{"id":9005,"date":"2014-01-12T16:52:01","date_gmt":"2014-01-12T16:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=9005"},"modified":"2014-01-12T16:52:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T16:52:01","slug":"economical-with-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/economical-with-the-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Economical with the Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Reinhard<\/a>Cross-posted<\/a> on Ricochet<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Religion News<\/em>‘s David Gibson believes<\/a> that the current pope\u2019s crude and demagogic attacks (to be clear: that’s not exactly the way that Mr. Gibson appears to see them) on the free market have a useful supporter in Marx. That\u2019s Cardinal Marx, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich. Did you think I meant anyone else?<\/p>\n

After taking a few, largely ludicrous, swipes at the pope\u2019s critics on the right, Mr. Gibson gets to the point:<\/p>\n

Cardinal Reinhard Marx \u2026says the idea that capitalism has never been properly tried is silly \u2014 and he says it in the latest edition of the Vatican daily, L\u2019Osservatore Romano<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo think that somewhere there are pure markets which give rise to the good through free competition is mere ideology,\u201d wrote Marx, who is one of the pope\u2019s \u201cGang of Eight\u201d special advisers. \u201cCapitalism should not become the model of society\u201d because \u201cit does not take into account individual destinies, the weak and the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted that \u201cThe call to think beyond capitalism is not a struggle against the market economy,\u201d but, according to Catholic World News, he wrote that an economic vision that \u201creduces economic action to capitalism has chosen the morally wrong starting point.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And such an economic vision is practiced where, exactly, Cardinal?<\/p>\n

Marx then goes on to deny most of postwar European history:<\/p>\n

Catholic social teaching offers the \u201cspiritual foundations of a social market economy\u201d but \u201cthese ideas have never played a real role.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh come off it. <\/p>\n

Marx is an educated man. We thus must assume that he is a knave rather than a fool. As he knows perfectly well, Western Europe\u2019s economies have been run on a \u2018social market\u2019 basis since the fall of Hitler, and, indeed, in some places sometimes before, a social market that, at least in Roman Catholic Europe, owed a clear debt to Catholic social teaching, and more specifically to that set out in Leo XIII\u2019s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum<\/em>. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth adding, perhaps unkindly, that the economic ideology running through some of the variants of prewar European fascism can also be seen as a mutation of those very same ideas, a mutation that was profoundly influential in shaping the Peronism that flourished in the Argentina of the future Pope Francis\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n

And Cardinal Marx\u2014selected, as Mr. Gibson mentions above, by Francis as one of his eight wise men to assist in the overhaul of the curia\u2014 is someone of whom this pope clearly approves.<\/p>\n

Make of that what you will.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, there\u2019s one other thing. As the Huffington Post<\/em> noted last October<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich\u2019s archdiocese spent around $11 million renovating the archbishop\u2019s residence and another $13 million for a guesthouse in Rome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And make of that<\/em> what you will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted on Ricochet: Religion News‘s David Gibson believes that the current pope\u2019s crude and demagogic attacks (to be clear: that’s not exactly the way that Mr. Gibson appears to see them) on the free market have a useful supporter in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15,711],"tags":[1053,998,403,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9008,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9005\/revisions\/9008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}