Posted on 11/10/2013 4:46:26 PM PST by ebb tide
Vaticanologists are making much of a major speech by one of the eight cardinals the pope has designated as leaders of reform, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.
The speech is ambitious: It offers a comprehensive re-reading of the Church’s role in politics, and of the government in economics. The cardinal makes bold, sweeping assertions in a tone as confident as Karl Marx or Ayn Rand: “With the New Evangelization we restart (start anew) from the beginning: we once more become the Church as proclaimer, servant, and Samaritan.”
Does the cardinal really mean that the Church ever ceased to be these things? If so, when? And by what authority does the speaker makes this implicit attack on all his predecessors? By the experience of the Church in Latin America, where large swaths of his flock have fled to Pentecostalism?
Which popes, precisely, is he accusing here:
Too many times [the Church] gives the impression of having too much certitude and too little doubt, freedom, dissension or dialogue. No more excommunicating the world, then, or trying to solve the world’s problems by returning to authoritarianism, rigidity and moralism, but instead keeping always the message of Jesus as her sole source of inspiration.
Such grand and unsupported attacks on an institution’s past are a common rhetorical device of revolutionary movements, which demonize the past, thus gaining the power to shape the future.
Power is the point here: For all his protestations of “humility” and “service,” the cardinal imagines a Church that will have extensive political and economic power, wielded through laymen and politicians whom it can mold. In what shape political and economic principles does he hope to mold them?
Cardinal Maradiaga makes his sympathies clear when he quotes as an authority on the morality of international investment the Swiss radical Jean Ziegler – a longtime defender of Fidel Castro, who has called the United States an “imperialist dictatorship”:
The globalization of the exchange of services, capital and patents has led over the past ten years to establish a world dictatorship of finance capital. . . .The lords of financial capital wield over billions of human beings a power of life and death. Through their investment strategies, their stock market speculations, their alliances, they decide day to day who has the right to live on this planet and who is doomed to die.
Ironically, Ziegler here denounces foreign investors for threatening poor people with death; on other occasions he has condemned the United States for forbidding its citizens to do business with Cuba.
Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga makes a point Globalization has helped tens of millions in long-impoverished places like India and China move from grinding poverty to relative prosperity – even as wealth stagnated or shrank in Europe and North America. Talented people in developing countries are no longer doomed to subsistence agriculture or foreign-aid handouts; increasingly, they can compete against better-paid, comparatively privileged workers in richer countries. This reality is something Jean Ziegler prefers to ignore.
The Cardinal elaborates on Ziegler’s conspiracy theory, writing himself:
The effects and consequences of the neoliberal dictatorships that rule democracies are not hard to uncover: they invade us with the industry of entertainment, they make us forget about human rights, they convince us that nothing can be done, that there is no possible alternative. To change the system, it would be necessary to destroy the power of the new feudal lords. Chimerical? Utopian?
The Church decidedly bets on living the globalization of mercy and solidarity.
So democracies like ours are “neoliberal dictatorships,” which the Church will help reform through the “globalization of mercy and solidarity,” that is, by helping governments to seize wealth from some people, skim its own share off the top, and distribute that wealth to others. Those “others” will doubtless be grateful, as Hugo Chavez’s supporters were in Venezuela; indeed, they will form powerful voting blocs dependent on state redistribution of wealth, as directed by humble clergymen.
This shows no awareness of decades of research about the true causes of poverty: the lack of clear property rights, political corruption, crony capitalism, populist politics, and centralized bureaucracy. Such problems cannot be solved by foreigners, but by local action to build up a culture of enterprise and institutions that protect small business owners. But it’s much more convenient, comfortable, and conducive to grabbing power to blame everything on the Yanquis.
The good cardinal has already shown in the past his proclivity for shifting blame. In May 2002, the cardinal explained who was really to blame for the sex abuse scandal: Jews in the media.
Tiny coteries of evil investors cause starvation in the developing world, while cabals of Jewish journalists try to smear the innocent bishops. Is it all clear now? Based on Manichean, conspiratorial analyses such as these, we humble, loving “Samaritans” must reject the pharisaical Church of the past, and march forward to use the guns and prisons of the state to enforce “mercy” and “solidarity” among the classes and the nations.
In Quod Apostolici Muneris, the great Leo XIII frankly condemned socialism as a Satanic counterfeit of the Gospel. If I might be permitted to cite this pope from the Church’s compromised past:
they assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one's mode of life. . . .But the boldness of these bad men, which day by day more and more threatens civil society with destruction, and strikes the souls of all with anxiety and fear, finds its cause and origin in those poisonous doctrines which, spread abroad in former times among the people, like evil seed bore in due time such fatal fruit.
We see that fruit today. And I’m not biting. Neither should you.
I think John Zmirak is right on here. From what I’ve read of Maradiaga, he’s a “Rupturist” and a left-wing political operator,
If that is the case, what is Pope Francis doing having him as one of the eight Cardinal advisors?
I’m continually looking for reasons to hope this pope is simply a misunderstood saint.
I’m continually disappointing in this search.
And the fact he's in a position of high power is another reason I refuse to associate myself anymore with the Catholic Church.
Amen to your comments. As a Catholic, I find this Pope’s continual daily comments to be rather scary. But then I should have known as he appears to be living up to his Jesuit culture.
Have you also elected to distance yourself from the faith and beliefs of the Catholic Church? No matter who is appointed, promoted, or elected, even a bad pope, I would never abandon those. Totally separate in my heart and mind from "staffing decisions".
**I refuse to associate myself anymore with the Catholic Church. **
Why are you saying this? will you answer my question since I am a Catholic?
You can’t put all Catholics in the same bucket, just as we can’t put all Presbyterians or all Baptists in the same bucket. We are all individuals, created by God!
I love the Catechism, I despise the vast majority of Catholics. Leadership and pewsitters alike. Liberal and conservative alike.
I see the destruction they spew on the world, and how they try to wrap it up in Jesus' name, and it makes me sick.
So, now I'm a Catechism loving Christian. The only thing I can do about the Catholic Church, other than pray about it, is vote with my feet. That seems to be the only thing they pay attention to.
See post 8.
However, I have to admit: among conservative Catholics, I saw a lot of public sinning, yet they felt that their devotions to various Catholic-isms (praying the rosary, saint trading cards, perpetual adoration) gave them a pass. It's like refusing to shower because you have such swell perfume.
Being unemployed this last year really opened up my eyes.
All Catholic Churches have what is called a Caritas or an Emergency fund. Did you ask for help?
Also most areas have a St. Vincent de Paul Society that can help you will bills, food, medication, etc. Back when my husband died, I took advantage of both of these resources, for with my five children from 9-10, it was quite difficult at times.
There are also community food banks in most areas. If you lived close to me, I would bring you some food right now!
Thank you, but I’m not in need that way, thank God. I had money piled up, and then a generous family.
However, I was in anguish, that’s for sure, and all I saw were holier-than-thou and supposedly conservative highly-placed in the Church Catholics that were (and still are) profiting from destroying our nation. (Even worse, many then took those profits and used them to fund religious pilgrimages.)
When I confronted them on it, they were excuse-making machines.
Try saying the same thing about the Jews, while you're in Germany, and see what happens.
I’ve been to Auschwitz, no thank you.
I’m not understanding how you think the Catholic Church is profiting. They are trying to build up our faith, not the nation.
Maybe you can explain further.
I don’t recall Christ despising the vast majority of any populations whether they were ethnic, racial, or religious populations. Do you?
All this to build up their depleted population of pew sitters. The steps they are doing right now are actively destroying the country.
And never forget: the Church fought hard for Obamacare, and only backed out when they couldn't get out the immoral mandate aspects. They share blame for this whole mess, as they were active agents in building momentum for it.
Please don't put the Catholic Church in the bucket for some Bishops.
BTW, are you aware that almost all the Bishops that were pushed forward by Bernardin and Jadot are retiring and have been replaced by very Orthodox and straight forward -- in line with the Church teachings? Most of the Catholics here on FR are very happy that Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis are replacing there unorthodox Bishops!!!
I see the actions - both active and passive - of many of pewsitters in the church - as leading to anguish and destruction.
As I hate anguish and destruction, especially when it impacts both me and the ones I love, I don't look too kindly upon those doing dishing it out. I tried redirecting these people to a non-disordered way of being, but they are stubborn and keep on leaving a trail of destruction.
I see no reason to greet such people with a sickly false smile.
Those are my words, and I stand by them.
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