down your door and “accidentally” kill you. Same if you did anything funny in DC around the SS or Capital Thug LEOs. If you were considered a rebel against the authorities in Wisconsin and supported Scott Walker instead of the Left’s religious leader, they would put the SWAT hit on you hard, and then gag you.

    Btw, Molly and others, please recall that when the Left and their brainwashed zombie masses say “science”, they speak of scientific consensus. So they are projecting their own totalitarian intentions unto the past. It is not science they speak of but “scientific consensus” or “good think”. The Left also likes to summon up the once dead, and use them as sock puppets against the Left’s modern day enemies. They used quotes from Reagan, Bush II, to attack people for policy disagreements.

    Humans are fallible, the old Protestant religions have long ago lost their luster and faithful zealots. The primary point the Catholic Church made about not tolerating heresies or schisms, is because decay occurs faster with 5 different religions than with one religion that has a central authority. Because that central authority can reform and revitalize the faithful. As for Merkel being Lutheran, as a politician she would be the same as a feudal queen converting to Christianity so she can choose marry into an alliance with Christian nations. Many political leaders converted to a religion for more pragmatic purposes than pure belief and fanaticism.

    The ancient Christianity which Franklin refers to would probably be the Miaphysites, the Bogomils, the Cathars, the Messalians perhaps, and various Christian orders that focused on poverty and equality. The Orthdox Church in Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church in Rome, split apart starting with the crowning of Charlemagne in France by a Pope who had good reason to be friend and ally of Karl Karling. It is good to be able to connect another dot, because I think the Founding Fathers’ Deism was much closer to the old pure Christian strains, before they had to deal with kings and military occupation. That is not to say the current modern day Christian churches should be rejected for heresies or dogmas of the elder days, but there are elements in the past that people should know about today, in order to sink deep roots to the Earth with the Coming Storm.

    Also, for those interested in Creation Theory or Intelligent Design, look up the anomalies in experiments having to do with water. You might find something very interesting for theological discussion or something very very scary.

  79. Pingback:Pope Francis: ‘Grow, You Guys…’ | Regular Right Guy

  80. Fine analysis and historiography, thanks. Christianity is interested in liberty, spiritual, mental moral, physical and political. The churches promote religion, which is only occasionally and briefly interested in liberty. Religion, usually, is a business masquerading as liberation, much as Apple, Facebook, Google, etc., do: “this [fill in] ‘allows’ you to ….” The churches, if you pay them with some value, ‘allow’ you to [fill-in]. Christianity is anti-religious, pro-liberty and pro-nation-state.

    The global governance crowd, driven by the same socialist religion that drives Francis, also treats liberty as an after-thought and then merely as some ‘good’ global governance bureaucrats ‘allow’ people to have. Here is an analysis of that phenomenon: http://theological-geography.net/?p=20920

  81. Q. George Pal wondered “And when last, and how often, had a Pope, prelate, priest, (sic) averted so much as that (to preach Christ crucified).”

    A. At every Mass, which every Pope, prelate, and priest celebrates daily.

    Bonus chatter: The Church is here to preach Christ crucified, not to set up an ideal society; this is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I recommend that all the Church’s critics read it. The Catechism is an inexpensive book and for the Church’s cheap critics, it’s also available online.

  82. “The ancient Christianity which Franklin refers to would probably be the Miaphysites, the Bogomils, the Cathars…”–Ymarsakar

    I disagree. Perhaps you should review what the, to pick one example, Cathars, really believed. Then ask yourself if any of today’s Protestants would accept what they preached and practiced as Christian. You might conclude that the true Church is correct again.

    “I think the Founding Fathers’ Deism was much closer to the old pure Christian strains…”

    Nope, except for Charles Carroll of Carrollton of course.

    If you really want to know what were “the old pure Christian strains” review the books called the New Testament (so named because they were read during the celebration of the New Testament, i.e. the Eucharist (Luke 22:20, Matthew 26:28). Also read the writings of early Christians who lived within one generation after the last Apostle passed away. You may find that the more you learn, the more you find that what’s oldest and purest is the Catholic Church.

    By the way, as you review the Gospels you may notice that Peter (Kephas) was not the sharpest tool in the boat shed. Yet Peter was picked to be the vicar of the Church (his successors have the title “Vicar of the Vicar of Christ”). You may wish to consider that bumbling by the Pope is another part of the most ancient Christian Church’s traditions.

  83. parker Says:
    September 24th, 2015 at 7:20 pm
    Cry prolix, and let slip the dogs of words!

    Here, here!

  84. As Micha says, the bet way to understand what the Church teaches is to pick up a copy of the Catechism. I get a daily email (from Flocknote.com) with short sections of the Catechism and within the course of receiving these short daily snippets you can easily read the whole thing within a few months. I thought today’s excerpt was especially appropriate:

    Catechism in a Year Catechism in a Year

    Day 268 – What is meant by the principle “labor before capital”? // What does the Church say about globalization?

    What is meant by the principle “labor before capital”?

    The Church has always taught “the principle of the priority of labor over capital” (Pope John Paul II, LE). Man owns money or capital as a thing. Labor, in contrast, is inseparable from the person who performs it. That is why the basic needs of laborers have priority over the interests of capital. The owners of capital and investors have legitimate interests, too, which must be protected. It is a serious injustice, however, when entrepreneurs and investors try to increase their own profits at the expense of the basic rights of their laborers and employees.

    What does the Church say about globalization?

    Globalization is in itself neither good nor bad; it is, rather, the description of a reality that must be shaped. “Originating within economically developed countries, this process by its nature has spread to include all economies. It has been the principal driving force behind the emergence from underdevelopment of whole regions, and in itself it represents a great opportunity. Nevertheless, without the guidance of charity in truth, this global force could cause unprecedented damage and create new divisions within the human family” (Pope Benedict XVI, CiV). When we buy inexpensive jeans, we should not be indifferent to the conditions in which they were manufactured, to the question of whether or not the workers received a just wage. Everyone’s fortune matters. No one’s poverty should leave us indifferent. On the political level, there is a need for “a true world political authority” (Pope Benedict XVI, CiV [citing Bl. John XXIII, Encyclical Pacem in terris]) to help reach a compromise between the people in the rich nations and those in underdeveloped countries. Far too often the latter are still excluded from the advantages of economic globalization and have only burdens to bear. (YOUCAT questions 445-446).”

  86. You may find that the more you learn, the more you find that what’s oldest and purest is the Catholic Church.

    A hierarchy is the same as Jesus Christ and his personal apostles? I doubt that.

    A hierarchy is a human mechanism, and often why human hierarchies persecuted Christianity or Christ was because the hierarchy did not want to be replaced.

    Replacing the hierarchy with a Pope and the Roman Catholic history, doctrine, and dogma, which was dissected to pieces given the wars against orthodox and non orthodox heresies in various councils that were approved after Jesus Christ and his Apostles’ died, isn’t particularly legitimate due to the primitivism.

    Then ask yourself if any of today’s Protestants would accept what they preached and practiced as Christian. You might conclude that the true Church is correct again.

    The Protestants aren’t considered by the Catholics to be the true church, since the Protestants are merely a heresy of the Roman Catholic branch. They aren’t even heresies or dogma differences from the Orthodox branch, but the Roman branch specifically.

    Thus it doesn’t matter what the Protestants think on this issue. The hierarchy’s authority and judgment, no matter which hierarchy it comes from, is invalid when speaking of individual conversions and virtues in 0 AD to 150 AD. The only record that would have any validity would be personal accounts near the time frame, which doesn’t necessarily mean they were an endorsement of 1000+ years of councils and decrees on theological matters.

    As for the Cathars, how is their merit based approach to equality of opportunity for either gender vs the patriarchal inheritance laws and system of the Catholic church at the time, supposed to be closer to the Founding Father’s situation than either 1600 Catholics or Protestants?

    Much of the frontier system had social and gender classes closer to the Cathar’s Perfect system than the Catholic good works or Protestant predestination system.

    The frontier towns and settlements had more equality of power for women than the orthodox or Protestant or Catholic systems did on the more settled colonies of New England. In fact, many of those voting, political, and/or social rights were removed in order for the new territories to become a state of the US. Although Utah was its own story, given the Mormons there.

    As for what people believe, that only matters for a religious system or authority. What people did mattered more for a government system. Applying primitive Christian virtues to a political system, would mean that the behavior of the citizens would matter above all else, not what their self chosen religion is about.

  87. Nor is Pope Francis an economic liberal: he describes sink-or-swim capitalism – in which the elderly and the unemployed are condemned to poverty – as “an economy that kills.”

    The reason why Argentina had this was because of socialists, not capitalists. When capitalists got in bed with secular power, the socialists, they naturally began to have little interest in their workers and employees. Why would they when they could, as Buffet and Trump did, use the state’s power to give them economic edges and favors?

    The fact that Francis thinks the equality of poverty and/or charity will get rid of socialism or capitalism, is not an ideal state. It’s more like a utopia. Maybe if he got rid of socialism, most of this would just happen naturally without the Tyranny of fascist states giving an edge to socialist lip paying capitalists.

  88. Bob says:

    The Church always talks about its preference for the poor. It is misleading to use the word “poor” to describe both the totally destitute masses of biblical times and people in the US today who live below the official poverty level. The former had almost nothing and were constantly faced with the possibility of starvation. The latter have cell phones, TVs, automobiles, and indoor plumbing, and their chief dietary problem is obesity brought about through overeating. I agree that the state should provide a safety net for those who are truly unable to care for themselves. But the Church in its pronouncements goes well beyond that–it seems to maintain that the person who is poor even as a result of bad choices, indolence, or stupidity is somehow more deserving than the person who has toiled for years to support his family. To me this is morally repugnant.

    The Church has done nothing to create wealth, but constantly calls for its redistribution. Over the last few centuries billions of people throughout the world have been lifted out of dire poverty, not through redistribution, but through the genius of free market economies and Western technology, including the burning of fossil fuels. The Pope now frowns upon all of this. Curious, is it not?

  89. A spectacular reflection — and a quite welcome one coming from an observer who is not Catholic or Christian. Neo has an amazingly accurate insight on the enigmatic Dorothy Day. This Catholic doesn’t know what to do with a pope that seems to envision a politically compelled utopia that has no model in history and has no present location where one is hoped to emerge.

  90. “In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints… Dorothy Day [championed] social justice and the rights of persons. A nation can be considered great when it […] strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work.” – Pope Francis, addressing a joint session of Congress, on September 26, 2015

    Know whom the pope admires and you will know who and what he is.

    “I am most of all interested in the religious life of the [Cuban] people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people, a naturally good life (on which grace can build) one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.

    “We are on the side of the [Cuban] revolution. We believe there must be new concepts of property, which is proper to man, and that the new concept is not so new. There is a Christian communism and a Christian capitalism. We believe in farming communes and cooperatives and will be happy to see how they work out in Cuba. God bless Castro and all those who are seeing Christ in the poor. God bless all those who are seeking the brotherhood of man because in loving their brothers they love God even though they deny Him.” – Dorothy Day, writing in the Catholic Worker, July-August 1962.

    This is what Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement,”tireless striver[er] for social justice and the cause of the oppressed,” who was supposedly “inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints,” wrote after John XIII had excommunicated Fidel Castro for expelling most of Cuba’s priests and nuns from the island; closing all parochial schools and the Catholic University (and invalidating their degrees); confiscating Catholic hospitals and orphanages; newspapers, radio stations and publishing house; looting and desecrating churches; and forcing the Cardinal-Archbishop of Havana to take refuge in a foreign embassy, in effect. decapitating the Cuban Church. Castro by then had also deprived Cuban workers (Catholic or not) of all protections under the law. His regime abolished in 1959 the right to organize unions; it outlawed strikes; it repealed minimum wage laws; it discarded collective bargaining and arbitration; it eliminated tenure and seniority; it scrapped Cuba’s 35-hour work week (for which workers were entitled to 40 hours’ pay); it rescinded the “13th month” bonus paid to all workers at Christmas; it authorized the payment of wages in script; and it instituted compulsory unpaid work for the State. Everything, in short, that you would expect Dorothy Day to denounce if these outrages had occurred in her own country to her beloved Catholic workers. But when Castro’s Revolution did all these things to Cuba’s Catholics and workers, she “could not help but be in favor of the measures taken.”

    Want to really get angry?

    Savor this quotation from the same article, for sheer ignorance and condescension unequaled until Pope Francis’ own recent statements in Cuba:

    “So here we have the problem. The education of the people. Fifty percent of Cuba’s millions were illiterate. No wonder Castro had to talk for so many hours at a time, giving background and painting a picture of what they were aiming at, for a multitude who could not read.”

    In “Dorothy Day, a Communist?”, David H. Lukenbill writes:

    “I’ve been studying this issue for some time and have reached the conclusion that Dorothy Day had so conflated Communism and Catholicism in her own mind that she saw them as one and the same; which is the only explanation I can find for her lifetime support of Communist governments and ideology, co-existing with devout practice of her Catholic faith.

    “Another clear mark, in my opinion, of her lifetime adherence to Communism was that she never denounced it or its evils to protect others from becoming ensnared, which is what most people, yours truly included, do once they see a past way of life clearly for the wrong path it was.”

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