We can Throw That Around Because You Don't Teach It in School

You know this quote?

Excellent point. They can throw around "Thomistic" thought and "subsidiarity" and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they're talking about.

I got it here: Catholic Family News : Clinton Campaign Official Denounces Catholics as "Severely Backwards," Calls for Left-Wing Infiltration of Church
12/10/16 19:24
http://www.cfnews.org/page88/files/049b994d306030f1676163beeb7d4646-640.html

Thomistic - defined as:

Per accidens

the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.

Clarifying points on this definition:

Back then often opposed to Averroës outside the pale of Catholic orthodoxy and to Scotism on a few minor points inside the pale of Catholic orthodoxy.

Now very many wouldn't know a Thomist from a Scotist, if appearing, since genuinely antimodern, both of them.

Some even imagine they are Thomist because using a terminology common to St Thomas and Averroism, while instead adhering to Averroism.

Per se

the thoughts that (contrasted with modernity, which is a per accidens) most stick out is:

Biblical inerrancy, ecclesiastic infallibility, high powers of papacy, lower powers of state or of masters, even of parents, and Aristotle was so right except a few Averroistic mistakes on everything ranging from Ten Categories and Proof of God in Five Ways (related to but not identic to Kalaam, which is more Scotist or at least Bonaventurish) to clarifying small questions of detail by his principles of being and of biology.

Thomistic - best studied in

The works of St Thomas Aquinas.

If you do know Latin, I recommend Corpus Thomisticum.

If you don't, at least Summa Theologica is readily available in English online.

Related but close - best studied in

If you do know Latin, I recommend the systematic (or systemicalised) syllabus of errors by Bishop Stephen Tempier. I put them online here:

En lengua romance en Antimodernism y de mis caminaciones : Index in stephani tempier condempnationes
http://enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.com/2012/01/index-in-stephani-tempier.html

While Bishop Tempier avoids open conflict with Thomistic theses, he is also not against the Scotist positions. (And it has nothing to do with SCOTUS, but don't ask me what SCOTUS is, I am severely backward, you see!)

Subsidiarity

Principle of, defined as "whatever can be done by smaller communities of men" (families rather than towns, towns rather than counties, counties rather than states, states rather than union) "should be done by these rather than by the larger ones."

The larger ones are only there to help the smaller ones out. To "subsidise" them, if you liken hence the name. But subsidise here not just or even mainly in the meaning of a dole. More like in general regulations and security of rights.

If Democrats who are so proud of the secular schools they had gone to had learnt this in school, we would not be able to sound sophisticated just by throwing these words around, we would need to show we had mastered the subject too.

Btw, it is against the principle of subsidiarity to force parents to send their children to a specific school endorsed by the state.

And it is against common sense to do so if that school is not even able to equip them for the debate they'll meet!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Luke's Feast
18.X.2016

St Thomas Aquinas OP 1225 – 7 March 1274.

John Duns Scotus c. 1266 – 8 November 1308.

Subsidiarity, see also Subsidiarity (Catholicism).