Category: Catholic Social Thought

David Mills, in a new op-ed for Aleteia, picks up on some themes I discussed in my recent Ethika Politika piece, “The Protection of Souls and the Banning of Books.” Instead of focusing on books, however, Mills takes aim at the idiot box. Here’s an excerpt:

Except for the occasional football or baseball game, I don’t miss having a television and think other people should get rid of theirs the way we did ours. I know that people who talk about their giving up television affect most people the way joggers and early risers affect me. I want to say bad words and frighten them into silence.

I also know giving up television’s not for everyone, that it can teach you things, that you can stream classic movies and great documentaries, that reading can be almost as mind-vacating an activity as watching television, and that even those of us without televisions have the internet with which to fill up our time.

Yes, true. But even if television were better than it seems, we have to police what goes into our minds and if we have children what goes into theirs, and that policing ought to be a lot more stringent than it usually is. It’s usually like the genial English bobby of children’s story books, willing to look the other way, when it ought to be like a North Korean border guard.

Mills is dead right that we need more self-policing when it comes to television or any form of media for that matter. Be sure to read the entire article.

Had I more time today I would write an extensive correction to The Washington Post‘s questionable quotes from Fr. Robert Sirico, head of the Acton Institute. In it, Sirico sets forth the typical Acton line that the Church is not competent to speak on economic matters while holding that because Pope Francis is “not an economist,” his teaching on economic matters need not be followed. This is not a Catholic position to take, unless one wishes to dissent from the magisterium — which Acton, an inter-confessional organization, routinely does. Let us not forget what Pope Pius XI taught authoritatively in his masterful encyclical Quadragesimo Anno:

42. Even though economics and moral science employs each its own principles in its own sphere, it is, nevertheless, an error to say that the economic and moral orders are so distinct from and alien to each other that the former depends in no way on the latter. Certainly the laws of economics, as they are termed, being based on the very nature of material things and on the capacities of the human body and mind, determine the limits of what productive human effort cannot, and of what it can attain in the economic field and by what means. Yet it is reason itself that clearly shows, on the basis of the individual and social nature of things and of men, the purpose which God ordained for all economic life.

43. But it is only the moral law which, just as it commands us to seek our supreme and last end in the whole scheme of our activity, so likewise commands us to seek directly in each kind of activity those purposes which we know that nature, or rather God the Author of nature, established for that kind of action, and in orderly relationship to subordinate such purposes to our supreme and last end. If we faithfully observe this law, then it will follow that the particular purposes, both individual and social, that are sought in the economic field will fall in their proper place in the universal order of purposes, and We, in ascending through them, as it were by steps, shall attain the final end of all things, that is God, to Himself and to us, the supreme and inexhaustible Good.

Yes, there has been some understandable conservative and traditionalist concern with the Pope’s actions and words over the past two years, but on the plane of the Church’s social magisterium, Francis speaks in continuity with his predecessors. You would never know that, however, from reading Acton propaganda, which is why no mention should be made of that institute by any publication which seeks to discuss the Catholic Church and her authentic teachings.

Jack Quirk, a personal friend and the founder of the online magazine Christian Democracy, has issued his first salvo against the “classically liberal” Acton Institute. In an article entitled “It’s Time to Take Acton,” Quirk takes umbrage with a recent article by Acton research fellow Dylan Pahman’s misguided critique of Pope Francis’s recent speech in Bolivia. (As some might recall, I had more than a few critical words to offer against Pahman’s article as well.) From the conclusion of Quirk’s critique:

One aspect of Mr. Pahman’s article represents a positive development. His attack on Pope Francis should make it clear that there is little affinity between Catholic Social Teaching and the positions of the Acton Institute. Due to the presence of a Catholic priest at the helm of the organization, some have been confused on that point. There should be no confusion now.

Quirk could have also noted that two other Acton leaders, Samuel Gregg and Michael Miller, are both confessing Catholics, neither of whom appear all that concerned with aligning their liberal ways with the Catholic Church’s social magisterium. Pahman, on the other hand, is an Eastern Orthodox convert. Superficially, that provides him with more magisterial leeway to infuse his free-market ideological leanings with ostensibly Orthodox social thought. Perhaps soon one or more of Quirk’s Eastern brethren will take up the task of demonstrating Acton’s incompatibility with their tradition as well.