July 26, 2010 - Dr. Jeffrey Mirus, founder of the excellent CatholicCulture.org, was surprised by the “bitterness” he found from readers responding to the Bishops’ support of extended unemployment benefits last week. He presses the need for some “cautions” and “perspective” particularly when we begin to denounce the Bishops as socialists. He insists that we be ‘very careful in using this term” and not resort to “inaccurate name-calling.” Why are the bishops not socialists? According to Mirus it is because they never have advocated the state ownership of private means of production.
This incomplete defense is followed by a lengthy and abstract discussion on balancing solidarity and subsidiarity, building “intermediary” institutions, correcting the tax structure, pursuing the “twin goals of stimulating the production or wealth and preventing the marginalization of those who fall behind;” and patient acceptance with the way things are until something better can be created. “Conservative Catholics need to recognize that it is not wrong in Catholic social theory to engage government in fostering the economic common good. ” Here we must wonder where a conservative may disagree. Would they be against the ‘economic common good,” or just against re-distributionist confiscation and its uniformly negative results?
This familiar lullaby is epidemic in faithful Catholic intellectual circles. It grows mainly out of pride and a misunderstanding of the social justice writing of Leo XIII, Chesterton, and the Distributists. Such destructive thinking needs to be addressed as it runs contrary to natural law and the laws of God. Furthermore the Bishops, as they manifest culturally and politically via the USCCB, are not only socialists, but function regularly as statist agents. They do not shout for socialism; they just enact it and applaud its ongoing construction. They should be assessed not by what they advocate, but by what they achieve and destroy.
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