Kathy Shaidle's succinct response is, "Dear Catholic Church: We’re breaking up. This time I mean it. It’s not me. It’s you."
My slightly less succinct reaction is this:
By and large, socialism is Catholicism without "all that bothersome God-talk." Certainly, there are multitudes of Catholic persons who abhor socialism, but modern Catholicism itself explicitly supplies the theological and moral justification for socialism (*). That it’s a false theology and a false morality is a different matter. Further, while the man-in-the-pew may tend to abhor socialism, just as with the “liberal” Protestants, the more a Catholic person regards himself as an intellectual, the more likely he holds to socialism … eventually making of it a substitute for Christianity, just as the “liberal” Protestants do.There are, after all, reasons that many, perhaps most, “low-church” Protestants do not, and never will, trust the One True Bureaucracy; it’s not just about mutual bloodshed 500 years ago, it’s about what the RCC is to this day, about what its bureaucrats advocate and what they condemn.
(*) I strongly suspect that this is because way back in the mists of time, the RCC made a virtue of poverty -- and thus, today, the One True Bureaucracy hates wealth … when it’s owned and controlled by private parties.
Being wholly contrary to all of human nature - being contrary both to virtue and to vice - socialism can never be achieved, and all attempts at it must inevitably involve windrows of human copses. For a bureaucracy that claims to “think in terms of centuries,” the One True Bureaucracy sure does seem to have a glaring blind-spot regarding actual lived history.
6 comments:
We don't have a "Justice and Peace department" of the Vatican, for starters. There's the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which writes stuff, but it's just a teaching committee.
By the way, binding teaching for Catholics on socialism:
And in addition to injustice, it is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation. Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.
That socialism and communism-- and most other threats to modern civilization like abortion and eugenics -- are rooted in Christianity with the God removed says nothing bad about Christianity. It's like blaming bread because if you mix milk, eggs, sugar, salt and yeast, then bake it, you don't get a good loaf.
The catholic priest that holds the class on catholicism for non-catholics that I currently attend last week said pretty much exactly what Foxfier quoted above.
"I strongly suspect that this is because way back in the mists of time, the RCC made a virtue of poverty -- and thus, today, the One True Bureaucracy hates wealth … when it’s owned and controlled by private parties."
I strongly agree with this. In various posts in the past I have also compared leftists to gnostics.
Slightly different topic, yet not unrelated -- *all* bureaucracies exist for the furtherance of the bureaucracy ... and the RCC is the ultimate bureaucracy, for it has convinced its 'clients' that it lives and breathes only for their own good.
Considering how horribly off-kilter their last scandal from German-- remember, "Pope condenms harry potter!"-- probably best to wait and see if it's as flat out wrong as the writeup for the PCJP note was.
hmmm
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