It seems the worse things get, the higher the stock market goes. That’s as may be, however. What we’re interested in is what’s going on in the real world:
• Someone’s Got to Do It. It isn’t easy, but apart from recommending in the strongest possible terms that the current pandemic be used creatively instead of destructively (mostly attacking other people for wearing/not wearing masks or doing/not doing anything else of which you disapprove), as described in our (relatively) short piece, “Universalizing Capital Ownership,” we have tried to avoid discussions of the Covid-19 virus. We will continue that policy. If you insist on discussing it, please do so within the parameters outlined in “Universalizing Capital Ownership.”
Pope John Paul II, personalist.
• One More Update and Delay!. We can’t really blame anyone — “stuff” happens — but there has been another delay in publishing THE BOOK formerly known as Dignity, Power, and Freedom, but now retitled (again) Economic Personalism . . . which is a form of the title we started out with a year ago. The general consensus of the lucky few who have seen the still-being-tweaked-even-as-we-speak draft is that the book is well worth the delay, and we hope all potential readers agree. A former Vatican journalist has agreed to write a short foreword, and has promised to have his draft completed and submitted by the end of this weekend. A number of high-profile Catholic clergy and intellectuals have been approached for endorsement (the book is not specifically “Catholic” but natural law; the natural law being the framework within which Catholic social teaching and that of other faiths was developed), and some of them may realize the book’s potential to bolster their own efforts to restore some sanity to economic life. Some of the research involved in writing the book revealed what some might regard as shocking, but it can all be supported by original sources and logical argument. Economic Personalism promises to be a very important book and may even change some people’s thinking about some key areas.
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| Fulton J. Sheen |
• Fulton Sheen Unveiled! Speaking of shocking revelations, two recent postings on this blog, “The American Chesterton Annoys Msgr. New Deal” and “How Fulton Sheen Viciously Attacked Msgr. Ryan (Not),” have gotten extremely high numbers of people reading them (or at least getting counted as such in the blog statistics). While researching how the heck “social justice” managed to get interpreted as some form of “Christian socialism” (an oxymoron, as socialism was first introduced not to counter capitalism, but to replace traditional forms of Christianity), we uncovered the story behind some very cryptic remarks in Fulton Sheen’s autobiography, Treasure in Clay (1979). After doing a lot of digging in old newspapers and a number of obscure tomes — among them an ultra-rare copy of Msgr. John A. Ryan’s autobiography we found in Tokyo, of all places — we found that Msgr. Ryan (also known as “Monsignor New Deal” and “The Right Reverend New Dealer”) was not exactly the champion of social justice he has been painted. He also viciously attacked Fulton Sheen and destroyed Sheen’s academic career. The latter worked out very well for Sheen and the rest of us, but it does not excuse what Msgr. Ryan did or pretty up his rather avaunt garde theories that are socialism, modernism, and New Age thought in all but name.
• Outreach on the Just Third Way. Some people in Germany, France, and Italy have expressed interest in the Just Third Way proposals outlined in “Universalizing Capital Ownership” as an alternative to simply printing more government-debt backed money to address the economic crisis brought about by the pandemic. It does, after all, make more sense to use funds intended to keep a business going to, er, keep the business going in the most efficient way possible.
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making your purchases through the Amazon Smile program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon 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.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 47 different countries and 52 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Canada, Philippines and the United Kingdom. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “How Fulton Sheen Viciously Attacked Msgr. Ryan (Not),” “The Living Wage and Social Justice,” “The American Chesterton Annoys Msgr. New Deal,” “News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 21,” and “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 27.”
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.” Due to imprudent language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled comments.
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