Once again, I wish I had more time to devote to this, but the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) has responded to Moscow Patriarch Kirill’s recent letter (discussed briefly here) which foists blame for alleged wrongdoings to Orthodox Christians on the UGCC and the independent Orthodox Kievan Patriarchate. I will leave it to you, dear readers, to compare the tone and contents of both epistles.
The Church of “It’s Everyone Else’s Fault”
The weekend is packed and I have an article to finish, but I couldn’t pass up drawing attention to the Russian Orthodox Church’s latest round of paranoid, hyperbolic criticism of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) and the independent Kievan Patriarchate (KP) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In a letter to the other local Orthodox churches which was posted on, and then later removed from, the Moscow Patriarchate’s official website, Patriarch Kirill offers up a litany of accusations against the UGCC and KP with nary a mention of his own Church’s activities in the recently (and probably illegally) annexed Crimea. Kirill is also silent on the fact his priests have actively supported separatist in east Ukraine and that Russian Orthodox churches have served as ammunition depots for the rebels. You can read the full hypocritical text here.
As always, pray for peace in Ukraine and the UGCC. Ask the Blessed Virgin and St. Nicholas — the Patron Saint of Ukraine’s Greek Catholics — for their intercession so that the Church of Christ may continue to prosper and grow in the lands of the Christian East.
Things To Read
I still haven’t found much time for “blogging” and with the Feast of the Assumption (Dormition) tomorrow, I may not get back around to Opus Publicum until this weekend. Thankfully that doesn’t mean the Internet is without other things to read in the interim. Here are a few pieces which caught my eye over the last week.
Legal Bias
Eric Posner and Adam Chilton of the University of Chicago Law School have just posted a new working paper, “An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship.” For any who have spent time in and around the legal academy, the abstract won’t contain any surprises:
Distributism Basics
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.