Bastille Day! We’d say “Happy Bastille Day!” but some
people in France still think the French Revolution might not have been the best
way to go, but it was significant, and it is important, even if we can’t give
it wholehearted and enthusiastic support.
Like anything, even (or especially) the American Revolution and U.S.
Constitution, it could have been better, so let’s just celebrate it for what it
was supposed to mean, not for any mistakes people might have made. Besides, we can’t be down on revolutions per se since the Just Third Way is (in a
peaceful way) more earthshaking than the American and French Revolutions
combined:
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| Norman G. Kurland |
• This past Tuesday Dr. Norman G.
Kurland gave a talk on the Just Third Way over the internet to people in Asia
and the South Pacific. A remarkable
number of people tuned in, especially taking into account the fact that
listeners came from different time zones stretching from a town near Mumbai
(Bombay) on the west coast of India, to New Zealand. The geographical breakdown was 51% from
Australia, 19% from Singapore, 11% Hong Kong, 8% from New Zealand (all from the
same town), 8% from Japan (two different prefectures), and 3% from India (again,
all from the same town). As there was no
question and answer period (very difficult with the number of participants and
the time allotted) it is hard to gauge the specific level of interest, but only
one person left the network before the end of Dr. Kurland’s talk, which is
remarkable given the spread of time zones covered and the number of people who
listened.
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| Pius VII: Democracy not incompatible with Catholicism. |
• It comes as a
great surprise to many people, but the Catholic Church has always looked
favorably on democracy — a statement that we must immediately qualify,
especially on Bastille Day. You see,
what the Catholic Church approves of is a theory of democracy in which natural
rights such as life, liberty, and private property begin with the human person
where God put them, not in the abstraction of the collective or the State where
human beings put them. Right before his
election as pope, Pius VII declared there is no necessary conflict between
Catholicism and democracy . . . referring to American style democracy in which
people have rights by nature, not European style democracy in which the State
has rights by nature. Almost every pope
since Pius IX (who was mentored by Pius VII . . . which is why he took the name
Pius) has endorsed the United States Constitution. Leo XIII even kept a special copy of the
Constitution in his private apartments that he showed to favored visitors. Cardinal Satolli, the first papal legate to
the United States, said the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Constitution of the
United States were the Magna Charta of humanity.
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| De Lamennais: Christian socialist. |
• Half of the book
tentatively titled Red Start Over
Bethlehem, chronicling the rise of socialism as the “New Christianity” or
“Neo-Catholicism” and efforts to develop “social justice” as a just and viable alternative
to socialism, has been completed, and has been sent to an editor with good
media contacts. The editor finished
reading the half-manuscript Wednesday morning (after staying up all night
reading it), and sent us the following comments: “Thank you very much for the
book. I finished reading it early this morning. It is fascinating and also
depressing at the same time. But I see it a great way to explain what went
wrong with the understanding of economic and social justice. I think that the
people who are confused about the distinction between socialism and social
justice should begin to understand their mistake. It is great work!
Congratulations!” He then added, “I am
looking forward to the next chapters as they are completed.”
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| I AM smiling! |
• 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 46 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Brazil, South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The Buyback
Bamboozle,” “Book Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 27,” “Those Wacky Distributists and Friends,” and “Leading
the Reform.”
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#