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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2019 12:38:28 GMT
THE ECONOMY OF FRANCIS
On May 1st, day of the International Communist, Pope Francis signed a letter, which L’Osservatore Romano only published on May 12, 2019. In it he summoned young entrepreneurs and economists from all religions and all parts of the world to attend a meeting in Assisi on March 26-28, 2020. He invited them to join together in an effort to launch a new economy, which he names the Economy of Francis.Francis invites young economists and entrepreneurs to join his pact to change the economy
A first reaction to this name is one of surprise: Why is the Pope naming this initiative after himself? Doesn’t it look pretentious? Pope Francis has an escape: He is naming it after St. Francis of Assisi, and he will be meeting with those young people on the date when St. Francis divested himself of his bourgeois clothing and entered a new life, the life of Franciscan poverty. So, the name is ambivalent: Although many people will understand that the Economy of Francis is the economy of Pope Francis, he can safeguard his humility by saying that he is preaching an economy based on Franciscan poverty. It is a Jesuit mirror trick to confuse what will actually inspire this “new” economy. At any rate, we can clear up this confusion by stating that the Economy of Francis is how Pope Francis imagines an economy based on St. Francis of Assisi should be. Main guidelinesWhat are the principal characteristics of this economy? I will translate from the Italian text of the letter in L’Osservatore Romano:
- The event’s goal is “to make a pact to change today’s economy and give a soul to the economy
- of tomorrow”;
- The pretense for the name: St. Francis returns his clothing to his father to follow a new path Assisi, which is “the symbol and the message of a humanism of fraternity” [fraternity is a Freemasonic principle] was chosen as a place “to inspire a new economy”;
- St. Francis’ “choice to embrace poverty gave rise to a vision of economics that remains most timely”;
- This economy “gives hope to our future and brings benefits … to mankind as a whole. A vision that is also necessary for the fate of the entire planet, our common home, our sister Mother Earth…”; [Mother Earth is a pagan principle]
- “The safeguarding of the environment cannot be dissociated from ensuring justice for the poor and finding answers to the structural problems of the global economy”;
- “We need to correct models of growth incapable of guaranteeing respect for the environment…”;
- It is necessary “to set in motion a new economic model, the fruit of a culture of communion based on fraternity and equality”; [Freemasonic ideas]
- “The environment urgently demands a sound economy and a sustainable development that can heal its wounds and assure us of a dignified future”;
- “Given this urgency, each one of us is called to rethink his or her mental and moral priorities to bring them into greater conformity with God’s Commandments and the demands of the common good” [Socialism];
- “Dearest young people, I know you can hear in your hearts the ever more anguished cry of the earth and its poor…”;
- “Your organizations are workshops of hope for creating new ways of understanding the economy, … for combating the culture of waste, … and for proposing new styles of life” [New World Order?];
- “That is why I would like to meet you in Assisi, so that we can promote together, through a common pact, a process of global change.”
These are the basic guidelines of Pope Bergoglio’s letter.
Francis, at an Sustainable Development Goals conference, striving to unite all religions
[...] Once we are aware of Francis’ adhesion to Liberation Theology, we see that what counts for him is to destroy Capitalism in society, and Monarchy and Sacrality in the Church. Any other reasons appear to be nothing more than pretexts to reach these goals.
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2019 12:50:20 GMT
From the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia on Socialism:
These main points in the history of Socialism lead up to an examination of its spirit and intention. The best idealism of earlier times was fixed upon the soul rather than upon the body: exactly the opposite is the case with Socialism. Social questions are almost entirely questions of the body — public health, sanitation, housing, factory conditions, infant mortality, employment of women, hours of work, rates of wages, accidents, unemployment, pauperism, old age pensions, sickness, infirmity, lunacy, feeble-mindedness, intemperance, prostitution, physical deterioration. All these are excellent ends for activity in themselves, but all of them are mainly concerned with the care or cure of the body.
To use a Catholic phrase, they are opportunities for corporal works of mercy, which may lack the spiritual intention that would make them Christian. The material may be made a means to the spiritual, but is not to be considered an end in itself. This world is a place of probation, and the time is short. Man is here for a definite purpose, a purpose which transcends the limits of this mortal life, and his first business is to realize this purpose and carry it out with whatever help and guidance he may find. The purpose is a spiritual one, but he is free to choose or refuse the end for which he was created; he is free to neglect or to co-operate with the Divine assistance, which will give his life the stability and perfection of a spiritual rather than of a material nature. This being so, there must be a certain order in the nature of his development. He is not wholly spiritual nor wholly material; he has a soul, a mind, and a body; but the interests of the soul must be supreme, and the interests of mind and body must be brought into proper subservience to it. His movement towards perfection is by way of ascent; it is not easy; it requires continual exercise of the will, continual discipline, continual training — it is a warfare and a pilgrimage, and in it are two elements, the spiritual and the material, which are one in the unity of his daily life. As St. Paul pointed out, there must be a continual struggle between these two elements. If the individual life is to be a success, the spiritual desire must triumph, the material one must be subordinate, and when this is so the whole individual life is lived with proper economy, spiritual things being sought after as an end, while material things are used merely as a means to that end.
The point, then, to be observed is that the spiritual life is really the economic life. From the Christian point of view material necessities are to be kept at a minimum, and material superfluities as far as possible to be dispensed with altogether. The Christian is a soldier and a pilgrim who requires material things only as a means to fitness and nothing more. In this he has the example of Christ Himself, Who came to earth with a minimum of material advantages and persisted thus even to the Cross. The Christian, then, not only from the individual but also from the social standpoint, has chosen the better part. He does not despise this life, but, just because his material desires are subordinate to his spiritual ones, he lives it much more reasonably, much more unselfishly, much more beneficially to his neighbours.
The point, too, which he makes against the Socialist is this. The Socialist wishes to distribute material goods in such a way as to establish a substantial equality, and in order to do this he requires the State to make and keep this distribution compulsory. The Christian replies to him:
This ultimate difference between Christian and Socialist teaching must be clearly understood. Socialism appropriates all human desires and centres them on the here-and-now, on material benefit and prosperity. But material goods are so limited in quality, in quantity, and in duration that they are incapable of satisfying human desires, which will ever covet more and more and never feel satisfaction. In this Socialism and Capitalism are at one, for their only quarrel is over the bone upon which is the meat that perisheth. Socialism, of itself and by itself, can do nothing to diminish or discipline the immediate and materialistic lust of men, because Socialism is itself the most exaggerated and universalized expression of this lust yet known to history. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches and practices unselfish distribution of material goods, both according to the law of justice and according to the law of charity.
Again, ethically speaking, Socialism is committed to the doctrine of determinism. Holding that society makes the individuals of which it is composed, and not vice versa, it has quite lost touch with the invigorating Christian doctrine of free will. This fact may be illustrated by its attitude towards the three great institutions which have hitherto most strongly exemplified and protected that doctrine — the Church, the Family, and private ownership. Socialism, with its essentially materialistic nature, can admit no raison d'etre for a spiritual power, as complementary and superior to the secular power of the State. Man, as the creature of a material environment, and as the subject of a material State, has no moral responsibilities and can yield to no allegiance beyond that of the State. Any power which claims to appropriate and discipline his interior life, and which affords him sanctions that transcend all evolutionary and scientific determinism, must necessarily incur Socialist opposition.
So, too, with the Family. According to the prevalent Socialist teaching, the child stands between two authorities, that of its parents and that of the State, and of these the State is certainly the higher. The State therefore is endowed with the higher authority and with all powers of interference to be used at its own discretion. Contrast this with the Christian notion of the Family — an organic thing with an organic life of its own. The State, it is true, must ensure a proper basis for its economic life, but beyond that it should not interfere: its business is not to detach the members of the family from their body in order to make them separately and selfishly efficient; a member is cut off from its body only as a last resource to prevent organic poisoning. The business of the State is rather that of helping the Family to a healthy, co-operative, and productive unity. The State was never meant to appropriate to itself the main parental duties, it was rather meant to provide the parents, especially poor parents, with a wider, freer, healthier family sphere in which to be properly parental. Socialism, then, both in Church and Family, is impersonal and deterministic: it deprives the individual of both his religious and his domestic freedom. And it is exactly the same with the institution of private property.
The Christian doctrine of property can best be stated in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas:
If man, then, has the right to own, control, and use private property, the State cannot give him this right or take it away; it can only protect it. Here, of course, we are at issue with Socialism, for, according to it, the State is the supreme power from which all human rights are derived; it acknowledges no independent spiritual, domestic, or individual power whatever. In nothing is the bad economy of Socialism more evident than in its derogation or denial of all the truly personal and self-directive powers of human nature, and its misuse of such human qualities as it does not despise or deny is a plain confession of its material and deterministic limitations. It is true that the institutions of religion, of the family, and of private ownership are liable to great abuses, but the perfection of human effort and character demands a freedom of choice between good and evil as their first necessary condition. This area of free choice is provided, on the material side, by private ownership; on the spiritual and material, by the Christian Family; and on the purely spiritual by religion. The State, then, instead of depriving men of these opportunities of free and fine production, not only of material but also of intellectual values, should rather constitute itself as their defender.
In apparent contradiction, however, to much of the foregoing argument are the considerations put forward by numerous schools of "Christian Socialism", both Catholic and non-Catholic. It will be urged that there cannot really be the opposition between Socialism and Christianity that is here suggested, for, as a matter of fact, many excellent and intelligent persons in all countries are at once convinced Christians and ardent Socialists. Now, before it is possible to estimate correctly how far this undoubted fact can alter the conclusions arrived at above, certain premises must be noted. First, it is not practically possible to consider Socialism solely as an economic or social doctrine. It has long passed the stage of pure theory and attained the proportions of a movement: It is today a doctrine embodied in programmes, a system of thought and belief that is put forward as the vivifying principle of an active propaganda, a thing organically connected with the intellectual and moral activities of the millions who are its adherents.
[...]
The trend of the Socialist movement, then, and the deliberate pronouncements and habitual thought of leaders and followers alike, are almost universally found to be antagonistic to Christianity. Moreover, the other side of the question is but a confirmation of this antagonism. For all three popes who have come into contact with modern Socialism, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X, have formally condemned it, both as a general doctrine and with regard to specific points. The bishops and clergy, the lay experts on social and economic questions, the philosophers, the theologians, and practically the whole body of the faithful are unanimous in their acceptance of the condemnation. It is of little purpose to point out that the Socialism condemned is Marxism, and not Fabianism or its analogues in various countries. For, in the first place, the main principles common to all schools of Socialism have been explicitly condemned in Encyclicals like the "Rerum novarum" or the "Graves de communi"; and, in addition, as has been shown above, the main current of Socialism is still Marxist, and no adhesion to a movement professedly international can be acquitted of the guilt of lending support to the condemned doctrines. The Church, the Socialists, the very tendency of the movement do but confirm the antagonism of principle, indicated above, between Socialism and Christianity. The "Christian Socialists" of all countries, indeed, fall readily, upon examination, into one of three categories. Either they are very imperfectly Christian, as the Lutheran followers of Stocker and Naumann in Germany, or the Calvinist Socialists in France, or the numerous vaguely-doctrinal "Free-Church" Socialists in England and America; or, secondly, they are but very inaccurately styled "Socialist"; as were the group led by Kingsley, Maurice and Hughes in England, or "Catholic Democrats" like Ketteler, Manning, Descurtins, the "Sillonists"; or, thirdly, where there is an acceptance of the main Christian doctrine, side by side with the advocacy of Revolutionary Socialism, as is the case with the English "Guild of St. Matthew" or the New York Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labour, it can only be ascribed to that mental facility in holding at the same time incompatible doctrines, which is everywhere the mark of the "Catholic but not Roman" school. Christianity and Socialism are hopelessly incompatible, and the logic of events makes this ever clearer. It is true that, before the publication of the Encyclical "Rerum novarum", it was not unusual to apply the term "Christian Socialism" to the social reforms put forward throughout Europe by those Catholics who are earnestly endeavouring to restore the social philosophy of Catholicism to the position it occupied in the ages of Faith. But, under the guidance of Pope Leo XIII, that crusade against the social and economic iniquities of the present age is now more correctly styled "Christian Democracy", and no really instructed, loyal, and clear-thinking Catholic would now claim or accept the style of Christian Socialist.
To sum up, in the words of a capable anonymous writer in "The Quarterly Review", Socialism has for
[Emphasis - The Catacombs]
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