It’s difficult for anyone familiar with economic and
financial history not to feel a little uneasy about the increasingly wild
fluctuations in the stock market. All of
the experts in academia and government seem to forget that the stock market
isn’t really what they call an “economic indicator,” leading or otherwise. It’s a secondhand shop for used debt and
equity. The primary market, where people
engage in agriculture, industry, and commerce, really doesn’t have much to do
with the secondary market, where people move pieces of paper around.
That’s one reason why we’re focusing so much on figuring out
how to make leaders with vision, such as Pope Francis, aware that there is a
way to help people and families become productive, and thus independent of
outside control over their lives, liberties, and property — and it can be done
without taking anything away from anybody else.
It’s called “Capital Homesteading,” and we’re working constantly to let
people in key positions know what’s going on:
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| The mail did get through. |
• Late yesterday the
Campaign for Economic Justice received its first contribution in the mail, a
check from a reader in California.
Receipt was delayed due to the Christmas snail mail rush (. This week’s planned official launch of the
campaign was postponed due to personal situations affecting the CESJ core group
as well as the weather, but we hope to get back on schedule for next week. Again, if you feel you can’t wait, send your
check to CESJ, P.O. Box 40711, Washington, DC, 20016, U.S.A. Be sure to note on the memo line that it is
for the Campaign for Economic Justice.
Any amount is fine, but because it costs time and money to process any
contribution, we ask that you give at least $5.
Any contributions received in excess of actual needs will be applied to
other CESJ programs, so everything advances economic justice, one way or
another.
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| Solidarity in Milwaukee, Capital Homesteading chaser? |
• Deacon Joseph
Gorini, CESJ Counselor, may be attending the “Open
to the Word: Empowering People Through Faith and Action” forum in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Saturday, February 21, 2015, at St. Alphonsus Catholic
Church in Greendale, Wisconsin. Catholics for Peace and Justice are sponsoring
the forum, and they may permit Deacon Joe to have a table for materials. Retired Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba of
Milwaukee is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the one-day event. According to the invitation, you should plan
to attend so that “Through
presentation, networking and discussion, [you can] learn about
educating, transforming and empowering your community to move from charity only
to being in solidarity, enabling the people you serve and advocating for
structural change.”
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| 19th century Irish Argentinians |
• The CESJ core group is working to schedule a skype meeting
with Dr. María Teresa Rosón de Pérez Lozano, professor of commercial law at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires, where Pope Francis
was Grand Chancellor before his election, to bring Dr. Rosón up to date on
current efforts to advance the Just Third Way and discuss strategy for the
coming year, particularly in light of the Campaign for Economic Justice and the
upcoming World Meeting of Families. Dr.
Rosón and her husband have been strong supporters of the Just Third Way for
many years.
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| Evansville, IN, birthplace of Mighty Mo Muensterman, IU Basketball Star |
• In the serendipity
department, it turns out that the author of The
Political Philosophy of Blessed Robert Bellarmine (1926), Father John
Clement Rager (1883-1963), was
pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Evansville, Indiana, for over a quarter
of a century. CESJ’s Director of
Research is from Evansville (as is his niece, the Mighty Mo Muensterman, IU Women's Basketball Star), and has used Rager’s book as a secondary source
for background leading up to CESJ co-founder Father Ferree’s analysis of Pius
XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy, the act of social justice (Rev. William
J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., The Act of Social
Justice. Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1942, © 1943 — condensed for students as Introduction
to Social Justice, 1948).
Bellarmine, an opponent of the divine right of kings, made an error in
his political theory that Pius XI corrected, whereupon the pope beatified
Bellarmine, then quickly canonized him and named him a Doctor of the Church. Bellarmine’s error? To claim that the collective has some rights
by nature that individual people do not — the basis of socialism (as well as
going from the abstract to the particular, which is a Big Mistake in
philosophy). Pius XI explained that the
belief that the collective has rights by nature is an illusion: only human
beings have rights by nature, but some rights can only be exercised by individuals
as members of organized groups. Pius XI
thereby solved a problem that had baffled philosophers for thousands of years,
since Aristotle, in fact: how to reconcile individual ethics and social ethics,
thereby eliminating the justification for both individualism and collectivism.
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| Fulton Sheen Mini-me advising you to read the book. |
• We also got a very
nice response from the president of Oldenburg Academy in Oldenburg, Indiana, a
small town in southeastern Indiana, an hour or so from Cincinnati, Ohio, and about
two hours from Louisville, Kentucky, where the CESJ core group has discussed a
number of social justice projects, and where Norman Kurland, CESJ’s president,
recently gave a talk. It turns out that then-Monsignor
Fulton J. Sheen (author of CESJ’s
Just Third Way Edition of Freedom Under
God) was faculty advisor to Father Lambert Victor Brockmann,
O.F.M. (1898-1973) who taught at Oldenburg for many years, and Fr. Brockmann
got involved in the conflict between Msgr. Sheen and Msgr. John A. Ryan, nearly
becoming “collateral damage” when questions were raised about Fr. Brockmann’s
doctoral thesis. From the veiled
comments about the incident in various accounts, Msgr. Sheen seems to have
managed to straighten things out . . . for a while. Fr. Brockmann seems to have gone to an
exemplary academic and pastoral career, and the president of Oldenburg will be
looking up details for us.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 49 different countries and 51 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Russia. The most
popular postings this past week were “Book Review: The Field Guide for a Hero’s
Journey,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,”
“Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” and “Of Cosby, Crime, and
Calumny.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next
“issue.” If you have a short (250-400
word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog —
do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#