Let's be gentle with the Catholic haters...too much about people converting to the true Church and they really make a mess.
Posted on 04/13/2008 8:54:51 AM PDT by don-o
Shortly after Pope Benedict XVI's election in 2005, President Bush met with a small circle of advisers in the Oval Office. As some mentioned their own religious backgrounds, the president remarked that he had read one of the new pontiff's books about faith and culture in Western Europe.
snip
Bush attends an Episcopal church in Washington and belongs to a Methodist church in Texas, and his political base is solidly evangelical. Yet this Protestant president has surrounded himself with Roman Catholic intellectuals, speechwriters, professors, priests, bishops and politicians. These Catholics -- and thus Catholic social teaching -- have for the past eight years been shaping Bush's speeches, policies and legacy to a degree perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Please keep bumping the prayer thread by adding your prayers to it!
Let's be gentle with the Catholic haters...too much about people converting to the true Church and they really make a mess.
The battles were fought hundreds of years ago and the Catholics lost
You eveidently haven’t read about Lepanto. Numerous thread on FR.
The Catholics won!
What Catholic clergy does Bush associate with?
Last first: subsidiarity means that political decision-making should be devolved to the lowest possible level - i.e. that local communities should have a say in most of the policies that directly impact their lives. Clearly some questions - like the decision to go to war, immigration policy, etc. - naturally resolve themselves at the national level. But issues like education, taxation, etc. are best dealt with locally.
The preferential option for the poor means that in making policy decisions and when faced with several legitimate and moral possibilities, these decision should be made in such a way as to choose the policies that most help the least fortunate and most vulnerable.
The left side of the political spectrum among Catholics is inclined to scrap subsidiarity altogether in advocating redistributionary income polices at the federal level.
There is also a third element of Catholic social teaching which is forgotten by most commentators: voluntarism.
That is, the best way to help the poor is not by having the government cut them checks transferred from your tax receipts, but by giving your own money, your own time and your own skills and talents for the assistance of the poor in your community.
Authentic Catholic social teaching embraces the principles of subsidiarity and the preferential option for the poor exercised by the voluntary charitable acts of private citizens.
That is exactly the type of response I was looking for. Thank you for composing a well organized and well thought out post.
I don't have time to develop these themes right here and now, but let me say that just as the fraudulent, gassy "spirit of Vatican II" was used to subvert and nullify the religious doctrines of Vatican II, churchy Peace and Justice advocates have done their best to subvert and nullify the social doctrines of the Church.
I have had a lot of objections against some of Michael Novak's ideas over the years, but he has done some interesting and useful work wresting Catholic social/ethical proprietorship away from the pacifists and socialists.
The non-negotiables of Catholic political ethics are actually very, very firm but very, very few. Under the principle of subsidiarity, a centralized national state should really only be doing the things that ONLY a centralized national state can do. That'd be national defense, foreign and military policy, and upholding the rule of law to defend the Constitution and prevent fraud and aggression.
Once the protection of life (of everybody) is secured, almost all the rest is prudential, negotiable, private, local, voluntary, entrepreneurial, "the art of compromise" and "the art of the possible."
In other words, while the Gospel still places upon us very challenging demands, these demands are mostly met by practical liberty, which has very wide scope.
Or so I am prepared to argue.
We had a cute as a button 6 year old baptized today at Mass.
LOL, the priest called the youngster up and asked him if he knew his prayers.
God love him, the little guy was honest and said, "I know some of 'em."
The priest asked him to recite the Gloria, which he did very well.
He had a bit of a problem with the Our Father, though.If I recall it want something like this.
"Our Father who is Art in Heaven. How are you?"
Not so bad really, I recall my nephew coming home after school when he was in kindergarten wanting to know who Richard Stands was and was he really invisible.
I have no problem with moderate Muslims (like the guy featured in my tagline). Nor do I have a problem with Catholics other than those who use it as a covering for radical Marxists or racial reconquistadora politics. The same problem I have with Faux Christians like Rev. Wright and his hate whitey politics.
These are the good old days, aren’t they?
ping
What battles? You mean when the Huguenots ranged up and down the coast of Spain attacking tiny villages, destroying the churches, altars and statues, burning the church with the priest in it, and killing any Spaniard who couldn’t escape into the the hills fast enough? Even so, the Faith won, and that’s why there are a million Protestant “visions” and still only one Catholic Church.
Perhaps.
I love it! LOL!
Things are good with the TOL flock!
But...but...but...if he doesn't receive the Eucharist weekly, the FRCatholics will claim he's not a real Catholic....
“Subsidiarity” sounds like a Southern Baptist Doctrine. LOL!
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