The Peoples’ Liturgy!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Headline reads: Pope says Communists are Christians.

Well, maybe. Hard to tell what he actually said, much less meant, from such a brief article. But if the article is accurate, I’d suggest the Holy Father is confused.

Christ lived in an era when there was no welfare so life was Root Hog, or Die. That system forced every man to focus on building and preserving wealth for himself and his loved ones (family, tribe). And that relentless focus on gathering wealth made some people selfish, miserly, stingy, greedy, covetous. Those are not endearing qualities.

Christ’s message of giving was not a call for government redistribution, but a call for individuals to voluntarily donate. Paying your taxes to Caesar requires no inner contemplation, no step back to look at your life, no reassessment of what’s important, no thankfulness for what you have, no gratitude for what God has blessed you with. Instead, paying taxes to be redistributed fosters resentment that the ants toil while the grasshoppers play – and the grasshoppers get rewarded for indolence while the ants get punished for thrift.

Communism is not Christian, they are polar opposites looking toward the same middle. We all want to eliminate poverty. The question is how. The answer is voluntarily. Nothing else works.

Joe Doakes.

People ask me why I don’t convert to Catholicism.

Liturgical matters aside, the presence of a leader and bureaucracy that can use religion to push hogwash like Francis and his inner circle have been pushing is a big part of it.

9 thoughts on “The Peoples’ Liturgy!

  1. The Catholic Church is very confusing, but when you are that large and in every nation on earth (well, maybe now some Arab states), it is hard to be consistant.

    They were wrong during the cold war in opposing the west’s efforts to contain the Atheist communist expansion. And like industrial unions partnering with radical enviromentalists, some Catholic church leaders don’t seem to realize that they often work with those who are very anti-Christian and would love to destroy the church.

    Yet many of the most dedicated Catholic leaders are very brave in pushing back against the secular left. Look at what happened in San Francisco last week when the local….is it archbishop?….attending a traditional marriage event. He stood up against the local politicians who tried to stop him from particapting in it.

  2. Jason Lewis is the only one highlighting this stuff. What a mess of wasteful and destructive stupidity.

  3. You can take Cardinal Bergoglio out of Argentina, but you can’t take the Argentina out of Cardinal Bergoglio.

    There’s not enough time or space here to explain what’s going on, but you need to understand the following:

    • Some popes (Benedict, for example) spend their days thinking about matters of faith. Other popes (Francis) are thinking about works. Francis is a Jesuit, so his inclination is to engage with the world.
    • Exhortations to serve to poor are exhortations. There are plenty of parish priests and comfortable congregations around that spend their time gilding their lilies instead of working with the poor. This is a problem with a 2,000-year history; it’s also something that many of our Protestant brethren rightly call to our attention.
    • When the Pope says the Communists have “stolen the flag” of Christianity, he’s speaking about his personal experience. The issue, which we all recognize, is that the Communists are lying. Francis knows this, too, but the audience he is speaking to isn’t the readership of Mitch’s blog.
    •Actual Church doctrine hasn’t changed in any real way since Francis became Pope.

  4. Actually, that’s a horrible summary article. Mr. D gets it closer. Francis was responding to criticism calling him “Leninist” for criticizing our current form of capitalism. Personally, I agree with much of his critique of our system of crony capitalism, especially as practiced in his former home country. If you want to see a
    “capitalist” system designed to steal from the masses and give to the elite few, there are few places better than Argentina.

    The “stolen the flag” comment is also telling in the context in which it was made (hint: how many journalists can handle context when it involves religion and non-leftist economics?). While Communists have stolen the rhetoric of serving the poor, they haven’t lived up to serving the poor, and that’s also what Francis was pointing out with his “then you are Christians” critique of what they should be doing to follow their own propaganda. Given that he was laughing when he said that, you can see that he’s clearly dismissing any similarity between what Christians should do and what Communists actually do. In this sense, it’s more an invocation of Berg’s Seven Law, but applied to the Leftist/Communist axis.

  5. Yes because its not like communism resulted in the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century. I feel like Francis is going to utter the classic line, “The reason Communism hasn’t worked is because it has never been implemented properly” which of course it never can be due to something the church should be familiar with. The fallibility of human nature.

  6. Joe, but there was welfare. Jewish concept of tzedaka – helping others in need – was well established by time JC walked the earth. Of course, it was never meant to be permanent – you got help from the community to get back on your feet and then off you went. So hate to burst your bubble Joe, but JC was just preaching what he knew, nothing new.

  7. Just read the link, and I tend to agree with Mark. I had been afraid that there was some vague universalism that is alleged to be within Vatican II that Francis was taking to its logical conclusion, but in this case, that would not be fair. He’s not saying that the Reds are going to be in Heaven, but rather that they’ve tried to appropriate the travails of the poor for their own benefit.

    On the way to toilet paper shortages in Nicaragua, most of which is covered by pulpwood forests. Yeesh.

    And I agree with JPA as well. I’m currently taking teens at church through the book of Matthew, and it really helps to understand “Oral Torah” to get a fuller picture of what Christ is doing there.

  8. The Holy Father seems to have some advisers who are “invincibly ignorant” in the realm of economics – Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga chief among them. The beauty of the Church is that it can contain faithful Catholics from Dorothy Day to Sam Gregg, author of “Tea Party Catholics,” and still cohere after 2000 years.

  9. The reason I am not Catholic is simply that no man or man made institution is infallible.
    Over all the Catholic Church has been a good influence on the western world. But, it is not without corruption.

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