Things are heating
up around the world with respect to problems that could be solved by applying
the principles of the Just Third Way.
Everywhere, from North Korea to England, we see the growth of State
power and its intrusion into every aspect of life . . . and death. College students are tortured to death for
stealing a piece of paper, infants are sentenced to death because the State has
determined their lives can’t be saved and wouldn’t be worth living even if they
could, and millions more infants are killed simply because they are
inconvenient or might become so. It’s
not a question of whether we need the Just Third Way, but how badly we need it:
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| "Dear Sir or Madam: I am not, nor have I ever been, a socialist." |
• There has been a
tremendous upswing in the number of people who seem to think that the Catholic
Church has not condemned socialism, and in fact approves of it as the
foundation of its social teaching. This
appears to be rooted in an extremely generous interpretation put on a passage
written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger before his election as Pope Benedict
XVI. As one such enthusiast declared, “I
am a socialist in the mold of Benedict XVI, who wrote that the Christian
socialism of Europe was the closest thing to Catholic Social Teaching.” And the specific quote from Cardinal
Ratzinger? “In England [socialism]
became the political party of the Catholics, who had never felt at home among
either the Protestant conservatives or the liberals. In Wilhelmine Germany,
too, Catholic groups felt closer to democratic socialism than to the rigidly
Prussian and Protestant conservative forces. In many respects, democratic
socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made
a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.” We only need to point out that “similar to”
(“in many respects was and is close to”) and “same as” are two very different
things. Brass was and is similar to gold
in many respects, but they are, and will always be, two very different
metals. In any event, Pope Pius XI
responded to this concern in §§ 111-121 of Quadragesimo
Anno, which must be read in order to put Cardinal Ratzinger’s comments in
context. After admitting that there was
a great deal of good in so-called “democratic socialism” (which is a direct
descendent of the “democratic religions” that attacked the Catholic Church in
the early nineteenth century), Pius XI concluded, “Socialism,
if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice
on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings
of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign
to Christian truth (§ 117). . . . If Socialism, like all errors, contains some
truth (which, moreover, the Supreme Pontiffs have never denied), it is based
nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable
with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory
terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist” (§
120). To claim, therefore, that
Catholic social teaching can be reconciled with any form of socialism is wrong.
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| "Dear Sir or Madam: You can't be a Catholic and a socialist." |
• But what is the
“concept of society . . . utterly foreign to Christian [or any other kind of]
truth”? The idea that everything, even
the natural law itself, must be changed or subordinated to the desired goal. This is the principle common to socialism,
modernism, and the New Age. Since in
Catholic belief God is the natural law, the natural law obviously cannot
take second place to anything, even
for the best of reasons.
• This past week we
located an essay by Orestes Brownson (1803-1876), “La Mennais and Gregory XVI”
(Brownson’s Quarterly Review, July
1859) dissecting socialism and “liberal Catholicism.” The rather lengthy piece (nearly 10,000
words) was published in 1859, and explains how “the current pope’s” (Pius IX)
condemnations of “democracy” were directed to the European idea that the State
or the collective, not actual people, are sovereign. Pius IX actually endorsed democracy of the
American kind, having high praise for the U.S. Constitution, which declares in
the Preamble that “We, the People” delegate rights to the State, NOT
the other way around as in socialism.
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| "Hi, Norm! Good to see you again. I hope you're not a socialist." |
• The CESJ core
group met today with an official of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington,
Virginia. The object of the meeting was
to explore ways of working together to introduce understanding of the Just
Third Way into discussions on Catholic social teaching, particularly in light
of the problems associated with the increasing intrusion of the State into
everyday life, even matters of life and death decisions, and the healthcare
issue.
• Speaking of State
power over life and death calls to mind the situation into which the State has
put the parents of “Baby [Charlie] Gard.” The State has decided that Charlie’s parents are
not permitted to try and save the life of their child because “they” have
determined it can’t be done, and even if it could, the boy’s life would not be
worth living. The State knows
this with absolute certainty. This is,
by the way, a great advance, because people used to have the naïve belief that
only God is omniscient and omnipotent (that’s “all-knowing” and “all-powerful”),
and now we know only the State, not God, can have the power of a god.
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| "I can't Smile. I'm a socialist." |
• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it. To participate in the Amazon Smile
program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• We have had
visitors from 30 different countries and 40 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Democracy (and Wages)
in America,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 26,” “The Buyback Bamboozle,”
“Whigs, Wages, and Wonder,” and “Who’d Have Thought It?”
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#