June 24, 2014 Economics, Law

Acton Attacks Distributism (Again)

The Acton Institute’s web-log has been serializing Jonathan Witt’s forthcoming chapter from a book on Christian critiques of capitalism. Today’s installment, “The Distributist Alternative,” purports to demonstrate that Distributism is just another highway to the hell of concentrated government authority over the economy — the sort which leads to “crony capitalism.” Without involving myself right now in an excurses on Distributism, let me point out what should be glaringly obvious to anyone who peruses Witt’s takedown with even a half-critical eye: He’s attacking a strawman. That’s nothing new for the Acton Institute and its cohorts. Just last week, during its so-called “university,” Acton offered a course on Distributism taught not by card-carrying Distributists such as John Medaille or Thomas Storck, but rather by an economic liberal, Todd Flanders.

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June 23, 2014 Liturgy

Summorum Pontificum

Traditional Catholics are often accused of being uncharitable and self-righteous when it comes to their brothers and sisters in Christ who do not fall within the traditionalist orbit. In fact, traditional Catholics are routinely accused by other traditional Catholics of being uncharitable and self-righteous when it comes to their brothers and sisters in Christ who do not happen to fall within some very specific traditionalist orbit. Certain folks claim that these divisions are all part of a divide-and-conquer strategy instituted by opponents of tradition. That charge, which isn’t very plausible to begin with, is undermined by the reality that traditionalists possess no shortage of reasons to generate their own divisions without outside assistance. Even the sedevacantists—the most “hardcore” wing of traditional Catholicism—can’t keep themselves together despite their miniscule numbers. It’s really no surprise then that the rest of the traditional Catholic world is fractured along any number of lines: liturgical, ecclesiological, spiritual, aesthetic, and so forth.

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June 21, 2014 Liturgy

1962

On the old Opus Publicum I staged several defenses of the liturgical books approved for use with the vetus ordo (“1962 books”) against those critics, some more good-natured and well-intentioned than others, who find them wanting. Some in fact argue that the 1962 books represent a transition from the classic Roman Rite to the New Rite of Pope Paul VI, though as a genealogical matter that is a hard argument to maintain. While the modern liturgical reformers had been busy at their dark craft since the first-half of the 20th Century, the revolutionary changes to the Holy Week Rite in the 1950s coupled with a reduction of the Breviarium Romanum and the Roman Calendar did not inevitably point to the Novus Ordo Missae and the Liturgia Horarum. Besides, it is anachronistic to assess the value of the 1962 books based on what happened later in the decade, as if the slight and subtle simplifications introduced into the Missale Romanum of John XXIII eviscerated the Offertory in the New Mass and gave us Eucharistic Prayer II. The integrity of the 1962 books must be judged, if not exclusively then substantially, in the light of what preceded them.

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June 19, 2014 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church

Open Letters and Orthodoxy

It didn’t receive as much play in the blogosphere as I expected, but George Weigel’s “An Open Letter to the Patriarch of Moscow,” housed over at First Things, is still worth reading. It is worth reading not because Weigel’s neoconservative political posture isn’t nauseating, but because it should remind certain Catholics who have doe eyes for “neo-Holy Russia,” i.e., the apparent resurgence of symphonia between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the government of Vladimir Putin, that, at this juncture at least, support for Russia and her church is a betrayal of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC).

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