What’s Become of The Catholic Church? (by ContraSuggest)

In the wake of the destruction following the reelection of President Obama, and after lengthy discussions with several good friends (solid conservatives all) I now understand the need to address several paramount issues. 

Of foremost importance is the tragic fact that poorly catechized Catholic Americans greatly contributed to Obama’s reelection by voting for him in large numbers (Catholic Hispanics by a much wider margin than white Catholics).  “Liberal Catholics,” whatever their ethnic backgrounds, are able to justify their mistaken, leftist view of Catholic doctrine only with the aid of liberal U.S. priests and bishops, who infest the Church, and shamelessly continue to traffic in heretical pedagogy.  We need clear distinctions here: Catholic doctrine as taught by the Church Magisterium is unerring; leftist apostate priests and bishops violate that doctrine and fail to properly extend it to everyday political issues. 

I intend to illustrate several things here.  First; how the Church came to be riddled with leftist clergy who fill lay people’s heads with all sorts of un-doctrinal falsehoods.  Second; I will dispel, once and for all, the false, pitiable belief that “Jesus was not political; therefore Catholics should not be political either.”  And finally; I’ll show how conservative economic principles are consistent with Catholic doctrine on a specific, issue by issue basis. 

The Tragedy of Vatican II:

One of the great self-inflicted wounds of the Catholic Church, especially in America, was suffered by the misapprehensions surrounding Vatican II.  The intent of the Second Vatican Council (convened in the early 1960s by Pope John XXIII) was for the Church to meet the destructive challenges posed by modernity; instead the Church allowed the excesses of the modern world to shape the Church.  After VII, Catholic liberals moved through the dioceses of Western Europe and America, purging the liturgy of traditional hymns and high-sounding language and seeking to reconcile faith with secular forms of “liberation.”  The same Marxist, counter-cultural forces that invaded the courts, the universities, the media, charitable organizations and all our great cultural institutions, also polluted the instrumentalities of the Catholic Church.  Many of the priests and bishops of today were the counter-cultural hippies of the 1960s.  Fifty years later, the legacy of these changes manifests in a majority of U.S. Catholics voting to reelect a president who is both a poster child for infanticide and an advocate of liberation theology.  The damage done in the U.S. by the Marxist-cartoon-rendering of Vatican II, begat several generations of Catholics who are morally ignorant and insulated against the duties imposed upon them by Catholic doctrine.

Jesus Wasn’t Political- Really?

Contrary to the belief of many uninformed Catholics, sacred scripture tells us that Jesus involved himself deeply in politics!  True, he wanted no part of Roman politics; but he fully immersed himself in Jewish politics.  Jesus’ main antagonists in the New Testament narrative were the Pharisees.  Who were they?  They were scribes or lawyers. But there was no separation between law, politics, and religion in 1^st century Jewish culture.  When the Pharisees repeatedly attacked and challenged Jesus’ proclamation of God’s kingdom, what was our Lord’s reaction?  Did he disengage; did he run; did he claim to be above the debate, withdraw and hide?  Of course not.  Our Lord continually engaged them; took on their rigid propaganda and revealed it for what it truly was.  The Pharisees' beliefs regarding the subjects of ritual purity, table fellowship, tithing, and divorce, were at the same time religious, cultural, and political.  Although Jesus did praise the Pharisees for some things, he clearly rebuked their beliefs on all these counts.  Catholic clergy and lay people need to proudly and vociferously immerse themselves in issues that are both religious and political, if we truly want to emulate the actions of our savior.  Our non-negotiable religious beliefs, such as the sanctity of innocent human life, from conception to natural death, will naturally inform the way we vote.  Bishops or priests that refuse to acknowledge this are aiding and abetting the commission of sin on a massive scale, and should be removed from their sees.  Ignorant pro-abortion Catholics had better stop whining about God not being on anybody’s “side”, and start concerning themselves as to whether or not they are on God’s side. 

Catholic Doctrine vs. Conservative Principle:

Contrary to the belief of the monolithic intelligentsia, conservative principles are compatible with Catholic social teaching.  Here are several solid examples.     

On Welfare Statism:

Simply put, conservatives don’t reject the notion that government is tasked with an economic regulatory and social welfare role.  The question is how do we define those terms and what should that role be?  What governmental actions (or inactions) constitute the reasonable and moral fulfillment of that role within the Catholic framework?  So let’s start by asking ourselves: has the plight of the underprivileged in America been helped or hurt by dooming the inner city poor to cycles of generational dependency on a massive monolithic federal bureaucracy that we’ve euphemistically called the Welfare State?  The poor have obviously been hurt.  Conservatives have stood against the Welfare State; liberal statists have made it a reality.  The establishment of inner city welfare plantations is totally out of line with Catholic teachings on caring for the poor.  There have been numerous sensible, market-based, effective conservative alternatives to the leftist culture of dependency.  However, liberals continue to spin the malicious fairytale, believed by many Catholics that conservatives desire a pitiable, destitute underclass left to fend for themselves.  Leading conservatives have long offered viable alternatives to the bane of leftist welfare statism; proposals that would temporarily care for the downtrodden while providing them with the tools to better their plight.  Many proposals have been public/private faith based efforts.  These myriad proposals, truly helping the indigent as our Catholic faith calls us to do, have been repeatedly rejected by leftists in both major political parties.       

Representative Paul Ryan’s proposed reforms of Medicare are by definition compatible with the precepts of Catholic social teaching.  Absent Ryan’s proposed reforms, Medicare will rapidly go bankrupt, doing untold harm to seniors who depend on that program for their healthcare needs.  Liberals can’t seem to explain how standing idly by as Medicare goes bankrupt is somehow in line with Catholic teaching.  Conservatives don’t oppose poorly performing government welfare programs because they wish to cast the impoverished into the wilderness.  We oppose them because they do great injury, not only to the people they were supposedly designed to help, but to our society as a whole.  As Charles Murray illustrated in his well-researched book, Losing Ground (1984), welfare programs are inimical to the institution of marriage.  Using the typical example of a poor couple, he demonstrated that welfare benefits available to the woman create a disincentive for the couple to stay married, or if living together, to get married.  Marriage, one of the treasured Catholic sacraments, drops the probability of poverty by 82%.  Once again, the liberal solution stands against Catholic teaching while the conservative view stands with it. 

On “Workers’ Rights”:

Conservatives, as advocates of limited, frugal government, stand against levels of public employee compensation that have exceeded that of their private sector counterparts.  The burden of paying out these soaring public employee benefits has pushed dozens of states to the verge of bankruptcy.  Public and private workers are immeasurably hurt by confiscatory taxation and crippling public debt.  Implementation of leftist policies has created a toxic economic atmosphere for all workers; the antithesis of Catholic teaching as laid out in the encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, which supports labor rights and rejects socialism. 

The “Evils” of Laissez Faire and The Free Market:

The term laissez faire is repeatedly used by liberals as a buzz word to assail conservatives and show they’re at odds with catholic precepts.  However, general opposition to regulation or interference by the government in economic affairs, and trust in the market, is not socially irresponsible.  Look, for instance at the concept of insurance.  It’s a free-market way of taking care of those suffering life’s vicissitudes.  And there is plenty of market incentive to deal with the unemployed.  Employers deal with the unemployed through markets all the time—by hiring them.  Those who have lost their homes still want a place to live, so property owners want to deal with them by renting to them.  How is this somehow anti-Catholic?  Capitalism and the free market are governed by what Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, called enlightened self-interest.  This concept held that the larger social good is best served by individuals pursuing private interests.  There is no other country in the world where this principle has been allowed to thrive to a greater extent than in the United States; and, as a result, no other country which is wealthy enough to so compassionately care for it’s poor and downtrodden.  It is ham-handed, ill conceived federal government programs that are truly cruel and incompatible with Catholic teaching.

The Ultimate Evil: Big Corporations!

The conservative view of big corporations is in no need of alteration in order to bring it in line with reason and Catholic social goals.  Profitability of big corporations is essential because that profitability is intertwined with the economic well-being of the average person on the street.  Not only do these corporations employ average working stiffs like us, but our 401K, retirement/pension plans and stock portfolios are invested in those same corporations.  This isn’t the world of 30 years ago when only 3 in 10 average American workers were invested in the stock market.  By 2008 that figure was 8 in 10.  Why would we want to increase punitive regulation and taxation on the very corporate entities that our personal economic interests are inexorably linked to?  This type of silly, demagogic class warfare thinking makes it impossible to have a rational conversation about the validity of our largely free market economic system.  For instance, our media outlets are very quick to depict multi-national corporations that do business in third-world countries as evil and exploitative.  Ignorant Catholics undoubtedly agree.  The fact of the matter is that, on average, third-world workers earn three times as much working for multi-nationals than they could otherwise.  Although those wages pale in comparison to American wages, keep in mind, we’re talking about people who are cursed with the most extreme poverty.  That’s why they line up by the thousands to work for multi-nationals when those companies set up plants in underdeveloped parts of the world.  And they’re better off for it.  Giving job opportunities to utterly destitute people living in the third world is in no way incompatible with Catholic morals.

Final Thoughts:

In closing, I’ll paraphrase former abortion doctor turned Catholic pro-lifer, Bernard Nathanson, “morality isn’t just something that floats around in the air and sticks to us.  Someone has to explain it, someone has to enunciate it, and someone has to fight for it.  For if we don’t; who will?”  Catholics should be at the forefront of that movement; instead we’ve abdicated our responsibility by allowing the leftists to catechize us into imbecility.  In Matthew chapters 16 and 28, Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church and that he would be with His church until the end of the world (or the end of the age- literally until the end of time).  I believe those words without doubt, but am fearful that much damage can be done by Satan to many individual souls before the end of time.  I am acutely aware of my sins and continually beg forgiveness for having committed them, but liberal Catholics had better wake up soon and look at the blood on their hands and the destruction they’ve left in their wake, before it’s too late.