Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Please stop this silly criticism of the Pope

I wish people would stop criticising the Pope, mostly because of the way he dresses. It is not my cup of tea but it takes at least 100 years to make a judgement on a particular pope. Every one has a different task for a different time. This one needs to cleanse the augean stables that the Vatican has seemingly turned into.

Benedict stressed the need for "reform of the reform" and the need to develop Catholic Social Teaching. After more 120 years of Catholic Social Teaching since Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, it remains deficient. Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate effectively takes the subject back to square one, whilst Summorum Pontificum and the accompanying letter point the way to necessary liturgical reform.

The Benedictine liturgical reforms now need to be driven through, especially at the local level. The laity also need to address the deficiencies in Catholic Social Teaching, working from the ideas set out in Caritas in Veritate. Discussion of the colour of the papal footwear is a damaging distraction and discredits those who keep on talking about the subject.

If issues relating to these matters lead to conflict, they have to be resolved through the use of reason and modern scientific knowledge, particularly in the field of cognitive psychology, a subject whose insights need particularly to be brought to bear on the subject of liturgy.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer