The Conservative chairman's visit to the Vatican on Tuesday is the latest example of how her party is increasingly willing to talk about religion.
It could misfire. Christianity sits uncomfortably with the policies of both political parties. What are the Conservatives to make of the laws on land tenure and usury set out in Chapter 25 of Leviticus?
There is worse: the encyclical Vix Pervenit of 1745 re-states the scriptural ban on usury, to say nothing of the entire body of Catholic Social Teaching encyclicals given out since 1891. These commence with Rerum Novarum, the encyclical signed by Pope Leo XIII, and continue to the latest, Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate of 2009 - which argues that justice is the foundation of charity.
The encyclicals from Quadragesimo Anno (1931) onwards argue the case for social responsibility in the economic sphere, setting the Popes up as advocates of principles well to the left of anything the British Labour Party would have dared to promote over the past couple of decades.
The politicians may get this thrown back in their face.
1 kommentar:
Well, one could hope they would get it thrown back in their face, as you say. I personally hope to see the rise of the Catholic confessional state all over the world, as it was a more humane state, which the Reformation destroyed precisely in the name of excess profit. But none of these encyclicals are so radical as you let on, unless you have found that I didn't. Excepting Caritas in Veritate, they are no more than extensions of traditional teaching--a defense of private property, for example, a defense also of the right to strike. They all say the poor must be cared for, but none of them say the poor have a right to housing and food without working for it. So you would have to get a bit more concrete to make the point. The Catholicism we could expect from a Catholic state a strong work ethic, and yes, control of banks for the common good. We could expect defense of life from conception to grave. We could expect a systematic break down of the too-big-to fails, ala distributism, and if current distributists are a guide, they think of that in terms of several generations, not a law passed to begger big corporations tomorrow. We might expect the public to get a share in new wealth, rather than it going to the big corporations as presently, but not in the form of handouts, 'income redistribution,' which means nothing--real shares, real ownership. In any case, I saw a scheme like that in one of the distributist blogs, and it is not leftist in the sense we usually use the term. It's ownership in a culture of private ownership, not government ownership. The Catholic state would appear left on some things, and right on others--and is the solution we need. We are waking up to this, that's why you are blogging on it. I hope you continue to investigate. What do you think of Hungary's constitution? It's rather what I mean, commit oneself to the poor, as it does, and kick the gypsies off the dole at the same time. That needs done, and all of Europe is afraid to do it.
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