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.
My novus ordo parish church demands parental education for the baptism of every single child a couple has, even if they and their children are at Mass every Sunday. The classes are taught by ignorant lay people, the classes are few and far between, and they have delayed infant baptism by as much as three months. In my opinion, it’s a moral crime to delay infant baptism for so long.
“everything allowed, everything “on demand” like an entitlement or a public utility, nothing required”
Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t we entitled to the Sacraments, bars thereto aside.
“We need to keep in mind that what is important about the Mass is not the infidelity of men but the fidelity of God, who makes the Mass valid not by our virtue, but by His promise.”
That’s great. Is it original?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3089784/posts?page=61#61
If so, it does seem to be an imposition and a maddening aggravation. And if it gets on to long delays like 3 months, that's a real offense against the sacrament.
I'm thinking if my husband and I were in that situation, the best tactic might be to go to one of these classes sometime during the course of the pregnancy (you do have a nine-month window of opportunity there) so the baby could still be baptized within days of birth.
And use the class to raise your hand, make additions or corrections to the ignorant catechist's presentation, and use the whole thing as a grand opportunity to do a little remedial catechesis.
If you do it assertively enough, they may waive the requirement that you come back for Babies #2, 3, and 4!
“You might wonder why I’m going after this “gay” detour, but it’s relevant for this reason: people are increasingly splitting off the Sacrament of Baptism from the Church, and using it as yet another way to celebrate “themselves”.
That is a significant problem.
As for answers to these issues, I have few, and doubt those.
Yes, generally; but you are not allowed to baptize an infant if the parents or guardians are not going to raise him as a Catholic Christian; and especially if the parents or guardians are using this as a political statement. There has to be correct intent. That's why the Archbishop in Minneapolis won't distribute Holy Communion to those people with the Rainbow Sashes.
I'd love to invite a Canon Lawyer into this discussion to clarify things, because my knowledge is admittedly scanty. Any Canon Lawyers here? Arthur, would you serve? (You'll have to go back a couple of posts to get context.)
This complaint always amuses me.
The Catholic Church, the one that exercises iron control over the minds of its least member, the Church with a Pope who issues orders every morning telling all his minions what to do, how to vote, etc., etc.
You mean, you mean...If you miss Mass on Sunday, nobody makes harassing phone calls, nobody pickets your house...???
Of all the lame excuses to abandon the Sacraments...
“There has to be correct intent.”
There is.
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