The challenge to Catholicism's consistent ethic of economic life

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

In 1986, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter on the American economy that amounted to an attack on the Reagan administration’s economic policies. As such, it was entirely consistent with the critical view of free market capitalism that had characterized Catholic social teaching at least since Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.


To read more:

https://religionnews.com/2018/05/22/the-challenge-to-catholicisms-consistent-ethic-of-economic-lifecatholicisms-consistent-ethic-of-economic-life/

[Igel]

1. I'm always torn between divergent understandings of the NT when I read it.

"Blessed are the poor" for some just means some sort of cosmic karma. You have little now, you'll have more stuff later. God wants us to have stuff, and that's what's really important.

Which I can't reconcile with ideas of righteousness, holiness, and mercy.

There's the recurrent refrain that the poor are downtrodden and the victims of injustice. But "justice" had a very clear meaning when the gospels were written, in the cultural context. If those are works to be fixed in time and space, those constraints have to be respected. Jesus wasn't raised in Nazareth, TX, and he didn't go to the National Cathedral. Or the cathedral of Chartres. Westminster. Or the Haram ash-sharif.

If it's injustice that's the issue, then the unwronged poor aren't blessed.

However, the "poor in spirit" is consonant with a number of motifs in the NT and the OT. Israel was haughty when prosperous, and when they fell on hard times they turned to their lord for salvation. So with the poor, who have nothing to be proud about, nothing much to love in this world that isn't other people (and even then ...), and need help.

Giving every one of the poor $100k today would satisfy the cosmic-karma view. It's neither just nor injust, unless the money is forcibly taken from others. And it would certainly go against the "poor in spirit" view.

Worse yet, the liberation theologians and many progressive social Xian activists are but left-wing versions of the Christian Reconstructionism many vilify. Those who view things in terms of cosmic-karma are variations on the theme of the "prayer of Jabez" dolts.

I guess there's also the "suffering" view of the poor. But apart from pure penury, most of the suffering is mere avarice and envy. We tend to look up and say, "Hey, there's somebody with more crap than I have" and seldom look down to say, "I'm richer than *them*." There's a reason cortisol levels of the merely poor (as opposed to the indigent) are about the same as those of the upper middle classes. Beyond a certain level of income and prosperity, it's all self-imposed mental anguish at wanting what others have.

However, many in 25 AD would have been very poor by today's standards. Poverty was the norm.