Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Daily Beast reports on the new homeless-friendly Vatican state.

It is nearly 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in early March, and the Vatican is locked up for the night. A few stray tourists pose for pictures in front of the glistening basilica of St. Peter, and cassock-wearing clergy skim the perimeter of the square on their way home to dinner. In the shadows of the famous colonnade and extending to the foot of the grand boulevard known as the Via Conciliazione, dozens of men and a few women settle in for the night in Vatican-issued sleeping bags. They are the welcomed guests of Pope Francis, though not everyone in the neighborhood appreciates their presence. Joey, a Romanian who used to bed down in Rome’s squalid Termini train station, moved to St. Peter’s in late February. “We are all moving here,” he told The Daily Beast. “Everyone else spits on the homeless. But not here.”

Do they really spit on you everywhere else?

After describing the new showers, other accommodations, and pro-homeless policing, the Beast’s Barbie Latza Nadeau shifts to one of the local store owners.

The generosity of the pope may be well received by those in need, but it is not without complications. Store owners along the Via Conciliazione have complained that the number of homeless people and beggars detracts from business and that every morning they have to forcibly remove those in the papal sleeping bags from their storefront steps. A woman at a religious trinket shop who asked that she not be named lest she upset the pope said his kindness was now a magnet attracting the city’s poorest people. “I don’t want to group homeless people with pickpockets and thieves, but we have also seen an increase in petty crime here since the homeless moved in,” she said. “There has to be a balance in finding the peace between those of us who pay a lot of rent to run our businesses here and those who cash in for free.”

Rent! They charge rent in the Vatican to store owners? And what about this other troubling reality: Is this money-grubbing business person saying that among people who can find no home that will take them, nor any productive work to do, there are more thieves and criminals? That’s akin to saying that they tend to be more prone to other vices! Perhaps they’ve grown accustomed to having large organizations give them things.

Are these ‘poor at the center of the Gospel’ because they have nowhere to go, or because they may be in some ways lacking in Christian character and self-discipline? Are sinners at the center of the Gospel too? What about saints? Are they around the corner of the Gospel?

There is also a logistical issue with the increase in street people. The city’s charities and soup kitchens do a fine job feeding the poor, but there are very few public toilets for the homeless to use—and a scant few that are open overnight—which means that full corridors of side streets along the flanks of Vatican City are littered with human feces and drenched in urine. Street sweepers have acknowledged that they now spray down full sections of the areas around St. Peter’s Square every morning before the tourists arrive.

So the center of the Holy Catholic Church is now covered in human excrement. Is there some deep spiritual significance to this?

 

When communists and redistributionists talk about food or farming, it’s always frightening.

Peasant groups appealed to Catholic bishops to support the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill, instead of pushing for the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

They still have peasants in the Philippines and they have ‘peasant groups’. I wonder how poor those peasant groups are?

The Anakpawis partylist and Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) made the statement in response to the recent appeal to President Aquino made by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. At least 81 Catholic Church leaders have signed the appeal that says, “’give new life and glorious finish’ to the 27-year-old CARP by passing the twin measures House Bill 4296 and House Bill 4375 for the sake of Filipino farmers.”

“It is helpful that the bishops are voicing out their support for the farmers’ interests, and so we appeal that they support GARB that proposes free land distribution and the nationalization of agricultural lands, Anakpawis Representative Fernando “Ka Pando” Hicap said in a statement.

GARB not CARP. GARB is the one that nationalizes everyone’s land and then hands it out to other people. 81 ‘Catholic leaders’ support GARB but apparently not enough bishops.

The group said farmer-leaders have officially submitted to the CBCP’s 107th Plenary Assembly in July 2013, an appeal urging “the Filipino peasantry including our Bishops, to unite and make a stand for a new, genuine and truly distributive land reform program… and, pray that our beloved bishops reconsider their position on the sham CARPER and to continue taking the side of the oppressed and exploited toiling peasants who have been struggling for genuine land reform.”

In their appeal to the CBCP, the KMP called CARP as “the longest-running and most expensive agrarian reform program in the world and is not meant to address the problem of landlessness and rural poverty. Enacted on June 10, 1988 during the administration of then President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino, the law was crafted to exempt Hacienda Luisita and other vast haciendas in the country from land distribution.”

So they already have a land redistribution system in the Philippines, it’s just that it only redistributes smaller farmers’ land. Rich farmers still get to keep what’s theirs. So, it’s a choice between bad and worse.

Will the bishops shift? What would Pope Francis do? Organize co-ops?

 

Fr. Dwight Longenecker follows up on the Pope’s recent promotion of cooperatives as a better alternative to actually owning your own business.  In doing so he rolls out a false dichotomy which is uttered so often it reminds me of how the Constitution calls for separation of church and state. It doesn’t, and Catholic teaching doesn’t call for checks on capitalism either.

To understand Pope Francis’ economics we need to turn away from the simplistic clash between left-wing socialism and right-wing capitalism. Catholic social teaching condemns socialism for substituting state systems of welfare for personal responsibility, and for obliterating individual freedoms through oppressive state control. Catholic social teaching also condemns unrestrained capitalism for focusing only on the quest for wealth at the expense of workers, the environment and the common good.

The Church condemns greed not ‘excess capitalism.’ Capitalism is just what happens when people are left alone to use their own property and energy. It really isn’t an ‘ism’ at all. It’s just natural rights and freedom. In its other sense ‘Capitalism’, as in the concentration of wealth and capacity in the hands of a few, is a result of oppressive laws which infringe upon the rights of others. That kind of capitalism doesn’t come from too much freedom, but from too little.

Pope St. John Paul II called both socialism and capitalism, “Atheistic, materialistic systems.” What he meant was that both systems focus only on the worldly attainment of money and power. They operate as if God does not exist, and each in their own way, subject the human person to the drive for wealth and power. In doing so, devotees of both systems worship money— “the devil’s dung.”

Sourcing contemporary encyclicals exclusively is a dangerous way to interpret Catholic teaching. Looking at society as it stood, Pope John Paul saw atheistic banking and finance empires concentrating wealth. This doesn’t mean we should check the God-given freedom to own and operate an enterprise. Money is the root of all evil, not evil in itself. It’s just a way to facilitate exchange, a transfer of power. It has to be misused to be called ‘dung’.

Instead, in his address to the members of the Italian co operative movement, Pope Francis emphasized economic principles that focus on the human person and the human family. The Italian Confederation of Cooperatives encourages private enterprise, helps fund start up businesses and draws people together into shared ownership of businesses for their own welfare and the assistance of the poor.

A cooperative illustrates one of the basic principles of Catholic social teaching: solidarity. Solidarity is the shared community of individuals and families for the common good. The Catholic solidarity principle is different from socialism because it is from the ground up rather than the top down. Socialism and communism attempt to impose a form of solidarity through state control whereas true solidarity is a genuine movement of the people for the people and by the people.

This turns the concept of subsidiarity on its head. Subsidiarity is the concentration of power as close to grass roots as possible, not solidarity. Socialists like to pretend that their form of solidarity is all about the people too but it never is. It just does what co-ops do. It removes real ownership and hands power to high-level administrators.

Someone has to run a co-op and it can’t be the owners because if everyone’s an owner than no-one is.