Mahony-nomics

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Wise Christian Counsel for the Church of the Poor and for the Poor

Wise Christian Counsel for the Church of the Poor and for the Poor

Retired L.A. Cardinal Mahony is notorious for his dissidence, waffling, and abusive mismanagement.  With shepherds like these, why is it so surprising to find they’re also raving liberals?

From the Cardinal’s blog:

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to increase the minimum wage in the City to $15 per hour by the year 2020. Thirty years ago when I first became Archbishop of Los Angeles, I would never have thought it necessary to take such an enormous leap in low-end worker salaries.

Not any more.

There are many reasons for the hike, but two of them are really important:

1. In past years, minimum wage jobs were also relatively short-term jobs. They were meant for young people working part-time or others just entering the job market. No one expected such jobs to be long-term and permanent work. These jobs were to get a foothold in the work field, and then to move on to better middle class jobs.

Translation: In the Reagan 80’s the country was full of promise and opportunity.  In liberal Obamaland, McDonald’s is the only place to get a job, so pile on more statist oppression!

2. The number of next level, middle class, jobs across southern California have all but disappeared. Recall after the Second World War how our area became a great leader in aerospace and defense companies. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed in these good paying, middle class jobs over the years. But gradually, because of many factors, those companies and those jobs began to disappear.

The result? People desperate to provide for their families are increasingly stuck in low-paying jobs, most paying at or below minimum wage. This is particularly true for our immigrant brothers and sisters. There are no “better jobs” to move on to.

And it’s not just the wages. Minimum wage jobs almost never offer benefits such as health care, retirement plans, or other amenities from previous generations. Many companies limit the hours for such employees in order to avoid having to pay for medical insurance. Shifting schedules makes it difficult for such workers to get to other low-wage jobs, or to take some classes.

Another worrying result is the rapid expansion of low-income families, and increasing wealth of high-income families, and the narrowing group in the middle.

The real issue is not just about minimum wage jobs. Rather, our goal must be to look for ways to narrow this growing gap between people at the top and those at the bottom.

Well Cardinal that will work then, if by lowering the gap you mean creating more and more poor.  The rich will keep getting richer but the middle class will certainly grow worse, and all those entry level McDonald’s employees won’t get high wages or benefits.  When the McDouble costs seven bucks in L.A. they’ll all just get fired.

Thank you, my shepherd!

The gap is not only economic. In so many places across the country, it is also a racial divide. Studies show that the minority communities of our country consistently remain on the lower rung of the economic ladder. Both divides need our focused attention, and I hope that the 2016 Presidential candidates will engage our country in this discussion–and that they be required to lay out concrete plans to ease the divide and to provide greater economic opportunity for everyone.

Just a few areas might help move us in the right direction. Home ownership has always been a past measure of success for our families. We need to make home ownership more readily available to all of our people–through new qualification parameters, lower down payments, and other means that do not jeopardize either the families or the economy.

Free houses, risky mortgages, high debt and unrealistic payments, social engineering, bubbles, bailouts, and bankruptcies: the wages of fraud and state compulsion, and precursor to the Obama-era economy.  What does any of this have to do with the Faith?

Most lower paying jobs offer no pension plan opportunities. Even if companies offered a very simple plan these families could begin acquiring some equity for the future.

Why is it these ‘lovers of the poor’ only know how to reach into someone else’s pockets and tell them what to do with their money, their business, and the people who they employ?  That’s not charity. It’s tyranny.

If you don’t like the way McDonald’s employees live, teach them to have lots of children, get together with their friends and family, buy a farm or business, work and take care of each other like Christians.  Give them churches so they can have the graces and the communities they need.  What a crazy paleolithic pre-Vatican II idea.

Social Security could raise the cap on payroll taxes so that the more affluent can contribute their fair share into the plan which will benefit them.

Tax the rich!….and raise everyone else’s while you’re at it.

The City of Los Angeles plan will go a long way to help our poorer families. But all of the incorporated cities in Los Angeles County need to match this new increase in the minimum wage for it to have its full effect. If a company in Los Angeles City just moves a few miles to a small city with a lower minimum wage, then everyone loses.

The widening gap between those at the higher end of our economy and those at the lower end of our economy must return to its former, historic narrow range.

Cardinal Mahony, men like you have no idea how to make things that like happen.

 

 

Vatican Archbishop: Don’t Try Calling Your Climate Denial Catholic Anymore!

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Ready to do or say anything for the UN

Ready to do or say anything for the UN Church

Vatican Radio reports on the “Climate and Health” 68th World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, where Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi c.s., gave an adress.

In his presentation the Claude Rains-ish archbishop discussed the respect and protection of nature, technology, and the role of various nations in health and environmental issues.

It is a great honour to address this distinguished panel and audience on a topic of such urgent importance, not only to the technical and scientific community but to all people now living on our planet and, most especially, to the future generations who will follow in our footsteps.

The moral imperative to respect and protect nature is not a new topic for faith traditions. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures are replete with such exhortations, and most of the major religious traditions offer similar commandments. Man is not the owner of creation but its steward.  In more recent times, the leadership of the Catholic Church has publicly and forcefully expressed concern about the damage to nature being caused by a privileged few, while the health and overall wellbeing of the vast majority of humans is being threatened through no fault of their own. Pope Benedict XVI, expressed such grave concern on this issue that he was popularly labelled as the “green Pope”. Pope Francis continued this tradition and has encouraged a more profound reflection on this global concern. I am sure you are well aware already of the ongoing preparation of a special teaching document on climate justice, about which  United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said: “I very much look forward to the upcoming encyclical by Pope Francis. It will convey to the world that protecting our environment is an urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and people of conscience. It is critically important that people and their leaders hear your strong moral voice in the coming months.”

So the ancient scriptures, all the popes including the most recent and credibly Catholic Pope Benedict, and that UN-Vatican farce conference all agree this is urgent, urgent.

These religious leaders and technical experts left no further room for denial under the mistaken guise of so-called religious belief when they declared that human-induced climate change is a scientific reality.  They acknowledged the “very vital role” played by religions through their affirmation of “the inherent dignity of every individual linked to the common good of all humanity” as well as “the beauty, wonder, and inherent goodness of the natural world.”  They proclaimed as “our moral duty to respect rather than ravage the garden that is our home.” They noted the particular vulnerability experienced by poor and excluded people who are menaced by “dire threats from climate disruptions, including the increased frequency of droughts, extreme storms, heat waves, and rising sea levels.”

Don’t dare call your climate-denying a ‘religious belief!’  There’s nothing Catholic about climate skepticism, right Archbishop?

So they had a conference with the UN and a bunch of ‘experts’ and now they know that poor and excluded people are menaced by dire threats?  How can anyone possibly believe this?  What a perfect atheist idea to start calling this bunk ‘faith’ then turning it ‘c’atholic.

 

 

 

 

 

Vatican To Catholics: Don’t Like The UN? Don’t Buy Global Warming? You Must Be A Rich Capitalist!

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Apostle of FrancisChurch

Apostle of FrancisChurch

It makes perfect sense, now that FrancisChurch has morphed the Catholic Faith into a UN vehicle, that her princes would sound exactly like cheap Democrat Party hacks and nothing like Christians.

The Vatican has interested itself in global warming, going so far as to stage an invitation-only exhibition on the matter, and to release through the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences the curious document “Climate Change and The Common Good.” The document’s main author is the Chancellor of the Academies, Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.

His Excellency was criticized by many for the low-quality, error-laden science in this document, but he received the most heat for buddying up to abortion and “population control” enthusiasts like UN boss Ban Ki-moon and economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Evidently, these critiques stung. The Archbishop returned fire, accusing his detractors of acting on the orders of a cabal dedicated to destroying Science — a charge which found sympathetic ears. But he couldn’t quite escape the scandal caused by his purposely associating with, and giving political cover to, abortion and contraception advocates. More explanation was called for, so he gave it.

In an interview with Stefano Gennarini, Sánchez shot back with an odd claim he has made many times, that the “climate crisis leads to poverty and poverty leads to new forms of slavery and forced migration, and drugs, and all this can also lead to abortion.” Elsewhere, he included prostitution and “organ trafficking” as other results of global warming.

By any reckoning, this is an impressive list of evils. Yet what’s missing from his Excellency’s statements is any explanation of how exactly the slight increase in clement winter afternoons has caused abortion, prostitution and other grave human evils to increase.

I thought the Catholic Faith was about avoiding guilt by keeping from sin, not about exponentially multiplying extenuating circumstances until you have an excuse the size of Planet Earth.

Did the fraction of a degree uptick in temperature late last century make men more amorous? Perhaps the dearth of hurricanes and tornadoes  — the “climate crisis” has pushed these way down  — induced men to seek other excitement in their lives. Or again, maybe the minuscule accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide has shouldered aside oxygen, depriving our brains and lessening our capacity to reason.

“These are serious matters!” the objection will run. And so they are. But mentioning something serious doesn’t make you a serious person. There must be more than moral dudgeon backing a claim as … grandiose as Sánchez’s, namely that global warming causes abortion. There must be evidence. Is there? The answer depends on how reliable global warming theory is.

Not exactly.  If if there were such a thing as global warming it would still have nothing to do with abortion, all this new slavery everyone’s talking about, or drugs.

Many have fallen prey to the unscientific belief that predictions of doom are proof the predictions are right, and that therefore the theory which generated the predictions must be correct. Otherwise intelligent people commit these blunders because of fear, or because they are in the grip of environmentalist ideology, or, in the worst cases, because it is politically convenient.

The predictions of doom have been consistent: temperature is promised to soar ever upwards. The theory is that small boosts in carbon dioxide (compared to the atmosphere as a whole), by way of feedback mechanisms too complicated to explain here, are responsible for the rise. The predictions are consistent, all right. Consistently poor. No, worse than poor. Rotten. For nearly two decades, climate models have predicted rising temperatures, but the reality has been that there is no such increase.

Since the climate is demonstrably not changing in the direction or rate predicted, how could this non-event be increasing the incidence of abortion, organ harvesting and slavery?

Let me pose another question. Which is more likely to lead to more abortions:

(A) Global warming, through a twisting, fanciful chain of causality, which anyway hasn’t even happened yet, or

(B) The bolstering of the rich, influential, abortion- and contraception-friendly United Nations and radical NGOs, who can now claim to enjoy “Vatican support”?

Can this assessment be repeated often enough?  Handing power to the Leftist enemies of the Faith is always wrong and never the business of churchmen.

It is, or used to be, a fundamental principle of science that a theory was proved false when predictions made based on the theory were a bust. Even Einstein had to wait for Arthur Eddington to verify relativity’s predictions before scientists wholly backed the theory.

Sánchez was asked about this principle: “What do you answer to so called ‘climate skeptics’ who point to the lack of change in temperatures in the past 18 years and the difficulty in finding any definite correlation between human activity and large scale climate changes?”

His response was revealing: “I hope you are not [a skeptic] because then we would discover the true reason for these false accusations against us!”

Sánchez went on to hurl some false accusations of his own. He said climate change skeptics were all either members of the Tea Party or people with “incomes derived from oil.” Because, well, that would prove that everything they’re saying is false, wouldn’t it? Thank heavens no scientists who assert that man-made climate change is a crisis receive any income for their work, or support from billion-dollar foundations.

Archbishop Sánchez is keen on sustainability, which many take as a code word for population control. On this issue, he said that his Sustainable Development Goals didn’t “even mention abortion or population control. They speak of access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

Everybody, even his Excellency, knows what such words are: dull euphemisms for population control and abortion. This is why he tried to deflect the moral implications of including these terms in Church documents by saying, “Some may even interpret [these terms] as Paul VI, in terms of responsible paternity and maternity.” If there is a polite, ecclesiastical way of saying “balderdash,” this is the place for it.

The Archbishop said that we “can rest assured that the two academies of which I am chancellor are against abortion and against population control simply because we follow the Magisterium of the Popes, on which we directly depend.” Okay, let’s accept that. Yet it is also true that Sánchez’s actions have lent political, cultural, and religious support to organizations which push, and push heavily, population control and the systematic killing of the unborn. They now can claim Vatican support for their agendas.

The Archbishop sought these worldly connections to give weight and prominence to his political programs. He ought to at least consider what is obvious to the rest of us: that his actions will foster the very evils he hopes to eliminate.

For years they’ve been telling faithful Catholics that our Church was not about politics, that it was something ‘above’ politics, and that politics was just a matter of ‘prudential judgment’ about which we could faithfully disagree.  That was always a lie, a way to disarm the reasonable objections and efforts to defend the Faith in our world. It ensured Catholics remained impotent while its adversaries destroyed the Church from within and without.

Now they’ve achieved their goal.  The visible Church has become nothing more than a venue for socialist politicking, where hard-eyed grinning Nancy Pelosi’s in purple hurl ridiculous insults at the faithful just for presenting facts along with their helpless pleas for mercy.