Both Capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves ….
“This ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it.”
— Pope Benedict XVI
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“If some Americans disapprove of Francis because of his positions on the environment and the economy, then logically they should have rejected every pope since at least Leo XIII and his 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum.”
John Allen
Why the outrage over THIS Pope and not his two predecessors, and Popes before them??? A great Catholic journalist explains down below.
Remember how Pope Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, used to spark such bitter blowback from conservative Catholic politicians, Fox News and other conservative media and Americans everywhere when he dared to criticize capitalism with his bold, unflinching, outrageous critiques of it???
I mean, Capitalism has failed in a way that Marxism failed????
And places where Capitalism is dominant are “regimes?”
Remember how American pundits on Fox News trashed him and dissed him every time he ragged on the world’s (greedy) rich people and called attention to the built-in injustices of (unrestrained) free-market economies?
Same with the beloved conservative Pope John Paul II, Benedict’s predecessor.
He made some very un-American assertions about capitalism and the exploitation of the power and the powerless around the world, seemingly unaware that the only business is America is business.
They also stepped on American toes in their homilies, speeches and writings about how greed and runaway capitalism are linked to the trashing of God’s good, green Creation and, as a result, do great harm to “the least” among us.
People, especially capitalists who think capitalism is above criticism from anybody–much less Christians and Christian leaders–really worked themselves into a frenzy over the prior two Pope’s messages about the environment.
Uh.
Oh, wait.
That never happened, you say????
Never mind.
When Benedict XVI spoke on abortion or homosexuality, his words had an echo because they fit the image of a stern cultural conservative. When he spoke on ecology or poverty, the reaction instead was generally confusion, which in an instantaneous news cycle is often a prescription for moving on to something else.
— The incisive Catholic journalist John L. Allen
Click here for a word from the greatest of all Catholic journalists ever John L. Allen, now editor at the very interesting Catholic journal “Crux.”
And while you’re at it . . . check out what the radical, political(???) American Catholic Bishops are saying about you-know-who, the political candidate from Hell.
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