First, a fair warning. First version of this post had three consecutive numerals six in the post-ID.
Now, for what I was going to write, and perhaps God, perhaps a Church man or perhaps just a kabbalist wanted it stamped that way. I did not want readers to be obliged to shun it due to post number actually there, so I made a new post. But I did warn you.
Mark Shea on Catholic and Enjoying It had this post:
Commie Pope Calls for State Intervention in Economy and Wealth Resdistribution!!!
January 24, 2015 by Mark Shea
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2015/01/commie-pope-calls-for-state-intervention-in-economy-and-wealth-resdistribution.html
Here is the comment I tried to post under it and what happened to it:
| What a pity he poisoned that document with paragraph 6, which seems to imply that the laws obeyed by the cosmos at large are non-moral laws of necessity. Or can you find a way out of that implication?
The angel giving 63 Ophiuchi a REVERSE parallax might be considered slighted because of it. And also a pity you mistranslate a good point. He called for wider DISTRIBUTION of "durable consumer goods", houses, land, tools and equipment. You talk about "Wealth Resdistribution" which may mean Social Democracy instead of Distributism. In SD, state redistributes money and therefore non-durable consumer goods. But leaves concentration of productive wealth where it is or (as in 1960's) makes it worse. Btw, Re-distribution, not res-distribution. |
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Fact remains : Commies concentrated rather than spread ownership of farmland by forcing individual owners to get together in a collective ownership, alternatives being Kolkhos and Sovkhos. The one little exception under a few years of Stalin era (NEP) was not just abolished, but its distributist heros, the Kulaks, demonised and punished for being Kulaks.
Social Democrats in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, probably Finland too, concentrated by making taxes so high a minimal farm for economic viability had to be greater than before.
And de Gaulle had done so somewhat less than SD. And Franco in 1960's did so somewhat less than de Gaulle. So, on antidistributist evil scale, Franco is mild, Soviet Communism extreme. de Gaulle and Social Democrats come between.
Now, there are a few more points to make. Redistribution and wider distribution do not mean the same thing. A new concentration is also a redistribution. Also, Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum had specifically said that a wider distribution of land was not needed, as long as the land was actually feeding the farm workers. However, since then, one may observe that some large land owners even in Catholic countries have adapted to the Capitalist logic which was most infamous during the Irish Potato famine, in which tenants grew potatoes for themselves and wheat for their landlord and when potato crop failed same landlord preferred selling the wheat in England over feeding the hungry tenants in Ireland. I don't think things were quite so bad when Sturzo (whom Chesterton admired) led farm workers with shovels to ensure land got worked, but if landlords were letting land lie fallow, not for preserving fertility, but only for gaining higher prices on wheat, that also was criminal, and the countermeasure of Sturzo (as of Mussolini, who ordered Sturzo to stop) was measured. The farm workers did not confiscate the land, only make sure landlords gained their usual gains from working it, rather than unusual ones from stopping it from being worked.
But per se, a collective farm is as much of concentrated ownership of land as a landlord is. More individual ownership is preferrable, but not a duty, as Leo XIII noted, as long as farm workers really also do live off the land.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Ezechiel
Prophet and Martyr
10-IV-2015
Apud Babylonem sancti Ezechielis Prophetae, qui, a Judice populi Israel, quod eum de cultu idolorum argueret, interfectus, in sepulcro Sem et Arphaxad, Abrahae progenitorum, sepultus est; ad quod sepulcrum, orationis causa, multi confluere consueverunt.
Sorry for making the paragraph 6 the culprit paragraph of precisely Mater et Magistra, I seem to have confused it with Pacem in Terris.
ReplyDeleteHere we go, Pacem in Terris §6:
6. But the mischief is often caused by erroneous opinions. Many people think that the laws which govern man's relations with the State are the same as those which regulate the blind, elemental forces of the universe. But it is not so; the laws which govern men are quite different. The Father of the universe has inscribed them in man's nature, and that is where we must look for them; there and nowhere else.
My emphasis. In the first of the sentences I emphasised, Roncalli might have just said that others think that mathematical rather than moral laws govern the universe and that they also think this is true of the relations of man and state.
If so, he could have continued: But it is not so; the laws which govern men are moral ones. The Father of the universe has inscribed them in man's nature, and that is where we must look for them; there and nowhere else.
Or he could have continued: But it is not so; the laws which govern men are quite different from this real or supposed necessity of the universe. The Father of the universe has inscribed them in man's nature, and that is where we must look for them; there and nowhere else.
Or ... but alas, he continued "But it is not so; the laws which govern men are quite different." Which is taken as different from those of the Universe. Meaning those of the Universe are not inscribed into the "hearts" of angels, only into the vectors of physical factors. Which is cosmologically speaking a modernist poison.