At the same time, however, the distribution of wealth did not become fairer but in many cases worsened.

There is no intrinsic injustice in some people being fabulously wealthy if those at the bottom have a standard of living that is commensurate with human dignity. I am in favor of some people owning business jets, mansions and businesses around the world. That creates jobs for other people and that is a good thing. There is only injustice if those at the bottom have an inhuman standard of living through no fault of their own, or if they are subjected to a denial of their inalienable human rights – even though they otherwise possess sufficient material goods – due to a misuse of the power of those at the top.

Something that is not explicitly mentioned in the document, which I think is a glaringly apparent cause of poverty and unemployment around the world and would have been entirely appropriate to mention, is this: As certainly as slavery in the Old South brought about poverty for non-plantation owning white Southerners, their labor being devalued by the cheap labor of enslaved Blacks, the exploitation of Chinese labor by the Chinese ruling class and the cooperation in this by the ruling classes of other developed nations is devaluing the labor of the world’s work force. This is a case of those at the top misusing their power by successfully lobbying for governmental policy – the normalization of trade with China in the case of the U.S. – that favors their self interest and has been devastating to the common good – and hasn’t done anything for the Chinese work force either, except to make their exploitation profitable, which isn’t exactly hastening it being brought to an end.

And one last thought – the concept of subsidiarity has long been affirmed by Catholic Social Teaching. It basically is the idea the governmental authority should be at the lowest and most local level possible. If there are issues that can only be effectively dealt with by an international governmental authority, then that is the absolute minimum they should be authorized to control. And even then there is the problem that humanity still has and will continue to have a fallen nature – the concept of subsidiarity addresses the fact that centralized power most often leads to corruption. The founders of the U.S., in their wisdom, realized that as well, and wanted the powers of the federal government to be very restricted. What makes us think that those holding power in some governmental authority with international scope will be able to resist temptations that haven’t yet been successfully resisted in the history of the world. Even the U.S., where subsidiarity was the clearly expressed intention of its founders, now has a federal government that in no way resembles that created by them. It has become everything the founders didn’t want it to be, not only because of its size and scope, but also for another, more fundamental reason: Where the founders created a government whose right to exist was bestowed upon it by humanity, which had the right and duty to alter or abolish it and institute new government as it saw was necessary for the protection of humanity’s inalienable rights – the government has now claimed for itself the authority to bestow and withdraw humanity’s right to exist by pretending to legitimately authorize taking the life of the child in the womb. That is 180 degrees from where we started. It is time for humanity to knock Caesar off his high horse and put him in his place, reminding him that it is not his to bestow and withdraw humanity’s inalienable rights; it is his only to protect them. Until that happens it is not yet time to seriously consider the establishment of some kind of governmental body with international authority.

The same list of “reactionaries” above would be a list of prominent conservatives and Catholics (Dreher was Catholic then) who derisively dismissed advice from “the Vatican” that was not “binding” authoritatively that suggested the moral implications of that war were worrisome. JP2 suggested stronger wording.

Weigel went so far as to derive a clerical competency evaluation to attempt to dismiss US bishops on such matters and in effect tell them to “shut up.”.

As such, it may be worth rethinking how rapidly one dismisses such “liberals” just because it fails to fit neocon philosophy.

But the virtue of thinking with the Church is not a virtue being embraced by conservatives in matters of war and peace.

It’s time to face up to that.

ISTM the Vatican is playing this game all wrong. They have to know that this confusion exists (they’d be idiots not to know, and they’re not idiots). So they’re playing off of it somehow. They know people will be confused, and in some weird way they think that’s an advantage.

It’s not.

They need a new communications director, and they need a very simple way to distinguish these occasional eruptions.

Just for example, they could do something like this. If they issue something in Latin, it’s ex cathedra. If they issue it in Greek, it’s binding but not necessarily infallible. (Like a change to the liturgy.) If it’s just an opinion, they issue it in French. Nobody pays attention to the French anyway.

Or they could use different colors of paper, or a big label at the top, or something.

As it is, only a very small percentage of the population is even aware of the distinctions in levels of authority of Vatican documents, and everybody else is just dazed and confused.

An even better strategy would be to quit issuing these opinion papers altogether.

As such, routine conservative discourse must be understood as standing outside the Roman Church leadership on matters of economics and social justice (and clearly war and peace). Whether such Catholic judgements are correct over the libertarian-disposed routine conservative economic approach is for God to determine. It is becoming clear: the libertarian-leaning Republican Party has social policies that lie outside the thinking of the magisterium of the Church.

Thanks!

Check these out as well.