After the publication of the awful Word On Fire misinformation propaganda we profiled yesterday, Austen Ivereigh, deeply schooled in the Church’s actual social teaching, extremely familiar with the thought and work of Pope Francis, and intensely hated by all MAGA Catholics for all the right reasons, wrote:
He had good reason for the question. The two quotes I cited yesterday (suggesting that nobody knows what social justice is) were bread on a shit sandwich making a claim central to the whole deceptive piece:
Essentially Word On Fire is lying that Pope Benedict refused to use the supposedly “leftist” word “justice” since Vile Woke Liberals have supposedly co-opted it and he wanted to make sure that we all understand that the one and only way to care for the Least of These is through the charitable giving of private individuals, never through the action of the state, since that is, according to MAGA dogma, “Marxism”. The piece invokes the name of Thomas to explain that all those ninnies committing the Sin of Empathy with their calls for Justice have no Deeply Catholic Thomism under their belts, so they can be ignored.
Meanwhile, St. Thomas, like Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, pops out and declares to WOF, “You know nothing of my work”:
It is no robbery if princes exact from their subjects that which is due to them for the safe-guarding of the common good, even if they use violence in so doing. (Summa Theologiae 2,2, Q 66, Article 8, Reply to Objection 3)
In short, the Libertarianism WOF is promoting contradicts Catholic teaching. It turns out that there is a distinction between justice and charity, but not an opposition. They are not in a zero sum game. And it turns out that the state has not only the right but the duty to do justice in the interest of the common good–with our money.
If I’m on the bus next to you and I have 10 bucks in my pocket, I don’t owe you 10 bucks. I can give you 10 bucks if I like and that is charity. But if I don’t I’m not being unjust to you.
But if I step off the bus and you are lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood after a robbery and I step over you and keep going, I have denied you justice, because you are owed your life. (That’s why the rich man wound up in Hell when he neglected the stranger Lazarus and that’s why the priest and the Levite sinned against the beaten man by the roadside and the good Samaritan did not).
Well, here’s the thing: the state’s entire job is to ensure justice. That’s the reason it exists. So it is false to call state-ensured health care “charity”. It’s not. It’s justice and it is entirely appropriate for the state to see to it that the needy get justice.
Health care is not a therapy session so that narcissistic libertarians can feel awesome about themselves. It is for the sick. They are at the center. If a private person can see to the needs of the sick, great. Let them. Nobody is stopping them. But when the libertarian makes war on the state’s ability to help the sick, (and hungry, thirsty naked or homeless) by lying that it is “evil socialism”, he does not give a shit about the needs of the needy. He cares about getting credit.
If you lie that the state seeing to its God-given task of justice “robs” you of your power to do charity, you understand neither charity nor justice and you care not about the needy but about getting glory for your largesse while retaining the power to sentence to death those Lebensunwertes Leben you deem unworthy of help–and life. That’s what this filth is about:
Understand, O MAGA Prolife Movement that libertarian lies have one purpose and it’s not liberty. It’s about gaming the power of the state to protect the rich and powerful from the just claims of the poor and weak. It is about the embrace of an antichrist Savior who is a eugenicist driven by a wholly transactional mindset. It is about believing that every human being on the face of the earth is lebens unwertesleben until they can prove their utility to him–and you.
So long as you embrace that, whether actively or passively, the motto is over the gate of your soul is now “Arbeit Macht Frei”. If you do not repent and work against the monstrous regime you have done so very much to create, maintain, defend, and expand, O MAGA Catholic, you shall in turn pass through far more fearful gates that bear the inscription:
Through me you pass into the doleful city;
through me you pass into eternal pain;
through me you pass among the forsaken people.Justice moved my high Maker;
I was wrought by divine Power,
supreme Wisdom and primal Love.All that came before me was eternal,
and I endure eternal:
abandon all hope, you who enter.”
Here’s the deal:
“If you do not see Christ in the beggar at the Church door, you shall not find him in the Chalice.” – St. John Chrysostom
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7 Responses
The MAGA “Catholics” appear to consider the poor to be unworthy, thus not deserving of any help. The rich however, they fawn over and demand tax cuts and other benefits. If you advocate for government paid health care for poor children, the MAGA cult considers you to be a Marxist.
Thus, their primary concern is to make the rich even richer. Please inform me where that is in the Gospels.
Curiously, the MAGA Catholics consider themselves to be the “good Catholics.” MAGA people have been bamboozled. The rich distract them with culture war issues, while picking their pocket. And they don’t get it.
It’s the greatest graft in history.
It’s greater than allowing divorce in Protestant denominations. Jesus clearly said that marriage is insoluble from the world’s inception but Moses allowed divorce because of hardness of the hearts of Jews. So allowing divorce among Protestants was essentially catering to the same hardness of hearts and expounding a bit on what exactly Jesus meant when He gave the allowance for divorce by unchastity/immorality/adultery (πορνείᾳ, porneia).
But as for justice towards the needy? Jesus clearly said that He is present in the least of these with no questions, no reservations and no loopholes. It took real nerve to adulterate THAT particular teaching and sell the clear opposite as somehow compatible with Catholic faith.
And I listened to those arguments for a while and believed some of them. It basically takes Thessalonians 3:10 and puts it on its head. If you ask any AI engine to summarize it, it will parrot the same argument: if you’re not contributing labor to the society, the society has no obligation to feed you*.
The motivation of Paul was that a number of Thessalonians subscribed to prompt parousia and thus shunned labor because they saw it as a waste of time that could be spent praying.
Once you know that, the whole argument unravels. Once you also put the monastic movement and Benedictine “ora et labora” in that framework, you also understand how Rod Dreher sets out to scam the readers of The Benedict Option.
Once the argument is unraveled, it’s impossible to not see through the graft. Luckily for my soul, I subscribed to these notions when I was young and poor, and I would not hold on to them when I became wealthy enough that I would clutch my riches and “protect them” against “the unworthy ones”.
*) By means of a Russian proverb that takes on the economic contribution meaning, this passage made its way to the first Constitution of the USSR (the Marxist-Leninist, but mainly Marxist one). So by sharing the same key tenet, all MAGA Catholics are closer to Marxism than the Catholic Social Teaching.
Well said, Mark. Thank you.
I’ve always been both amused and bemused by certain “traditionalist” or MAGA-style Catholics who claim the ancient Church was wiser than the Church today. They eagerly quote austere lines from the Fathers, Doctors, and medieval saints to bolster their views on “pelvic issues” and the death penalty — yet curiously overlook equally stern (if not fiercer) teachings from the same sources about our obligations to the poor, the marginalised, and “the least of these”.
As Mark has often highlighted on his blog over the years, the Church Fathers taught that care for the poor was not an act of charity but of justice — giving others what was already their due. St Basil, St John Chrysostom, and many others even described excessive wealth as a form of theft: a deprivation of what rightly belonged to the poor.
Love that Chrysostom quote. That addresses a key shortcoming in the American Church.
A couple years ago, I was part of a parish committee whose task was helping to address the lack of belief in the Eucharist. These groups were inspired by the bishops as preparation for the national Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. When the brainstorming session turned to the topic of missionary outreach, I recall the wrinkled noses and confusion.
I think it boils down to preserving comfort on individual, family, parish and class levels. Those of us who’ve “made it” materially and spiritually (at least in appearance) are desperate to hold on to it all -to the exclusion of anyone outside that privileged tribe.
Love the Annie Hall reference. I could see it.
My own parish, which is extraordinarily generous in all things charitable – really, has to be at or near the top in our diocese for per butt-in-the-pew donations – has actively declined to engage in ongoing adult formation that explicitly promotes the justice lens over several pastors, including one in recent memory who regularly gave very challenging justice-themed homilies and who was much loved. I have struggled to understand this reluctance. Sometimes it feels like the parish might secretly wish to step into that space, but has resigned itself in advance to an anticipated futility.
I have been out of the loop for a long time, but wasn’t the term “social justice” coined by an eighteenth century Italian priest (whose name I forget)?
I just looked this up: Both Robert Barron and Robert Prevost from Chicago became Bishops in September of 2015. I think Pope Francis had great hope for both of them.