This week is looking unusually busy. As such, I am not sure when I will be able to get another post up here. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the opening of a new series of articles at Ethika Politika, “Distributism Basics: A Brief Introduction,” by David W. Cooney. Cooney also runs the informative Practical Distributism web-log.
ISIS
I am not a big fan of doing “current events” posts, but recent developments in Iraq have turned a few gears in my head. As of right now, the United States is engaged in a low-level two-pronged mission: (A) Drop humanitarian aide to minority religious populations who are being directly persecuted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS — though some use ISIL); and (B) Commit airstrikes against ISIS forces intended to protect U.S. personnel and, it seems, slow their advance through Iraq. At the political level the action marks a rather significant turnaround in foreign policy for the Obama Administration — probably not the last one we will see over the next two years. Humanitarians who are normally not thrilled with military solutions to manifest military problems are, somewhat surprisingly, praising the operation, though their praise may be tempered quickly by the fact that hawkish pundits are already using the ISIS engagement as a vindication for Israel’s harsh measures in Gaza. Politics are never simple, especially at the international level, though one would hope — and pray — that some meaning distinctions can still be drawn between preventing a full-scale genocide from advancing further and a localized military engagement where the doctrine of proportionately became the first casualty.
The Russian Soul
I don’t normally read the Los Angeles Review of Books, but one of its latest essays, “Two Abysses of the Soul” by Costica Bradatan is an outstanding example of using literary analysis to tease out a cultural truth, even when that truth is unsettling. Here is a brief excerpt:
No Third Way?
Economic liberals within the Catholic Church frequently cite Pope John Paul II’s social encyclical Centesimus Annus (CA) for the proposition that Catholic Social Teaching is not a “third way” between and beyond communism/socialism and capitalism. In fact, following CA, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, writing for The Wall Street Journal, called this third-way view “a serious error.” On the 20th anniversary of the encyclical, George Weigel triumphantly boasted in First Things that CA had “abandon[ed] ‘Catholic third way’ fantasies[.]” Given that the term “third way” appears nowhere in CA, one might ask what is the textual basis of this audacious claim? Typically, the economic liberals quote the following:
Vote Libertarian But Be Distributist?
Today is primary day in Michigan and that means an embarrassingly tiny fraction of the voting population will turn out to decide the Republican ticket for Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District: (A) Incumbent Tea-Party/libertarian darling Justin Amash; or (B) Challenger and quasi-Republican businessman Brian Ellis. (For some of my earlier thoughts on this race, see my commentary in Michigan’s The Bridge magazine here.) Since first taking a seat in Congress in 2011, Amash has positioned himself as a “Washington outsider” willing to challenge “the establishment,” albeit with few, if any, tangible results to show for it. Amash may have made headlines opposing the “Security State” and reports of the National Security Agency’s data-mining overreach, but let’s be honest. Amash knows full well that the current security ordo is too precious to too many Americans to overturn (or probably even reform meaningfully). Amash, like other “Tea Partiers,” has managed to curry favor with a significant number of Catholic (and Orthodox) Christians on the grounds that their platform opposes the contemporary Leviathan state which, inter alia, has threatened religious freedom on multiple fronts while upholding the onerous system known as “crony capitalism.” This is no doubt why many Catholics who take the Church’s social magisterium seriously have no qualms about endorsing Amash et al. A good friend of mine even suggested that those who are Distributist in principle can, and perhaps even should, support Tea Party-types in good conscience because they favor policies that are, at a certain level, closer to a system of localized governance Distributists — and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) — champion. While this claim may be superficially correct, it leaves much to be desired at the substantive level.
More to Say on Vatican II?
I probably don’t need to plug Fr. John Hunwicke’s outstanding web-log on here, but just in case some of you aren’t aware of it, Fr. Hunwicke has just finished posting a three-part review of Roberto de Mattei’s sterling The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story. (You can — and should — purchase a copy of this volume here.) If you are not yet convinced that Mattei’s book falls under the category of a “Must Read” for those who are seriously interested in the most polarizing event in modern Catholic history, hopefully Father’s fine thoughts will make the case. You can find all three of Fr. Hunwicke’s posts linked below.
Francis, Continuity, and CST
Time constraints are not allowing me to dedicate as much time to this topic now as I would like, but it bears reminding some circles that casting a critical, even doubtful, eye on some of the occasional marks of our current Pontiff, Pope Francis, is not tantamount to a radical rejection of either his pontificate or the many instances in which he faithfully upholds the Catholic Church’s teachings on, inter alia, the devil, sin, just war, society, and economics. In fact, as Rorate Caeli noted not long ago, Francis and traditional Catholics, i.e., those traditional Catholics who faithfully adhere to Catholic Social Teaching (CST), are substantially united on economic matters. The problem, however, is that some traditionalists, like their (somewhat estranged) neo-Catholic and liberal Catholic brethren, fall into the trap of assuming that Francis is saying something radically new when he condemns usury or reminds world leaders that “the goal of politics and economics is to serve humanity.” Such claims rest on woeful ignorance of CST, particularly its modern formulation which, in large part, began with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.
A Brief Note on Coercion and Rationalism
In my previous post, “A Free Market for Religion,” I chided the Acton Institute’s Dylan Pahman for endorsing a market-based approach to religion which, on its face, appears agnostic about the truth of any religion. By a pure market measure, the religion which best supplies the spiritual-existential demands of the most people at the lowest “cost” (however defined) would presumably be the best (or the most “efficient” — which is typically the measure of “best” for most economists). Whether Pahman himself is agnostic about the true religion is another matter. My suspicion is that he isn’t, though I base that assumption on nothing more than the fact he belongs to an ancient Christian communion — the Orthodox Church — which certainly is not indifferent to its own claim to be the “one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” identified in the Creed. Still, it rings strange that a self-identified Orthodox Christian would want to measure religion through a market lens. After all, the Orthodox Church in the United States is smaller today than it was fifty years ago and, if the figures are true, worldwide attendance at Orthodox parishes is, at best, nominal. Would any Orthodox Christian claim that these empirical measures impinges the truth of Orthodoxy? I doubt it. In fact, whenever a Catholic plays the “numbers game” with the Orthodox, the latter are instantly indignant — and rightfully so. As we already know, it’s neither logically nor empirically impossible for over a billion and a half human souls to be ensnared by falsehood.
Blessed Feast of St. Alphonsus
I want to wish all readers of this blog a blessed feast of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (Redemptorists). For those following the Novus Ordo calendar, his feast day is today. For those who follow the vetus ordo, his feast is tomorrow (August 2). If you haven’t done so already, consider reading both his The Glories of Mary and Preparation for Death; they are among some of the greatest spiritual works in the history of the Catholic Church. It remains a great shame that most of the English-language volumes of his complete ascetical works are now long out of print, though used copies are readily available. Just be careful which translations you go for, as this helpful blog posts notes. Besides being a great Doctor of the Church, St. Alphonsus spent his life working tirelessly for the salvation of souls. His writings still serve as a guiding light through these dark times when we are so often tempted to set our hearts on worldly things instead of our minds on eternity and our last end. The following text is a summary of his life taken from the pre-1962 Breviarium Romanum.