Bill's Notes

I'm sorry. The Pope has addressed a serious topic, which was European colonialism, and here I am making a joke in the title of this post. Terrible of me, I know. So let me get a little more serious.

The Catholic Church holds a wide variety of teachings that inevitably will make anyone uncomfortable, regardless of political affiliation. One of the easiest things to do is enlist a specific Catholic teaching against whoever your opponent of the moment is, while ignoring the Church's teaching against what makes you uncomfortable.

Chesterton said in Orthodoxy something along the lines of this: When people abandon the Church, it's not just the vices that get released, it's the virtues. Thus people grab this or that Christian virtue, and promote it at the expense of others. The result is an imbalance in the culture, which can occasionally become malignant. See the Church's teaching on caring for the poor as an act of mercy versus the totalizing construct of communism*.

Yet, even after the legacy of communism, the Church still teaches that the economy is for man, not man for the economy. It says the legacy of colonialism is a real thing, not a leftist fantasy, and that the church (little c) was implicated in colonialism. The Church shows concern about rich nations exploiting poor ones ... the concern for the poor is still there, but it's rooted in a broad-based morality and concern for the dignity of man, and for bringing individuals and human societies in a right relationship with God.

Those who cheer the Church's virtue of preference for the poor might quickly turn away when that virtue is put among another virtues.

For example, the Catholic Church teaches unequivocally that pre-marital and homosexual sex is always and in all cases a sin, that birth control eventually enervates a culture, that cooperating in the procurement of an abortion is not only a sin, but automatically excommunicates you from the Church (and may cost you your soul), and that civil authorities are obligated to legally ban pornography in order to protect fundamental human dignity. This Pope's first letter diagnosed sex as an essential part of the western "culture of death's" sickness.

By sin the church doesn't mean, "you are naughty and we arbitrarily say so because we are cosmic killjoys." It means, "if you are doing this, you are hurting yourself and your neighbors." It means, "What you're doing doesn't work, it won't satisfy you in the way you seek, and it won't help build a healthy society." Church teaching is always rooted in fundamental moral law and reason, and toward orienting us toward a right relationship with God, ourselves and our neighbors.

FWIW.

* I rewrote this sentence. Initially it contained references to left-liberalism and socialism, but it was unclear that I was referring to a series of progressively more extreme emphases on the virtue. But I took it out because I don't want to compare left-liberalism, which I consider in many forms to be quite reasonable, with something as murderous as communism, which is outside the realm of reason, IMHO.