There has been a great deal going on this week, mostly in
the “Getting the Word Out” Department.
It’s not even worth the time commenting on the ups and downs in the
stock market. The wild swings have
gotten rid of some of the real investors, leaving the field to the speculators
. . . helping us set the stage for a return to sanity with Capital Homesteading
and the reversion of the secondary market to a genuinely secondary role in the
economy:
• This has been something of a banner
week for Just Third Way publications.
First was the appearance this past Saturday of “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way” on Homiletic
and Pastoral Review, the oldest magazine for Catholic clergy in the United
States, since 2012 a completely online publication. The article corrects certain misimpressions
floating around about the meaning of natural law-based Catholic social
teaching, especially in light of Pope Pius XI’s breakthrough in moral philosophy,
the “act of social justice.”
• The publication of “Pope Francis and
the Just Third Way” was followed on Wednesday by “Putting
Pope Francis in Perspective” on Catholic365. We can assure our faithful readers that the
timing of the appearance of the two articles, as well as the similarity in the
subject matter, was purely a coincidence.
• At the same time, we’ve experienced a small spike in sales
of the Just Third Way Edition of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s “long lost” 1940
classic, Freedom
Under God. Evidently, especially
in light of the increasingly critical world situation, people are searching for
solutions that are not simply a rehash of the same old thing, but that are
something truly new and different, yet fully consistent with universal moral
values.
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| James Cardinal Gibbons |
• We also note the
appearance of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudate Si. Not surprisingly, most of the commentary on
the encyclical attempts to force it to fit a liberal-socialist or
conservative-capitalist framework, without regard to the underlying natural law
principles. There also seems to be some
fundamental misunderstandings of the role of the pope — any pope — and the key
difference between infallible knowledge of the pope’s teaching office in
regards to faith and morals, and opinion of the pope as a fallible human being. This is not surprising, as Mortimer Adler
identified the failure to distinguish between knowledge and opinion as one of
the ten great philosophical mistakes of the modern age. This is despite the great lengths the Council
Fathers of the First Vatican Council went to in an effort to make it clear that
it is the teaching office of the pope that is infallible, and then only when
speaking on matters of faith and morals, not the pope as a human being. It may have been due in part to the efforts
of James Cardinal Gibbons of the United States that the document defining
infallibility was changed from “On Papal Infallibility” to “On the
Infallibility of the Teaching Office of the Pope” precisely to avoid such
confusion.
• Mr. Mark Gross, O.P,
has requested permission to reprint “Putting Pope Francis in Perspective” in a
future issue of the
newsletter for the Dominican Western Province of the United States. We have granted tentative permission, on
condition that he acknowledge that the article first appeared on Catholic365.
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| (Left to right) Jean-Marie Bukuru, Norman G. Kurland |
• CESJ Fellow
Jean-Marie Bukuru of Burundi has been granted a temporary extension of his visa
in view of the troubled situation in his home country as the president seeks an
unconstitutional third term and works to eliminate all opposition. On May 29, the vice president of the election
commission fled the country, and we received word (unconfirmed) this morning
that Gervais Rufyikiri, the Hutu
Second Vice President (the constitution allows for two vice presidents, one
Tutsi and one Hutu) has now fled the country.
If true (we repeat that we have been unable to confirm this, and are not
completely sure that the report referred to Rufyikiri, to a second vice
president of the election commission, or even to someone else), it is yet more
evidence that the country is imploding as a direct result of President Pierre
Nkurunziza’s illegal actions. More than
100,000 people have fled Burundi since Nkurunziza precipitated the
constitutional crisis — which has caused a serious humanitarian and ecological
crisis in neighboring countries, as Jean-Marie reported during a recent
interview on Voice of America.
• We have a meeting
scheduled tentatively with a well-placed Republican who might have some good
contacts for Jean-Marie. Now we just
need to come up with a Democrat.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 53 different countries and 46 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Kenya, and Australia. The most
popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green
Mother from Outer Space,” “Yet More on Property, II: Hudock’s Alleged Errors,” “Crisis
of Reason, III: Symptoms of Irrationality,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” and “Crisis of Reason, II: The Source of the Problem.”
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#
