Thread: VATICAN ENGINEERED VICTORY FOR PELOSICARE

VATICAN ENGINEERED VICTORY FOR PELOSICARE

By Cliff Kincaid
November 10, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

In a story about why the U.S. Catholic Bishops have embraced Democratic-style universal health care, the Los Angeles Times noted that the Roman Catholic Church considers healthcare a basic human right, “a position the church has articulated since 1963, when it was included in a papal encyclical by Pope John XXIII.â€

Jesus said it best, about rendering to Caesar and rendering to God. Vatican forays into economic theory can go sadly and badly astray.

Redistributionist notions advanced by any so-called religious leaders as essential tenets of their faith should be held up to the plain light of day with those leaders asked, point-blank, is "salvation" a function of COLLECTIVIZED and COERCED action in your religion? Or does your religion profess a belief in FREE WILL and man's INDIVIDUAL SALVATION through faith and CHARITABLE ACTION?

It's one area where I've "gotten into it" (heated debates) with people from my R.C. religion.

The Pontiff's July release of this document ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/world ... .html?_r=1

had its best critique (gold for "Catholic thought" and red for the "socialist inclined influences") in this article, I felt ...

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NT ... FkM2ZiMmE=

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which imagines itself the curial keeper of the flame of authentic Catholic social teaching, prepared a draft, which was duly sent to Pope John Paul II — who had already had a bad experience with the conventionally gauchiste and not-very-original thinking at Justice and Peace during the preparation of the 1987 social encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. John Paul shared the proposed draft with colleagues in whose judgment he reposed trust; one prominent intellectual who had long been in conversation with the Pope told him that the draft was unacceptable, in that it simply did not reflect the way the global economy of the post–Cold War world worked.

So John Paul dumped the Justice and Peace draft and crafted an encyclical that was a fitting commemoration of Rerum Novarum. For Centesimus Annus not only summarized deftly the intellectual structure of Catholic social doctrine since Leo XIII; it proposed a bold trajectory for the further development of this unique body of thought, emphasizing the priority of culture in the threefold free society (free economy, democratic polity, vibrant public moral culture). By stressing human creativity as the source of the wealth of nations, Centesimus Annus also displayed a far more empirically acute reading of the economic signs of the times than was evident in the default positions at Justice and Peace.

[quote]It was, in a word, a rout — the Waterloo for Justice and Peace. Ever since, Justice and Peace — which may forgive but certainly does not forget — has been pining for revenge. It didn’t get it during the last years of the pontificate of John Paul II, despite efforts to persuade the Pope to mark the 30th anniversary of Paul VI’s 1967 social encyclical, Populorum Progressio, with a major statement — or, when that stratagem failed, to mark Populorum Progressio’s 35th anniversary. Evidently incapable of taking “Noâ€