You voted for Trump even though you didn't like him. Doubted his character. Questioned his fitness for the job. Yet, your aversion to Hillary was even greater The post To my Republican Friends first appeared on Spirit of a Liberal.
The Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MIPA) recently named Wormwood and Gall as one of three finalists for a Midwest Book Award in the Religion/Philosophy category. The awards program, which is organized by MIPA, recognizes quality in independent publishing in the Midwest. The post Wormwood and Gall a Midwest Book Award Finalist first appeared on S […]
Related Off-site Link:Mild Temps Sunday and Beyond – Ron Trenda (Minnesota Public Radio News, February 5, 2023).See also the previous Wild Reed posts:• Photo of the Day – January 20, 2023• Wintering• Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”• Brigit Anna McNeill on Hearing the Wild and Natural Call to Go Inwards• Winter Beauty• Winter Light• After Record-Breakin […]
I believe in the human capacity to learn from mistakes and to make amends, and that atonement should be rewarded not punished. Rep. Omar and I disagree regularly on policies, both domestic policy and foreign policy. She has made statements that [I experienced as] hurtful, painful and we have spoken about those. I do not believe that’s grounds for removal fro […]
Photo of Jean Vanier by Kotukaran, at Wikimedia CommonsOn 30 January, a study commission convoked by L'Arche International to look into the question of reports of sexual abuse of vulnerable women by L'Arche issued its report. Vanier founded L'Arche as a ministry supporting physically and mentally challenged people. The report produced by an in […]
As Rod McGuirk reports, as Cardinal Pell's funeral is held today, police have refused to permit LGBTQ-rights protesters outside the Catholic cathedral in Sydney, and have sought a court injunction against them.Pell famously refused to meet with his lesbian cousin, a former nun, to discuss Catholic teaching that LGBTQ human beings are "intrinsically […]
Archbishop Neinstedt gives the camera his best "I would never tell a lie" expression. I just finished reading Jennifer Hasselberger's deposition released by Jeff Anderson and Associates. The deposition was given for a civil suit against the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St Paul and involves child sexual abuse by a priest known to have serious se […]
A saint for the millenials: the young Italian teen, Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 of galloping Leukemia, will be beatified today in Assisi by Pope Francis (last step before being officially declared a saint). Carlo came from a luke warm Catholic family, but at the age of 7, when he received his first 'Holy Communion', he displayed an astonishing […]
(Jack Vidgen)Quite by accident, through a comment from a performance arts colleague of mine, I stumbled across the recent bios of two boy teen singing sensations, both of whom made a big splash worldwide 8 years ago. The first, Jack Vidgen, won Australia's Got Talent Contest in 2011 at the age of 14, primarily for his powerful renditions of Whitney Hust […]
Happy birthday today to Jamaican musician Bob Marley, who died in 1981. Here is Eric Clapton doing one of Marley's more well known songs, I Shot the Sheriff ...
The recent dust-up over the meeting between Pope Francis and culture warrior Kim Davis has caused the Pontiff’s stock to fall somewhat among liberals. Many of us felt let down by the pope’s opposition to marriage equality after his uplifting talk and formal declarations about confronting the causes of both global warming and economic inequality.
But with that said, it is for wiser to look at the Pope’s actions as opposed to individual statements. And for that reason he has put the Catholic Church on the trajectory for positive change.
As a liberal Catholic I can fully understand this disappointment many progressives felt when they learned that the pope and met with Kentucky marriage license clerk Kim Davis. On issues such as birth control, choice, and embryonic stem cell research I am in disagreement with the current pontiff. Those differences of theological opinion also extend to marriage equality.
Yet, I am not about to call it quits on this pope. His leadership on economics and the environment are historic and possibly world changing (That is certainly his goal). That is why I reject the recent claim of MSNBC host, Christopher Hayes that, “The Pope does not have your politics.”
And as a liberal and a cradle Catholic, I have learned to how to listen to the sometime esoteric meanings in discussions by Catholic clergy including those in the hierarchy as well as the many private conversations I have had with priests and nuns. And I combine that experience with the concept of trajectory: in politics or religion very few persons remain static; their ideas are almost always subject to change. What is indeed actually extremely difficult is effecting change within a 2000-year-old institution that tends to move very slowly, even glacially.
Pope Francis, at least officially, toes the Catholic Church’s teachings against marriage equality. Critics often point to his vehement exchanges while serving as a Cardinal with Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner over his opposition to gay marriage. But I suspect that he may be evolving, (albeit on a distinctly Catholic trajectory) just as politicians from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton have evolved.
Consider for example, where Abraham Lincoln stood on African-American citizenship before the Civil War and the very different place he stood at the time of his death. Think about where Lyndon Johnson stood on civil rights when he was a U.S. senator from the state of Texas and what he did as president of the United States. In Lincoln’s case he was on a progressive trajectory from seeing African-Americans as people to be liberated from slavery and then colonized overseas to the point where he understood their right to American citizenship. In Johnson’s case we see a man who went from being a supporter of segregation to being perhaps the single most effective president on civil rights. As a life-long Catholic I sense that something similar is happening with Pope Francis.
Many of us grew who grew up Catholic during the late 1960s and 1970s remember the priest who would not talk harshly about birth control or the divorced Catholics who received communion. The same sort of priest would often give, at best, only lip service to the Church position on choice. And when you would talk privately to such a priest he would advise you to simply “follow your conscience.” I detect the same qualities in Francis.
What separates Francis from his two immediate predecessors is that he is calling for discussion and debate on certain hot-button issues (at least those for Church conservatives) such as streamlining annulments and being more gracious to gay and lesbian Catholics. And to this certain gestures such as Francis’s recently memorialized meeting with a former student of his and his homosexual partner. All this leads me to conclude that Francis is internally wrestling with the issue of greater inclusion much in the same way Lincoln wrestled with the issue of ending slavery in the middle of the Civil War. I sense that even though he won’t (or seemingly cannot at the risk of schism) openly admit to this possibility he is trying to find a way to reconcile Church teaching to what he may believe in his soul is truly just.
The current pope is in charge of the Catholic Church that has been wandering in the wilderness the last 50 years. After the brief but enlightening papacy of Pope John XXIII, which ended in 1963, we experienced the sometimes progressive but often indecisive Pope Paul VI. It was under Paul where reactionaries could claim their first major victory in 10 years with the anti-birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae — this despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of clergy, theologians, and medical experts brought in by the Vatican to consult on the issue concluded that birth-control was not in conflict with principles of natural law. Then, after the all too brief reign of Pope John Paul I came the rule of more than 35 years of two conservative popes — John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
As a heterosexual Catholic I understand that I cannot fully appreciate the frustration that my fellow gay and lesbian co-religionists experience at this point. It is far too easy for me to plead patience when I am not rejected as much as they are rejected. But with that said, I do see reason for hope.
If I am indeed correct about Francis’s inner intentions, then he is going to need a lot of help. It will require the kind of external pressure that only groups such as DignityUSA can organize and bring to bear. But to bring about fuller inclusiveness a lot of the rest of us rank and file will have to play our part. We will have to voice our support for LGBT Catholics. This will help and encourage those in the hierarchy similarly wrestling with this issue will have the strength and support to speak their conscience with less fear of retribution.
In those 35-plus years many regressive things occurred. We saw the rise of Opus Dei within the church. American Catholic neoconservatives wielded too much power and influence in Rome. Hardliners such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Charles Chaput and others were elevated to positions of power. The American hierarchy in particular became saturated with Neo-conservatives and cultural warriors. Not surprisingly, many prominent members of the hierarchy serve as the Catholic auxiliary of the Republican Party. It will take time to refresh the Church with a distinctly Catholic identity again.
Francis has many enemies, both within and without the Catholic Church. He elicits edginess, defiance and sometimes rage from Church traditionalists and über-conservatives. But most of all he elicits fear from them. Why is that so? Simply because they understand the concept of trajectory.
As I have written before, Pope Francis is a Jesuit. Unlike many of the more reactionary forces within the Catholic Church the Jesuits thrive on open discussion. This terrifies many on the Catholic Right. From their own experience they know full well that ideas once considered radical can become mainstream. In our own American experience consider the trajectory of support for gay marriage. Only a generation ago many Americans rejected the idea. Now that it has been openly broached and discussed, marriage equality has progressed quickly from widespread acceptance to being held as a right by the highest court in the land.
The Catholic Right and their allies clearly recognize that Francis is not the culture warrior that his two immediate predecessors were. They fear that Francis will bring back the moderates and liberals who left the Church. They can see the more tolerant, more open-minded clergy that he is elevating into the hierarchy; clergy such as Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich who has called for more out reach to LGBT and divorced Catholics. This is their worst nightmare. As I have written here before it is their goal to make the church smaller and for more reactionary. Movement conservatives such as Opus Dei priest C. John McCloskey openly dream of a Catholic church where moderate and liberals are replaced by conservative evangelical members. The papacy of Pope Francis threatens this dystopian goal.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue goes after anyone he believes is engaging in anti-Catholic behavior, real or imagined. But as we have come to see, Donohue’s criteria for response depends less on the content of a statement as who makes it. And if the anti-Catholicism emanates from a religious libertarian conservative such as Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, mum’s the word. Donohue has frequently demonstrated this double standard since the ascendancy of Pope Francis.
What I did not realize was just how much more brutally ugly these comments would become – while at the same time the self-proclaimed Guardian of all things Catholic looks the other way.
On Thursday, September 24 I learned of this post at Daily Kos. Therein, the author links to this op-ed posted on FOXNews.com in which the network’s judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano accused Pope Francis of being quite possibly – among other things — “a false prophet.” Napolitano’s colorful comments included gems such as:
Now, here comes Pope Francis to use moral relativism to take the Church in two dangerous directions. The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market — two favorite political targets of the left.
And then:
In his papal exhortation on capitalism, Pope Francis spectacularly failed to appreciate the benefits of capitalism to the health, wealth and safety of the poor. Instead, he has reworked the Peronism of his youth to advocate government-mandated redistribution of wealth and to condemn those who work hard, employ others and achieve wealth — even when they give some of that wealth to the Church
For now, let us put aside the fact that the pope has never “reworked the Peronism of his youth” but is instead following basic Catholic doctrine on economics. Donohue’s language is nothing new for the Catholic Right. But what is new is this:
Pope Francis is popular on the world stage, and the crowds love him. But if he fails in his basic duties as the pope, if his concern is more for secular than sacred, if he aids the political agenda of the atheistic left, he is a false prophet leading his flock to a dangerous place, where there is more central planning and less personal liberty.
As the author in the aforementioned Daily Kos post noted, this is nasty stuff. The use of the description “false prophet” has its roots in the past anti-Catholic rhetoric.
The key point here is that this False Prophet is a leader on the world stage (significantly this is the exact phrase employed by Napolitano). He is a messenger of the Antichrist, appearing at his “right hand.” Napolitano leaves it to the imagination whom this Antichrist might be, but for a good number of Republicans it is in fact President Barack Obama.
This is the dog-whistle about Pope Francis now being transmitted by the Republican Party to its evangelical base. The right-wing Washington Times and Newsmax, neither of which I will link to, have also laid the “F” word [False] at the Pontiff’s feet this week, using the same terminology. The coordination among the right’s media organs reflects the degree of fear occasioned by the Pope’s embrace of what they consider “leftist” positions on climate change , and immigration, two of the GOP’s most sacred cows. The first, climate change, goes directly to the source of their funding, the fossil fuel industry, the most visible personages being Charles and David Koch. In terms of sheer political clout in the Republican Party nothing approaches fossil fuel conglomerates and their desire for deregulation permitting them to drill, dig and pollute at will. There is a reason that every single GOP’s Presidential hopeful either denies outright or claims insufficient knowledge of climate science. It is a required policy position demanded by their donors.
And as the writer correctly concluded of such intentions, “That is why this Pope must be marginalized at all costs.”
Where is Bill?
And all this raises the question, where is Catholic League president Bill Donohue? After all, this is the same man who sees anti-Catholicism in the way the Empire State Building does its nightly illuminations.
To his credit though, Donohue did properly condemn George Will for using his Washington Post column to conflate Catholic economics with Neo-Luddism. But then again, Will is an atheist; those on the Religious Right, however get preferential treatment. Donohue may well be attacking Will as an indirect way of attacking non-believers.
Interestingly enough, one of Donohue’s criticisms of Will went like this: “More important is his twisting of the pope’s position on materialism to mean that he is anti-electricity.”
That particular criticism carries a great deal of hypocrisy. More than likely it is an allusion to a passing reference in the recent encyclical on the environment Laudato Sii, (“Praised Be”). As I pointed out in an earlier post, it was originally the Catholic League President himself who attempted to make the document be about the condemnation of air conditioning. In reality, air-conditioning is mentioned only once in passing, in the book-length document.
Nor does Donohue complain about the absence of three conservative Catholic US Supreme Court justices — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — when Pope Francis spoke before Congress. That is a rather odd reaction from a man who would attack a liberal or moderate Catholic just for sneezing the wrong way.
But then again, there is a likely explanation: Scalia and Thomas are Opus Dei cooperators and Opus Dei has little or no love for the openness of the Jesuits (I have found no links between Alito and Opus Dei). For the record, the Catholic League board is loaded with Opus Dei sympathizers and actual members.
So, where is Bill Donohue on these instances of conservative disrespect and anti-Catholicism?
Where he always is — looking the other way. As I have pointed out again, again and again, this is his modus operandi.
Over the past year, Rachel Tabachnick and I have written a great deal about the Neo-Confederate elements of the Religious Right. I have focused upon Catholic Neo-Confederates Thomas DiLorenzo and especially Thomas E. Woods, Jr. They claim that without an individual state’s right to secede or at least nullify locally unpopular federal laws and judicial rulings, tyranny reigns. History not withstanding, they say that secession and nullification are necessary for the expansion of freedom.
I have argued that if Woods’ ideas were to prevail, the only freedom that would be expanded would be the freedom to oppress. That freedom to oppress has inglorious roots and those roots have a name that has faded into the fog of history. Its name is Mudsill.
Mudsill is a theory of economics that helps us better understand that the definition of liberty and freedom of the self-described libertarians of the Catholic Right is really about their belief in the right to oppress others.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a “mudsill” as 1. a supporting sill (as of a building or bridge) resting directly on a base and especially the earth; 2. a person of the lowest social level). The economic theory gets its name from an 1858 defense of slavery by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond.
“In all societies that must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Hammond declared. He further argued that this perennial underclass is necessary for the rest of society to move forward. He said that this class requires “a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites,” he said, “are vigor, docility, fidelity.” Hammond insisted that such a class is necessary to support “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”
Here is more from Hammond’s infamous Mudsill speech:
The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves.
It is worth noting that both Thomas DiLorenzo and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. are Catholic Neo-Confederates – modern-day advocates of the old Confederate cause combined with elements of nativism, religious chauvinism and caste consciousness. In addition to their embrace of Austrian economic principles (more on that point below), Neo-Confederates advocate the long discredited states’ rights theory of nullification — the notion that any state has the right to ignore any federal court order or law which that state has deemed unconstitutional. And a number of them – Woods, most preeminently – view states rights and nullification as a means to impose theocracy at the local level.
While not all libertarians are Neo-Confederates, Neo-Confederates of DiLorenzo’s and Woods’s ilk are certainly libertarians. This comes into focus when we consider the League of the South with which Woods proudly identifies and whose core economic beliefs are of the Austrian School variety: opposition to fractional banking; a return to the gold standard; and a general distrust government regulation that often borders on anarchy. (Indeed, Woods himself is devotee of anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard). DiLorenzo’s and Woods’s strain of libertarianism argues that these are essential elements of freedom.
Since the League of the South’s ideal of Southern independence, “Is structured upon the Biblical notion of hierarchy,” it is not surprising that most Neo-Confederates view the 14th Amendment as illegitimate. Indeed, the amendment’s due process clause that extends federal First Amendment guarantees of religious freedom to the states. Hence, these Neo-Confederates sometimes argue that while the federal government may not establish an official religion, individual states may do so.
“Labor is appraised like a commodity not because the entrepreneurs and capitalists are hardhearted and callous,” Austrian school leader Ludwig von Mises famously declared, “but because they are unconditionally subject to the supremacy of the pitiless consumers.”
Beyond their ruthless views of economics, Austrian schoolers apply the same principles to politics and government. They see dollars as ballots and the many considerations of government should be replaced by the supposed efficiencies of the free market. (DiLorenzo and Woods are both Senior Fellows at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama.) Of course, if dollars were ballots, then those with more determine electoral outcomes – which is antithetical to modern notions of democracy. If such ideas seem far-fetched, they are actually in open circulation. In February 2014, billionaire Tom Perkins suggested only half in jest, that this is the way it ought to be.
In any case, this view of economics and government brings us back to the origins of the Mudsill theory, which was primarily a justification of slavery which, in turn, is the root of modern libertarianism. “Mudsillism” allows for the select few to use other human beings to generate wealth without providing just compensation. And although we don’t call it that, Mudsillsm is resurgent in America as wages are stagnant or in decline despite the increases in worker productivity. Increasingly, average Americans work longer and harder while shareholders and executives are rewarded far beyond their contributions. And personal indebtedness to financial institutions replaces wages that, in turn, replaces liberty with dependence. Indeed, if libertarian economics were to prevail, the result would be local theocracies, restricted education, and the hierarchical economic castes.
Interestingly Mudsill helps us understand why DiLorenzo and Woods harbor so much animosity towards Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln understood that liberty is not narrowly defined as the ability to simply do as one pleases if the end result is foreseeable harm to others. Liberty exists within a structure of reciprocal rights and duties. Implicit within these is respect for human dignity, and by extension, the dignity of the worker. For Lincoln, that meant a baseline of no slavery, outright or constructive. As a logical extension, he believed that labor should be educated and not treated as “a blind horse upon a tread-mill.”
And just as Lincoln saw emancipation and citizenship as the logical means of perfecting the promise of equality, so too does contemporary liberalism see necessary legislation to prevent inequality built upon bad economic behavior.
Lincoln first took on Sen. Hammond at a Wisconsin State Fair in September 1859. Lincoln attacked Hammond’s Mudsill-based opposition to universal education. He observed, “According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious and dangerous.” But Lincoln did not fear an educated working class. Indeed, he boldly enunciated what would become a core belief of contemporary liberalism, stating, “In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.”
Lincoln’s demand for universal education raises derisive cackles from the likes of Woods who advocates homeschooling.
Lincoln knew that in the absence of universal education, access to better knowledge and skills is a privilege accorded to the few who can afford to buy it, and that the result was greater economic inequality. This means that a greater segment is suited to only the most menial tasks. Doing away with public education is one of the surest ways to ensure that most less-affluent Americans become that “blind horse upon a tread-mill.”
Lincoln’s demand to consider the dignity of the worker would later be taken up and expanded upon by Pope Leo XIII and his greatest American economic interpreter, Monsignor John A. Ryan. Both Leo’s and particularly Ryan’s calls for unionization, a living wage, and safe working conditions are on now bedrock principles of Catholic social teaching. Beyond that, through their influence on FDR’s New Deal they helped bring about a more just form of capitalism.
The Church’s teachings in this area stand in stark contrast to Mudsill. DiLorenzo and Woods know this and they don’t like it.
Like Juliet’s observation that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” so it is with Mudsill. We may call it something else these days, but it smells the same.
When a mob of conservative commentators led by Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business News morning host Stuart Varney recently red-baited Pope Francis, many of us wondered what the self-appointed defender of all-things-Catholic William Donohue would say.
As it turned out, given the choice between movement conservatives and those in line with Catholic economic teachings, the President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights attacked the pope’s defenders.
Now we know. But most of us are probably not surprised.
Pope Francis had dared to call out the inequities of laissez-faire capitalism, giving fits movement conservatives, long accustomed to a friendly Vatican focused almost exclusively on cultural war issues. The conservative pundits who hyperbolically miscast the pontiff’s recent encyclical as call to Marxist revolution didn’t know or didn’t care that Francis was articulating nothing more than good Catholic social teaching.
Indeed, Francis is clearly out of sync with Marx and Engels when he issued a renewed call for distributive justice; a cornerstone Catholic concept that calls for workers be able to earn enough to acquire private property.
But this did not stop many on the right from spinning this obvious laissez-fairytale. But when we listened for a full throated defense of the Holy Father from William Donohue, we heard nothing but crickets.
When the liberal Catholic group Catholics in Alliance actually challenged Limbaugh, saying what Donohue would not — Donohue changed the subject, raising a red herring argument about the group’s tax-exempt status.
For his part, Donohue offered a rather ho-hum defense of the pope in the online conservative journal Newsmax. In it, Donohue not only failed to criticize the red-baiting mob, but he failed to name the transgressors,
He did, however, manage to include this factually correct passage:
On economic issues, the Pope posits a clear animus toward unbridled capitalism, a view shared by his predecessors. But he is more pointed, rejecting “trickle-down” theories.
He is not rejecting a market-based economic model in favor of a socialist one — indeed he restates Catholic teaching on subsidiarity — but he is warning us against greed and the single-minded pursuit of profit.
Then he dropped the other shoe, seeking to deflect any criticism aimed at them.
“The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them,” Pope Francis says, “so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them.” This is welcome, but his focus on the structural causes of poverty, to the exclusion of the cultural causes, suggests an incomplete understanding of this issue. He is very much in the Latin American mode of thinking on this subject. [emphasis added]
The “Latin American mode of thinking?” By subtly suggesting that Francis is a proponent of Liberation Theology, he was issuing a dog whistle for rightists like David Horowitz who has described Liberation Theology as “Marxised Christianity”).
These things said, we should not be surprised to find William Donohue siding with movement conservatism over Catholic social teaching (Donohue is an adjunct scholar with the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation). He has repeatedly engaged in ad hominem attacks on people he sees as critical of his version of Catholicism — especially if that version of Catholicism is in line with laissez-faire, trickle-down economics. As I have reported, examples abound.
When Opus Dei bishop and culture warrior Robert Finn became pleaded guilty to criminal charges for failing to report an instance of child sex–abuse buy one of his diocesan priests, Donohue waged a scorched earth policy against both The Kansas City Star (the local newspaper that there the bulk of investigative reporting on the matter) and SNAP ( the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ).
When there was criticism of Mel Gibson’s controversial film Passion of the Christ for its not-so-subtle anti-Semitism (readily spotted by Catholics such as Sister Rose Thering and Fr. Andrew Greeley), Donohue lashed out by claiming, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.”
And this is not the first time that Donohue chosen the wrong side.
Several years ago when self-proclaimed rodeo clown Glenn Beck equated from notions of real Catholic social justice with the bigoted Rev. Charles Coughlin — a thinly veiled effort to equate the social justice teaching of the Church with fascism – Donohue sided with Beck over Catholic economic principles.
And when evangelical megachurch pastor (and fellow movement conservative) John Hagee was discovered at the time of his very public endorsement of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential run to have made anti-Catholic remarks it was Donohue who took this upon himself to absolve Hagee on behalf of Catholics everywhere.
Indeed, this is his standard operating procedure. What I observed about him three years ago still stands with necessary addendum:
Donohue does not in any way rebuke Beck (now in addition to Rush Limbaugh and Stuart Varney), let alone defend Catholic notions of Social Justice or such leaders as Monsignor Ryan, Robert Wagner, Sr. and Dorothy Day.
But this is nothing new. I’ve written before that for Donohue, movement conservatism always takes precedence over addressing anti-Catholicism.
Glenn Beck (as well as other conservatives) not only launched a frontal assault on Catholic theology, but provided an opportunity for Donohue’s Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to carry out its stated mission. That the League deflected for Beck and the others rather than standing up for the social justice teaching of the Church ought to be a singularly illuminating moment for American Catholicism.
If you are the victim of a pedophile priest demanding justice, then Donohue denounces you as “vicious and vindictive.” Yet if you are John Hagee, who, in Bill Donohue’s own words,, “…made a lot of money off bashing the Catholic Church and blames Catholics for the Holocaust…” you get on the Catholic League’s “A” list – even if you describe the Church as “the great whore of Revelation 17.” An apology will suffice provided you’re a player of the Religious Right. And if you falsely attack the Pope economics as “Marxist” you do not even have to apologize – as long as you are a political friend of Bill.
Rush Limbaugh and Stuart Varney seem to be confused and perplexed by Pope Francis’s recently encyclical, Evangelii Gadium (Joy of the Gospel). Perhaps the term “threatened” is a more accurate description. They have accused the pope of advocating Marxism in place of capitalism.
This is, of course stale, left-over McCarthyism — the same old game of slandering any sort of reform economics – even those solidly based upon capitalism — as either “Socialism” or “Marxism.” But what Limbaugh and Varney probably have no idea that His Holiness is advocating nothing more than “Good Catholic doctrine.”
Advocating Marxism?
Nowhere in the encyclical does Francis denounce capitalism. Nowhere does he call for the abolition of either private property or the private ownership of the means of production – two cornerstones of Marxism. Certainly, he is concerned about our priorities as a society: “How can it not be a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion.” Francis is also concerned about the acceptance of social Darwinism: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.” And like such mainstream economists as Robert Skidelsky, he observed that wealth is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself: “Money must serve, not rule!”
But Francis made one statement that made Limbaugh and Varney think they saw a Red:
Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.
“This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope,” Limbaugh bellowed. “…the Pope here has now gone beyond Catholicism here, and this is pure political.”
Varney added that “capitalism, in my opinion, is a liberator,” and he drew the analogy that Pope John Paul II knew that free markets were necessary because he grew up under communism. Varney claims that “markets work well for everyone.”
However, had they actually read the document, it is clear that Pope Francis was not calling for the abolition of capitalism, he was criticizing a particular style of capitalism: laissez-faire. In fairness, both commentators acknowledge that they are not Catholic, and they certainly demonstated ignorance about the teachings of the faith. That is, perhaps, the understatement of the day.
The Real Target: Distributive Justice
Limbaugh and Varney are really taking aim at is New Deal-inspired liberal economics – which is not about Marxism or destroying capitalism. Instead, it is about saving capitalism from those bad apples that would abuse it, seeing it only as a means to create non-meritorious wealth by dint of deceit and unscrupulousness.
Part and parcel of New Deal economics is Distributive Justice. Its roots are found in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Maimonides and adopted into Catholicism by Thomas Aquinas. And it is Aquinas who defines distributive justice as follows:
…in distributive justice something is given to a private individual, in so far as what belongs to the whole is due to the part, and in a quantity that is proportionate to the importance of the position of that part in respect of the whole. Consequently in distributive justice a person receives all the more of the common goods, according as he holds a more prominent position in the community. This prominence in an aristocratic community is gauged according to virtue, in an oligarchy according to wealth, in a democracy according to liberty, and in various ways according to various forms of community. Hence in distributive justice the mean is observed, not according to equality between thing and thing, but according to proportion between things and persons: in such a way that even as one person surpasses another, so that which is given to one person surpasses that which is allotted to another.(1)
Aquinas addresses something either Limbaugh or Varney conspicuously do not: a duty to distribute with provision to the poorest of society
That is why with the issuance of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum (Of New Things; subtitled, “The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”) Distributive Justice was adopted as the heart and soul of Catholic Economics.
What Is Distributive Justice?
The liberal economist Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945) outlined six canons for the distributive justice of wages. The first three, needs; arithmetic equality; and efforts and sacrifices are ethical in nature; while the next two, scarcity and comparative productivity, are economic in nature. Any one by itself, consummate to the product produced, would not pay a worker a just wage. And while laborers of superior talents deserve greater reward for their efforts and creativity, the first canon of needs is prominent and must always be the first to be satisfied. All five when properly balanced against each other results in the equitable distribution of wages as described by the sixth cannon, human welfare.
It is the all-too-common mischaracterization of the canon of arithmetic equality that gives rise to the accusation that liberals are “levelers,” “egalitarians” and of course, “Marxists” or “socialists.” Conservatives and neoconservatives often score points by taking this one canon of distributive justice argument out of context by interchangeably using the term “redistribution of wealth.” Our opponents erroneously claim that liberalism is about taking hard-earned income out of wealthier taxpayers’ pockets and redistributing it to the poor solely for the sake of soaking the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, the canons of distributive economic justice only apply when the employer enterprise can first provide his family with their basic needs. Secondly, it kicks in solely to justly distribute profits proportionately based upon meritorious contribution. Cleary, that is not Marxism but a fairer form of capitalism.
Modern distributive justice was first enunciated by Catholic progressives during the early 1890s and more clearly articulated in The Bishops’ Program of 1919. Led by economist-priest Monsignor John A. Ryan many in the Church were beginning to embrace the reformist ideas of the protestant Social Gospel movement then being pursued by progressive ministers such as Walter Rauschenbusch.
The Role of Progressive Taxation.
Progressive taxation has nothing to do with “the confiscation of wealth.” Such an interpretation is – once again – based upon a serious misunderstanding, focusing on only one of the six interdependent cannons of distributive justice: arithmetic equality. Instead progressive taxation seeks to maintain the wealth of those who succeed by playing by the rules. This means helping the middle class maintain a standard of living for which many of its members struggle every day to maintain.
It is not merely the percentage of taxes paid that defines justice, but the payment in proportion to wealth created by each individual after which the basic necessities of life have been first satisfied. The working poor and the lower echelons of the middle classes should not be forced to pay a flat tax rate equivalent to wealthier members of our society; the overwhelming majority of the former’s income goes to basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. They have little or no superfluous income. Thus, their tax burden should be the lightest.
Middle-class workers have a bit more superfluous income, but in light of their decreasing power in this area, care should be given to their tax burden. Yes, they should pay proportionately more than the poor, but always with the caveat that they fund many of our government programs.
If the middle-class or even lower echelon wealthy have some superfluous wealth by the dint of operating a small business that, too must be taken into account. The owner of a small trucking company or a produce distributor is more prone to suffer financial hardship than the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Furthermore, small business owners generally reinvest a greater proportion of their personally created wealth into their endeavors than does the hired executive. Because they are in the middle of the economic spectrum and reap the fewest benefits from the government, they naturally have a greater resentment of the abuse of tax revenue. They are the ones who, more and more, are struggling to maintain their measure of hard-earned wealth that they have created for themselves.
The stock conservative argument that our present tax system is one based upon “the envy of wealth” or “is a redistributer of wealth” is a fraud. Instead it is a value for value transaction-especially for the very wealthy. If the rich want to argue that a 90% or 70% top tax bracket is onerous, they may have a point. But having Bill Gates pay a federal tax rate of about 41% does not put a crimp in his lifestyle; he will not be denied self-development. In fact, in the early 1960s when the highest tax bracket was 90%, the conservative writer Willmoore Kendall proclaimed that if the top bracket were to be lowered to 40%, it would allow anyone to become “smacking rich.”
It is the wealthy who have the most to gain but who lately have been contributing the least. Yes, the rich are entitled to their rewards, but their wealth is their reward, not massive tax rebates. And if they want to protect their wealth, it does not come without a cost: A just and progressive taxation system.
Protecting wealth means paying for military and homeland defense, as well as for “first providers” such as police, fire fighters and EMS workers. Protecting wealth means having enough funds to ensure that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission can go after those who would engage in fraud and stock manipulation in an effort to unjustly separate the wealthy from their money. Protecting wealth means sufficiently funding the F.D.I.C. to protect citizens against bank failure.
The greater proportion of their tax burden does not come from income going primarily for basic necessities, but from overabundant, superfluous income. How can we bemoan their inability to buy a third or fourth vacation home when many hard-working Americans do not even have basic health care, let alone have the ability to purchase private property?
There is nothing wrong with being a millionaire. We should not discourage wealth creation, but encourage it. However, where we differ from the right is that wealth must gathered and maintained more fairly. Does this mean an egalitarian redistribution of wealth? No — but, it does mean adhering to the principle that our tax contributions fairly correlate with the benefits we receive the government.
On the False Charge of Marxism.
Distributive Justice capitalism is not Marxism — although that is what many of its critics on the Right falsely allege. Instead it is a third way that strives to ignore the arbitrary power that often results from the unchecked power that accompanies both Marxism and yes, laissez-faire capitalism.
Unlike Marxism, the model presented here still centers on the twin goals of private property ownership and profit motive. And unlike under Marxist regimes our government does not become the ultimate owner of property nor of the means of production. Instead, it acts as the umpire to assure that laws and mechanisms exist to allow workers to better bargain for a fairer share of private profits, safer working conditions and the ability to acquire private property.
Marxism desires to do away with both profit and private property. Distributive Justice concentrates on the democratization of capitalism through the fairer distribution of profits to all those who produced a given product or provided a specific service.
Capitalism at its best unleashes creative forces that have provided a vast improvement in standards of livings in many, many societies. But while capitalism is the most efficient vehicle across the board, it has also been uneven and sometimes unfair in its results. The trick is to make capitalism more democratic and thus more just.
For far too long this viable economic philosophy has been in the hands of buccaneer types who see market-based economics as an excuse to satisfy greed and do so under the guise of “economic freedom.” Clearly, there is no freedom for the collateral victims of economic practices that have no consideration for the common good. As we have seen in the 1920s and in the post-Reagan years, unfettered capitalists left to their own devices will only care about one thing and one thing only: maximizing profit. Government’s proper role is to not to eliminate their capitalistic instinct, but to prevent that instinct from causing unnecessary collateral harm.
The distributive justice model differs from the laissez-faire model is in its understanding that a just form of capitalism requires a sturdy government guarding against exhibitions of arbitrary economic power. Its mechanisms include the governmental oversight of financial institutions, progressive taxation and policies that favor the distribution of profit primarily based upon an individual’s contribution in creating such profit.
“Good Catholic Doctrine.”
This is far from the first time a Catholic has been called a Marxist or a Socialist for wanting to use the power of government to ensure that capitalism be fairer and less predatory. It is a battle that was being fought a hundred years ago often in the form of providing workers with safe working conditions.
Shortly after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, two prominent Catholic politicians took up the cause of Distributive Justice. They were then-New York State Senator Robert Wagner and then-Assembly Speaker Al Smith — two giants whose imprimatur would be on FDR’s New Deal. As Dave Von Drehle recounts in his book, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America:
The work of 1912 produced a series of new laws in the 1913 legislature that was unmatched to that time in American history. The Tammany Twins [Wagner and Smith] pushed through twenty-five bills, entirely recasting the labor laws of the nation’s largest state. There were more fire safety laws – by that point, two years after the Triangle fire, nearly every deficiency in the Asch Building [the site of the Triangle fire] had been addressed. Automatic sprinklers were required in high-rise buildings. Fire drills were mandatory in large shops. Doors had to be unlocked and had to swing outward. Other new laws enhanced protections for women and children and restricted manufacturing by poor families in their tenement apartments. To enforce the laws, the Factory Commission pushed through a complete reorganization of the State Department of Labor.
Business leaders didn’t quite know what had hit them. But gradually they started making their complaints known. Real estate interests, in particular, were upset by the number of safety modifications they were required to make. One member of the Factory Commission, Robert Dowling was a New York real estate man, and he often found himself dissenting from the sweeping recommendations pushed by the volunteer staff. (Eventually he resigned from the commission, blaming Francis Perkins, in particular, for going too far.) He saw it as his job to remind Wagner and Smith of the costs involved in their unprecedented reforms. During one executive session, he referred to the statistics on the number of people killed in factory fires. Notwithstanding the catastrophe at the Triangle, he ventured, “It is an infinitesimal proportion of the population.”
Mary Dreier was shocked. “But Mr. Dowling,” she cried, “they were men and women! They were human souls. It was a hundred percent for them.”
Smith jumped in on Dreier’s side. “That’s good Catholic doctrine, Robert! He declared.
Not Marxism or even socialism; as Al Smith said, just “good Catholic doctrine.”
—————-
(1) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, “Question 61: The Parts of Justice, Article 2.”
GOP Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has been playing up his Catholicism on issues such as abortion and stem cell research while seeming to throw his economic hero, Ayn Rand, under the bus.
His effort to be part-Randian, part-Catholic, while pretending not to be, has worn thinner and thinner as the election campaign has worn on.
If we compare the Ryan of 2005 when he more openly embraced Rand, to the Ryan of 2012, after his recent denunciation of the notorious atheist author it is clear that he still embraces much of her core economic outlook, which can be summarized, in her words, “This god, this one word: I.”
Speaking before the Atlas Society in 2005. (as recently exposed in America magazine), Paul Ryan said:
It’s so important that we go back to our roots to look at Ayn Rand’s vision, her writings, to see what our girding, under-grounding [sic] principles are. I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech (at Bill Taggart’s wedding) on money when I think about monetary policy. And then I go to the 64-page John Galt speech, you know, on the radio at the end, and go back to a lot of other things that she did, to try and make sure that I can check my premises so that I know that what I’m believing and doing and advancing are square with the key principles of individualism…
But in an August 14, 2012 interview with Fox News, he declared,
“Later in life I discovered what her philosophy was; it’s called Objectivism. It’s something I completely disagree with; it’s an atheistic philosophy.”
If, as he claims, Ryan has been reading Rand since he was a teenager, he couldn’t miss the atheism. The line in Atlas Shrugged for example: “…the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.”
But atheism is not all there is to Objectivism. The Atlas Society says Objectivism “rejects the ethics of self-sacrifice and renunciation.” That is also a rejection of Catholic economic principles.
What Ryan calls “later in life” may be translated as political visibility, as the author of the Republican budget plan. As recently as three years ago Ryan praised Rand’s economic “morality.” But as much as the Ryan of 2012 would like to, it is difficult to separate Rand’s “moral philosophy” from her particular variety of atheism, which is integral to Rand’s phrase, “This god, this one word: I.”
Rand’s sect of self eschews commonly held values of altruism which are also shared by many non-believers. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Ayn Rand equates any notion of commonality with the authoritarian and lopsided collectivist vision of the old Soviet Union. Rand and her fellow Objectivists ignore that among the tenets of liberal economics is that the component of personality is preserved by the realization of private property with the further understanding that even everyday workers require a sturdy government that will protect their ability to acquire property in a meritorious way. Rand’s view is atomistic, arrogant and unattractively selfish.
Consider Paul Ryan’s 2012 GOP convention speech:
None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers — a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.
Such a view echoes Rand:
“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”
This echoes the aforementioned 64 page rant by Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt:
This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth-in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.
Ryan and Galt share a disdain for those who believe in a system where they receive the benefits that maintain the quality of life – especially towards the end or while enduring disability when the means to support oneself – often becomes difficult. It is not just “I” as “god;” it is “I the superior human, made so by wealth” who would be “god.” It is a ruthlessly cold calculation.
While Atlas Shrugged is sometimes described as part science fiction, it is also in at least equal parts, also economic fiction, if not outright historical revisionism disguised as fiction. The book describes a middle-twentieth century world that never was. For example, although part of the American Marshall Plan was intended to help rebuild the industrial base of post World War II Europe, this is a far cry from making Europe dependent upon it foreign aid. Nor was the profit motive ever banished; it was just made more equitable – at least for a few decades.
That is not the only way in which fiction substitutes for history in the self regarding mind of Ayn Rand, who once wrote,
“Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.”
This idea, which we see drawn upon by Ryan and others on the Catholic Right, reveals much about the Randian economic fallacy.
What’s more, the very idea of redistribution as a means of achieving justice comes not originally from Marx, but from Rand’s own hero-philosopher, Aristotle.
Putting aside Rand’s avoidance of Aristotle’s teachings on distributive justice, she also missed one of Aristotle’s ultimate ends of justice: a good quality of life for a society’s citizens. Indeed, when the wealthiest hoard a share of profits beyond their contribution, provided skills and taken risk, that may trigger the ancient thinker’s other concern: Rectificatory Justice.
Rectificatory justice is the preventing or correcting injustices within transactions. It comes into play whether the transaction is mutually agreeable or forced.
It becomes an object of contention when seemingly voluntary transactions are in fact, forced — such as when one side consistently holds the upper hand, and therefore able to extract greater value than what has been given in return.
This is also evidenced in much of Catholic neoconservatism — such as Michael Novak’s excuse for deregulation, that capitalism is “for sinners.”
This is illustrated in Atlas Shrugged when John Galt was a asked how to fix the economy and he said simply, “Get the hell out of my way.”
This view assumes that parties all come to a negotiation of their own free will, free, ready to deal fairly and squarely. But that is rarely the case, because the laissez-faire version of capitalism contains no beforehand mechanisms for preventing fraud or malfeasance — nor for rectifying such injustices afterwards. It is much like claiming that football games would be more efficient without the rulebook and referees.
But Ryan and Novak are not the only Catholic Right characters who have embraced Randian buccaneer capitalism. Novak , who equates taxation with confiscation, for example, joins Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute who bemoans a positive role for government and Robert P. George who share’s Ayn Rand’s goldbuggery and zombie economics.
The Randian notion of the primacy of “the producers” finds its way into neocon George Weigel’s dismissal of the 2009 papal encyclical “Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) when he complained that there is “…more in the encyclical about the redistribution of wealth than about wealth-creation …”.
Even Rand’s use of the terms “moochers” and “parasites” – at one time used only by her closest devotees, has found its way into the lexicon of such Catholic Republican operatives as Mary Matalin.
Paul Ryan in his speech at the GOP convention in Tampa said, “…even presidents need reminding, that our rights come from nature and God, not from government.” Joseph McShane, S.J., the Jesuit biographer of Monsignor John A. Ryan provides the best retort to such an insufficient thought. He reminded us, as well as Paul Ryan, about the influential the American Catholic economic philosopher’s view of such things, and what our own Declaration of Independence acknowledges, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Catholics of Paul Ryan’s political persuasion tend ignore that inconvenient detail – as did Ayn Rand. Her “morality” is devoid of equity or, as it is known in Christian theology epikia. Beyond that, whether it be called Objectivism or miscast as representative of the Church’s doctrine of subsidiarity, it is hardly Catholic. Writing recently in the Jesuit journal America, theologian Vincent Miller described Ryan’s Objectivist-tinged vision:
This philosophy leaves no room for Catholic notions of Government in service to the common good, there is no room for a social conception of the human person. Rejection of Rand’s atheism notwithstanding, Ryan’s policies are based on a political philosophy completely at odds with the principles of Catholic Social Doctrine. “Prudence” is an insufficient measure of his proposals and the threat this philosophy poses to the Catholic faithful.
Like Paul Ryan, the many Randians on the Catholic Right have learned to reject Rand’s atheism as a cover for heartily embracing her narrow definition of liberty as the right to make money. And in so doing, they have replaced the cross with the dollar sign.
After sustaining a series of self-inflicted political wounds – particularly, the GOP nominee’s dismissal of 47% of the population — the Romney Campaign is scrambling for something analogous from Obama. The best that they could dig up, courtesy of Matt Drudge, is a statement from 1998 in which then State Senator Obama said he believes in a limited form of redistribution. Romney supporters now are running around the country equating Obama’s belief in liberal, New Deal-derived economics as either “Socialism” or “Marxism.”
An absurd assertion indeed! Marxism, particularly the Soviet model, is a form of anti-liberalism. But perhaps what would be more surprising to GOP’s would be Dynamic Duo is that the more accurate description would be “Good Catholic doctrine.”
New Deal-inspired liberal economics is not about Marxism or destroying capitalism. Instead, it is about saving capitalism from those bad apples that would abuse it, seeing it only as a means to create non-meritorious wealth by dint of deceit and unscrupulousness.
Part and parcel of New Deal economics is Distributive Justice. Its roots are found in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Maimonides and adopted into Catholicism by Thomas Aquinas. And it is Aquinas who defines distributive justice as follows:
…in distributive justice something is given to a private individual, in so far as what belongs to the whole is due to the part, and in a quantity that is proportionate to the importance of the position of that part in respect of the whole. Consequently in distributive justice a person receives all the more of the common goods, according as he holds a more prominent position in the community. This prominence in an aristocratic community is gauged according to virtue, in an oligarchy according to wealth, in a democracy according to liberty, and in various ways according to various forms of community. Hence in distributive justice the mean is observed, not according to equality between thing and thing, but according to proportion between things and persons: in such a way that even as one person surpasses another, so that which is given to one person surpasses that which is allotted to another.(1)
Aquinas addresses something either Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan or Ayn Rand conspicuously do not: a duty to distribute with provision to the poorest of society
That is why with the issuance of Pope Leo VIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum (Of New Things; subtitled, “The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”) Distributive Justice was adopted as the heart and soul of Catholic Economics.
What Is Distributive Justice?
The liberal economist Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945) outlined six canons for the distributive justice of wages. The first three, needs; arithmetic equality; and efforts and sacrifices are ethical in nature; while the next two, scarcity and comparative productivity, are economic in nature. Any one by itself, consummate to the product produced, would not pay a worker a just wage. And while laborers of superior talents deserve greater reward for their efforts and creativity, the first canon of needs is prominent and must always be the first to be satisfied. All five when properly balanced against each other results in the equitable distribution of wages as described by the sixth cannon, human welfare.
It is the all-too-common mischaracterization of the canon of arithmetic equality that gives rise to the accusation that liberals are “levelers,” “egalitarians” and of course, “Marxists” or “socialists.” Conservatives and neoconservatives often score points by taking this one canon of distributive justice argument out of context by interchangeably using the term “redistribution of wealth.” Our opponents erroneously claim that liberalism is about taking hard-earned income out of wealthier taxpayers’ pockets and redistributing it to the poor solely for the sake of soaking the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, the canons of distributive economic justice only apply when the employer enterprise can first provide his family with their basic needs. Secondly, it kicks in solely to justly distribute profits proportionately based upon meritorious contribution. Cleary, that is not Marxism but a fairer form of capitalism.
Modern distributive justice was first enunciated by Catholic progressives during the early 1890s and more clearly articulated in The Bishops’ Program of 1919. Led by economist-priest Monsignor John A. Ryan many in the Church were beginning to embrace the reformist ideas of the protestant Social Gospel movement then being pursued by progressive ministers such as Walter Rauschenbusch.
The Role of Progressive Taxation.
Progressive taxation has nothing to do with “the confiscation of wealth.” Such an interpretation is – once again – based upon a serious misunderstanding, focusing on only one of the six interdependent cannons of distributive justice: arithmetic equality. Instead progressive taxation seeks to maintain the wealth of those who succeed by playing by the rules. This means helping the middle class maintain a standard of living for which many of its members struggle every day to maintain.
It is not merely the percentage of taxes paid that defines justice, but the payment in proportion to wealth created by each individual after which the basic necessities of life have been first satisfied. The working poor and the lower echelons of the middle classes should not be forced to pay a flat tax rate equivalent to wealthier members of our society; the overwhelming majority of the former’s income goes to basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. They have little or no superfluous income. Thus, their tax burden should be the lightest.
Middle-class workers have a bit more superfluous income, but in light of their decreasing power in this area, care should be given to their tax burden. Yes, they should pay proportionately more than the poor, but always with the caveat that they fund many of our government programs.
If the middle-class or even lower echelon wealthy have some superfluous wealth by the dint of operating a small business that, too must be taken into account. The owner of a small trucking company or a produce distributor is more prone to suffer financial hardship than the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Furthermore, small business owners generally reinvest a greater proportion of their personally created wealth into their endeavors than does the hired executive. Because they are in the middle of the economic spectrum and reap the fewest benefits from the government, they naturally have a greater resentment of the abuse of tax revenue. They are the ones who, more and more, are struggling to maintain their measure of hard-earned wealth that they have created for themselves.
The stock conservative argument that our present tax system is one based upon “the envy of wealth” or “is a redistributer of wealth” is a fraud. Instead it is a value for value transaction-especially for the very wealthy. If the rich want to argue that a 90% or 70% top tax bracket is onerous, they may have a point. But having Bill Gates pay a federal tax rate of about 41% will not put a crimp in his lifestyle; he will not be denied self-development. In fact, in the early 1960s when the highest tax bracket was 90%, the conservative writer Willmoore Kendall proclaimed that if the top bracket were to be lowered to 40%, it would allow anyone to become “smacking rich.”
It is the wealthy who have the most to gain but who lately have been contributing the least. Yes, the rich are entitled to their rewards, but their wealth is their reward, not massive tax rebates. And if they want to protect their wealth, it does not come without a cost: A just and progressive taxation system.
Protecting wealth means paying for military and homeland defense, as well as for “first providers” such as police, fire fighters and EMS workers. Protecting wealth means having enough funds to ensure that the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission can go after those who would engage in fraud and stock manipulation in an effort to unjustly separate the wealthy from their money. Protecting wealth means sufficiently funding the F.D.I.C. to protect citizens against bank failure.
The greater proportion of their tax burden does not come from income going primarily for basic necessities, but from overabundant, superfluous income. How can we bemoan their inability to buy a third or fourth vacation home when many hard-working Americans do not even have basic health care, let alone have the ability to purchase private property?
There is nothing wrong with being a millionaire. We should not discourage wealth creation, but encourage it. However, where we differ from the right is that wealth must gathered and maintained more fairly. Does this mean an egalitarian redistribution of wealth? No — but, it does mean adhering to the principle that our tax contributions fairly correlate with the benefits we receive the government.
On the False Charge of Marxism.
Distributive Justice capitalism is not Marxism – although that is what many of its critics on the Right falsely allege. Instead it is a third way that strives to ignore the arbitrary power that often results from the unchecked power that accompanies both Marxism and yes, laissez-faire capitalism.
Unlike Marxism, the model presented here still centers on the twin goals of private property ownership and profit motive. And unlike under Marxist regimes our government does not become the ultimate owner of property nor of the means of production. Instead, it acts as the umpire to assure that laws and mechanisms exist to allow workers to better bargain for a fairer share of private profits, safer working conditions and the ability to acquire private property.
Marxism desires to do away with both profit and private property. Distributive Justice concentrates on the democratization of capitalism through the fairer distribution of profits to all those who produced a given product or provided a specific service.
Capitalism at its best unleashes creative forces that have provided a vast improvement in standards of livings in many, many societies. But while capitalism is the most efficient vehicle across the board, it has also been uneven and sometimes unfair in its results. The trick is to make capitalism more democratic and thus more just.
For far too long this viable economic philosophy has been in the hands of buccaneer types who see market-based economics as an excuse to satisfy greed and do so under the guise of “economic freedom.” Clearly, there is no freedom for the collateral victims of economic practices that have no consideration for the common good. As we have seen in the 1920s and in the post-Reagan years, unfettered capitalists left to their own devices will only care about one thing and one thing only: maximizing profit. Government’s proper role is to not to eliminate their capitalistic instinct, but to prevent that instinct from causing unnecessary collateral harm.
The distributive justice model differs from the laissez-faire model is in its understanding that a just form of capitalism requires a sturdy government guarding against exhibitions of arbitrary economic power. Its mechanisms include the governmental oversight oversight of financial institutions, progressive taxation and policies that favor the distribution of profit primarily based upon an individual’s contribution in creating such profit.
“Good Catholic Doctrine.”
This is far from the first time Liberals have been called Marxists or Socialists for wanting to use the power of government to ensure that capitalism be fairer and less predatory. It is a battle that was being fought a hundred years ago often in the form of providing workers with safe working conditions.
Shortly after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, two prominent Catholic politicians took up the cause of Distributive Justice. They were then-New York State Senator Robert Wagner and then-Assembly Speaker Al Smith – two giants whose imprimatur would be on FDR’s New Deal. As Dave Von Drehle recounts in pages 215-216 of his book, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America:
The work of 1912 produced a series of new laws in the 1913 legislature that was unmatched to that time in American history. The Tammany Twins [Wagner and Smith] pushed through twenty-five bills, entirely recasting the labor laws of the nation’s largest state. There were more fire safety laws – by that point, two years after the Triangle fire, nearly every deficiency in the Asch Building [the site of the Triangle fire] had been addressed. Automatic sprinklers were required in high-rise buildings. Fire drills were mandatory in large shops. Doors had to be unlocked and had to swing outward. Other new laws enhanced protections for women and children and restricted manufacturing by poor families in their tenement apartments. To enforce the laws, the Factory Commission pushed through a complete reorganization of the State Department of Labor.
Business leaders didn’t quite know what had hit them. But gradually they started making their complaints known.. Real estate interests, in particular, were upset by the number of safety modifications they were required to make. One member of the Factory Commission, Robert Dowling was a New York real estate man, and he often found himself dissenting from the sweeping recommendations pushed by the volunteer staff. (Eventually he resigned from the commission, blaming Francis Perkins, in particular, for going too far.) He saw it as his job to remind Wagner and Smith of the costs involved in their unprecedented reforms. During one executive session, he referred to the statistics on the number of people killed in factory fires. Notwithstanding the catastrophe at the Triangle, he ventured, “It is an infinitesimal proportion of the population.”
Mary Dreier was shocked. “Bur Mr. Dowling,” she cried, “they were men and women! They were human souls. It was a hundred percent for them.”
Smith jumped in on Dreier’s side. “That’s good Catholic doctrine, Robert! He declared.
Not Marxism or even socialism; as Al Smith said, just “good Catholic doctrine.”
—————-
(1) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, “Question 61: The Parts of Justice, Article 2.”
Fr. Thomas Reese posted a statement Friday at the Holy Post blog site saying that on Monday, Pope Benedict will issue a document about the reform of the international financial system that will be closer to the views of Occupy Wall Street than to those of the U.S. Congress–and far to the left of where any American politician stands. According to Reese, the document will focus on the dignity of the individual and the demands of justice, as we assess the morality of economic systems. Continue reading →
Catholic Right activist Deal Hudson features an article on the web site of his new venture Catholic Advocate — which presents House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal as a model of Catholic economic thought.
But if Catholicity is the standard, Hudson has a tough sell — since Ryan is a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness as virtue.
In a recent essay for the Roosevelt Institute, I explored Ryan’s affinity for Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism.” In it, I cited Ryan’s 2009 Facebookposting in which he equates Rand’s morality with freedom and individualism, and effusively praises the secular saint of selfishness. I wrote:
He boldly declared, “And a lot of people would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel — and metaphorically speaking.” He elaborated, “But more to the point is this: The issue that is under assault, the attack on democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America is an attack on the moral foundation of America.”
In that video, the Wisconsin congressman went on to proclaim:
And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. And this to me is what matters the most: it is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or that the health care plan does not work, or this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now; and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack.
As I then noted of Ryan’s lessons drawn from reading Rand, altruism deters excellence; and only selfishness breeds true success.
Yet Congressman Ryan’s plan is truly “The Path to Prosperity” — that is, if you already have substantial wealth. Asking no sacrifice of upper income earners, it lowers the top federal tax rate from 35% to 25%. But the rest of us watch Social Security go from being a secure old-age insurance plan to being a Wall Street crap shoot while Medicare gets eviscerated by replacing direct payments with an ineffective voucher program topping off at $15,000. Newt Gingrich was spot-on when he described the Ryan plan as “right-wing social engineering.”
In Atlas Shrugged Rand ridicules government assistance, casting it in the worst light possible. Any character who is not “a producer” is treated as either a “parasite” or “a moocher.” Rand portrays as villains starving European states, that in the book are being fed with aid that has been stolen from Americans through taxation. In fact, one of the books heroes, Ragnar Danneskjöld, is something of a pirate who attacks and destroys European-bound food convoys. He speaks of wanting to destroy the legacy of Robin Hood because, “He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.” He then describes himself as “… the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich — or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”
Rand’s characters thump their chests and say that they ‘only want to make money’ — but they have little to say about how they treat their employees, or wages and working conditions. Rand’s protagonists also do not consider the collateral effects of their economic activities such as pollution or monopoly due to unethical business practices. This is a major difference between Randism and anything remotely like Catholic economic thought.
But such things clearly do not trouble Quin Hillyer, a Senior Editor at the The American Spectator and author of the Catholic Advocate essay about the Catholicity of the Ryan budget plan. Indeed, Hillyer grossly misrepresents Catholic social teaching — especially in explaining the principle of subsidiarity (more on that below). To accomplish this, Hillyer selectively quotes from Centesimus Annus literally meaning “one hundredth year;” referring to the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark papal encyclical on Catholic economics.
In Centesimus Annus, PJPII [Pope John Paul II] wrote that an uncontrolled Welfare State “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
But Hillyer distorts John Paul II’s message by omitting such important points as:
A workman’s wages should be sufficient to enable him to support himself, his wife and his children. “If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accepts harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice”.
Would that these words, written at a time when what has been called “unbridled capitalism” was pressing forward, should not have to be repeated today with the same severity. Unfortunately, even today one finds instances of contracts between employers and employees which lack reference to the most elementary justice regarding the employment of children or women, working hours, the hygienic condition of the work-place and fair pay; and this is the case despite the International Declarations and Conventions on the subject and the internal laws of States. The Pope attributed to the “public authority” the “strict duty” of providing properly for the welfare of the workers, because a failure to do so violates justice; indeed, he did not hesitate to speak of “distributive justice”.
Hillyer also deviates sharply from the unambiguous meaning of the encyclical:
“When there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the defenseless and the poor have a claim to special consideration. The richer class has many ways of shielding itself, and stands less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back on, and must chiefly depend on the assistance of the State. It is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong to the latter class, should be specially cared for and protected by the Government”
John Paul II also discusses whether capitalism should be the path taken by the Eastern European countries that threw-off Soviet domination in the 1990s.
If by “capitalism” [it] is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” [it] is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.
Hudson has previously dissembled on the concept of subsidiarity — the idea that aid should be provided by the most local of governmental agencies possible. Thus it is no surprise to see him feature Hillyer’s piece.
But Hillyer has to reach into obscurity to find a seemingly authoritative Catholic root for Ryan’s plan. He cites an 1883 Catechism pronouncement, “Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative.” However, doing this requires him to ignore Pope Leo XIII’s admonition in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum:
“Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers, or it is threatened with evils which can in no other way be met, the public authority must step in to meet them.'”
As well as:
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.
In grounding his argument in an 1883 catechism, Hillyer ignores the entire modern history of Catholic economic thought. For example, in 1919, the American bishops issued their program for social reconstruction that recognized the critical role government is required to play to bring about true reform for the less powerful. Therein, they called for the federal government to provide retirement insurance (an idea that would evolve into what we now call Social Security), public housing for the working class and some early ideas about municipal health care. Beyond that, there is a necessary role for a sturdy national government in protecting institutions of the common good.
While subsidiarity calls for the most local response possible, it does not — as Hudson and Hillyer insinuate — rule out responses by higher levels of government when that is the most effective means possible.
In our recent essay, (The Randian Fault That Could Shake Conservatism), Frederick Clarkson and I discussed how Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism — which celebrates selfishness as a virtue; declares religious faith to be incompatible with reason; and altruism — including self-sacrifice – to be a vice. As we then noted, such a view is very far from the vision of most conservative Christians and suggests a deep fault line just below the normal fractiousness of the active factions of conservatism. After all, how can any Christian justify “morality” such as this:
“According to the Christian mythology, [Christ] died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the non-ideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”
“If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that…” said Rand in that 1964 interview. This should give pause to anyone who claims to be a follower of both Rand and Christ — certainly someone such as Rep. Paul Ryan.
This fault line is wider and deeper and increasingly out in the open in mainstream Catholicism. And that Deal Hudson, Paul Ryan and their ilk have more in common with Ayn Rand than they do with even the most conservative Popes, tells us all we need to know.
Catholic social teaching has recognized the right of workers to organize since Pope Leo XIII’s 1891papal encyclical Rerum Novarum. This was soon followed by the the American bishops’ groundbreaking Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction (ghostwritten for them by Monsignor John A. Ryan). The bishops declared that they recognized “the right of labor to organize; and to deal with employers through its chosen representatives…”
Unsurprisingly, Catholics in America have long been front and center in organized labor, from the old Knights of Labor; the Italian seamstresses of the ILGWU to Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers, and Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO. The rights and well being of working people is unquestionably a Catholic issue.
That is why the silence of Bishop Robert Morlino Madison, Wisconsin — except to call for neutrality as public employees struggle to maintain the right to collectively bargain — has been a mystery.
Morlino’s stance contrasts sharply with the statement from Jerome E. Listecki, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Listecki issued a statement that quoted directly from the recent papal encyclical (which had been criticized by Catholic conservatives such as George Weigel): Caritas in veritate:
The repeated calls issued within the Church’s social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum [60], for the promotion of workers’ associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honored today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level
A similar statement of support was issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
But Bishop Morlino framed his statement differently. Entitled “Clarifying the Fairness Issue,” he stressed taking “a neutral stance.” .
As if on cue, the Catholic Right spin machine kicked into high gear. Father Robert Sirico, head of the Acton Institute joined in Morlino’s wet blanket brigade, claiming: “As the social-teaching tradition has stated consistently, the Church has not (sic) specific economic or political policy prescriptions to offer.”
Piet Levy, a writer for Religion News Service saw the situation clearly. In an article entitled, “Wisconsin Dispute Exposes Catholic Split on Unions,” Levy wrote:
Morlino, writing in his diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Herald, said he and the statewide Wisconsin Catholic Conference were neutral, even though the Catholic Church has long sided with the rights of unionized workers.
Levy noted Morlino’s standing among the Catholic Right:
To be sure, Morlino has emerged as a hero of the Catholic right. In the heat of the 2008 campaign, he blasted vice presidential nominee Joe Biden and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “stepping on the pope’s turf — and mine” in appealing to church fathers for their support of abortion rights.
In 2009, Morlino fired a female church worker for using male and female imagery for God in her 2003 Master’s thesis.
Levy also cited Marquette University political science professor Michael Fleet’s critique of the bishop’s motives:
“Obviously (Morlino) wouldn’t have written (his letter) unless some clarification or reframing was necessary,” he said. “If you think about it, Morlino would write a short letter if he agreed with Listecki, but he wrote a longer letter articulating how (Listecki’s statement) should be understood.”
In his “clarifying” statement Morlino commented, “Believe it or not, I frequently try to avoid weighing in-on certain situations.” (That statement is more laughable than he could have ever imagined.)
The mystery of Madison lingered until the publication of an interview with Fr. Sirico revealed what may really be going on:
Father Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, a free-market think tank, suggested that the bishops’ response to the union protests marked a new era of episcopal leadership and a more nuanced understanding of economic realities in the United States.
He noted that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI had sought to reorient an overly politicized approach to social justice concerns and that new Catholic leaders had responded to this new direction. “Politics is not the governing hermeneutic of the Church,” said Father Sirico, “but for many years politics was the whole paradigm through which everything was seen.”
But he also suggested the Wisconsin bishops’ stance implicitly acknowledged “the changing reality of the American Catholic population as a whole. “The only sector of union membership that is growing is public unions,” he said. “That is highly problematic from a Catholic point of view, because these public unions publicly favor abortion rights and ‘gay marriage’ and seek to undercut the Church’s agenda on social questions.” [my emphasis in bold]
If what Sirico is saying is, in fact, the reason for Morino’s stance, it may be first time union busting has been promoted in the service of anti-abortionism and opposition to gay rights.
While Archbishop Listecki and the other members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops are certainly anti-abortion, Morlino and Sirico are willing to sacrifice the well being of fellow Catholics and all other workers in order to win their culture war. And if the right for public workers to collectively bargain is ultimately destroyed, it is because a highly attenuated reading of Catholic theology has been employed to serve mammon and not God.
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Bill Donohue Mum While Andrew Napolitano Calls Pope Francis “A False Prophet”
Originally posted at Talk to Action.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue goes after anyone he believes is engaging in anti-Catholic behavior, real or imagined. But as we have come to see, Donohue’s criteria for response depends less on the content of a statement as who makes it. And if the anti-Catholicism emanates from a religious libertarian conservative such as Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, mum’s the word. Donohue has frequently demonstrated this double standard since the ascendancy of Pope Francis.
What I did not realize was just how much more brutally ugly these comments would become – while at the same time the self-proclaimed Guardian of all things Catholic looks the other way.
On Thursday, September 24 I learned of this post at Daily Kos. Therein, the author links to this op-ed posted on FOXNews.com in which the network’s judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano accused Pope Francis of being quite possibly – among other things — “a false prophet.” Napolitano’s colorful comments included gems such as:
And then:
For now, let us put aside the fact that the pope has never “reworked the Peronism of his youth” but is instead following basic Catholic doctrine on economics. Donohue’s language is nothing new for the Catholic Right. But what is new is this:
As the author in the aforementioned Daily Kos post noted, this is nasty stuff. The use of the description “false prophet” has its roots in the past anti-Catholic rhetoric.
And as the writer correctly concluded of such intentions, “That is why this Pope must be marginalized at all costs.”
Where is Bill?
And all this raises the question, where is Catholic League president Bill Donohue? After all, this is the same man who sees anti-Catholicism in the way the Empire State Building does its nightly illuminations.
To his credit though, Donohue did properly condemn George Will for using his Washington Post column to conflate Catholic economics with Neo-Luddism. But then again, Will is an atheist; those on the Religious Right, however get preferential treatment. Donohue may well be attacking Will as an indirect way of attacking non-believers.
Interestingly enough, one of Donohue’s criticisms of Will went like this: “More important is his twisting of the pope’s position on materialism to mean that he is anti-electricity.”
That particular criticism carries a great deal of hypocrisy. More than likely it is an allusion to a passing reference in the recent encyclical on the environment Laudato Sii, (“Praised Be”). As I pointed out in an earlier post, it was originally the Catholic League President himself who attempted to make the document be about the condemnation of air conditioning. In reality, air-conditioning is mentioned only once in passing, in the book-length document.
Nor does Donohue complain about the absence of three conservative Catholic US Supreme Court justices — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — when Pope Francis spoke before Congress. That is a rather odd reaction from a man who would attack a liberal or moderate Catholic just for sneezing the wrong way.
But then again, there is a likely explanation: Scalia and Thomas are Opus Dei cooperators and Opus Dei has little or no love for the openness of the Jesuits (I have found no links between Alito and Opus Dei). For the record, the Catholic League board is loaded with Opus Dei sympathizers and actual members.
So, where is Bill Donohue on these instances of conservative disrespect and anti-Catholicism?
Where he always is — looking the other way. As I have pointed out again, again and again, this is his modus operandi.
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