St. Thomas More and a Prayer for Politicians from the AOP

Paul Ryan and Catholic Social Teaching: A Commentary by Fr. Barron

As usual Fr. Barron lays out the issues without being partisan about.  I'll have more to say about the social doctrine of the Church, distributism and faithful citizenship as we get closer to November 6. 

Gone Praying

I'm presently staying on the Ile Saint Bernard in Chateaunguay, Quebec.  It was a retreat house run by the Gray Sisters of Montreal, but it was sold last year and is now a hotel open to the public.  I'm on my yearly retreat, and in general the atmosphere is pretty tranquil, considering most of the people here are on vacation, and so not into the whole prayer and recollection thing.

So, you won't be getting any heavy stuff from me this week.  Even if I wanted to, the only Internet connection is in the lobby, and writing with the world going by isn't conducive to deep, penetrating thought.  I'll check in now and again.  I'm praying for all of you.  Please pray for us!

Our Real Home: AOP

The Assuption of Mary

This is a piece from a couple of years ago that I'm not sure I can really add to, so I'm just gonna go ahead and republish it.  Have a blessed Feast of Our Lady.  May we always trust in her loving, motherly care!

Today we take a break from the regular cycle of Sunday readings as we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. So I will take a break from our examination of Salesian Spirituality and focus our attention on our Blessed Mother. She is the Queen of Heaven, yet as St. Therese of Lisieux wrote, she is more mother than queen. She loves us very much and always calls us to follow her Son. Today’s feast, in part, teaches us that Mary, and all the saints are powerful gifts from God, that they are active within the Church, and that, if we are faithful, we will share in the glory they have been given.

That Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven was attested to from Apostolic times and was always believed by the Church, both in the East and West. It was not defined formally as a dogma until 1950 when Pope Pius XII proclaimed, “By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory (Munificentissimus Deus, 44). Because Mary was preserved from original sin in preparation to be mother of the Savior, and was obedient to God’s call, she was also given the grace of not suffering the corruption of the grave. In a special way she already enjoys the fruits of the resurrection won by Jesus’ death on the cross. She is alive in the fullest sense of the word, and is active still within the Church.

In the Gospel reading for today we hear the story of the Visitation. Mary, after saying “yes” to God, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth who is pregnant with John the Baptist. Mary has Jesus within her, this great grace prompts her to go forth and serve her neighbor in need. She is an example for us to follow. As we receive Jesus in the Eucharist we are also called to go and serve others. She and all the saints are united to us and help us by their prayers and example. In a special way Mary is active, as we can see by her apparitions in places like Guadalupe, Lourdes and Fatima. She always calls us to follow her Son more faithfully and covert our lives.

The celebration of the Assumption also points us to the reality of the resurrection. As Mary lives in glory now, so shall we. Mary was blessed in her life, but she also suffered greatly. Her heart was truly pierced by a sword when she saw Jesus suffer as he did. Through it all she was faithful to God’s call. She is a sign for us that if we are faithful through life’s problems and struggles we too will share in gifts from God beyond our understanding.

Maximilian Maria Kolbe and The Immaculata from AOP

What is Distributism? No, Seriously, What is it?

Since it is an election year, and I've been invited to contribute articles about the Church's social teaching to a secular web site, I've been reading up on all things Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.  The problem, as I see it, is that when it comes to discerning the proper Christian attitude toward economics and government the Church has become polarized, at least here in the United States, along political and ideological lines.  The conventional wisdom states that you're either a big government liberal, and maybe out and out socialist, or you're a big business capitalist, with maybe a touch Ayn Randian social Darwinism thrown into the mix.  After we've figured out the ideology that suits us we then try to fit it into our faith life.  The trick is to start from the other way around.  If you do this it becomes clear that neither established economic system fits the Christian ideal perfectly.  But these two poles of socialism and capitalism are pretty much the only options we've been given.  Is their a "Third Way" the Christian can follow?

Enter Distributism, which was popular, relatively speaking, in the early twentieth century among the likes of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  In truth I stumbled over this concept only yesterday as I was doing research on line, so I would not want to put myself up as an expert.  From what I can make out of it Distributists believe strongly in private property, but ownership needs to take place on a broad scale if people's rights are going to be protected.  The mantra is small communities, small farms, small factories, small schools.  They identified the same problems with capitalism as Marx, but saw direct ownership of the means of production, without the mediation of the state, as the solution.

Basically, from what I can make out of it, what's being proposed is something like a return to the medieval guild system or the creation of cooperatives.  But the key is that the farmer owns his land and his farming implements, the carpenter owns his shop, and the tools he uses.  The worker actually earnes money from his labor, with the goal being security and sustainability (to use a modern term) as opposed to economic growth.  In their view capitalism limits property rights to a few who take advantage of the workers' labor, exploiting them for profits that they do not share in in an equal way.  Socialism makes people dependent on the state who robs the worker of the right to enjoy the fruits of his labor or gain security that comes from private ownership.  In its beginnings the movement was agrarian in nature, but later adapted itself to address urban realities as well.

Dorothy Day, who is associated with city life and is often accused of being a communist, was really a distributist.  She was critical of Social Security, calling it an example of "Holy Mother State," that made people dependent on government, robbing them of their personal responsibility to act charitably.  On the other hand she supported President Truman's attempt to nationalize the steel industry in 1949, but only if the government served as a place holder until the factories could be sold off to multiple buyers (naive, if you ask me, but the point is that she did not see nationalization as an end in itself, or the state as being synonymous with the people). 
  
I still have more to read about this intriguing theory.  I'm not sold on it from my first reading, but I want to be patient and give it a chance.  When you see Chesterton mentioned you have to take the thing seriously.  I down loaded an anthology from Barnes and Noble and in the introduction the author-editor came off as defensive and a bit arrogant.  The defensiveness comes from the fact that Belloc and others supported Franco in Spain, and had some nice things to say about Mussolini in the '30's, so they've had to fight the fascist label ever since (its always been strange to me: you can cuddle up to Marx or Lenin and not raise an eyebrow, but mention Franco or Ayn Rand and people rend their garments...but I digress).  Then he went on about the evils of the Internet economy, which I thought was a bit ironic, considering I bought the thing as an e-book.  I'm eager to get into the primary source authors themselves and see what they have to say.   I don't know if I'll return to this with a full fledged critique, but I'm sure I'll mention things about it here and there.    

In Brief: What the Paul Ryan Selection Means

With Mitt Romney choosing Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate we will probably see a renewed debate among the Catholic academic class as to the 42 year old law maker’s Catholic “street cred.”  Back in the spring he was heavily criticized in an open letter by members of the Georgetown faculty before a scheduled speech there, and also earned a rebuke from a committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for the budget he proposed in Congress.  It called for entitlement cuts as a way of handling the deficit, and this was interpreted as a violation of the Church’s preferential option for the poor.  Ryan didn’t back down, saying that Catholic social teaching calls for a balance between solidarity-the recognition and living out of the interdependence of all members of society, and subsidiarity-the principle that local problems should be solved locally, beginning with the individual, before appealing to a higher authority.  Both principles have more to them, and both sides accused the other of over simplification.  What was hopeful about Ryan’s response was that he said what many of us “conservative” Catholics have long thought; that the Church’s social teaching has had a one sided presentation up to now.  We’ve for a long time needed to have a real debate about whether the welfare state, usually proposed as the best embodiment of Catholic thought, really alleviates poverty, promotes the common good and helps people fulfill their God given call to holiness.  With Congressman Ryan as a part of the ticket that opportunity has finally arrived.