Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 1:07pm

Father Z on the Latest Folly From Justice and Peace

 

My co-blogger Christopher Blosser has done his usual yeoman work in pulling together reactions from around the Catholic blogosphere to “TOWARDS REFORMING THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL AND MONETARY SYSTEMS IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL PUBLIC AUTHORITY” from the pontifical counsel on justice and peace.  One of my favorite blog authors Father Z, who I have designated Master of the Fisk, has some memorable comments on it:

 

I have a few things to digest yet, and it takes me a while, since this isn’t exactly my bailiwick.  However, I can say this: thanks be to God this “white paper” doesn’t form part of the Holy Father’s Ordinary Magisterium.

Every once in a while the Holy See’s smaller offices, Pontifical Councils and so forth, have to put out a paper to justify their budgets and remind everyone that they take up valuable space.  These documents, which do not form part of the Holy Father’s Magisterium, can deal with critical issues like how to be a safe driver.  The dicasteries keep busy by hosting seminars on how to play sport and so forth.

Some of my favorite points in the new “white paper” include the suggestion that there should be global monetary management and a “central world bank” to regulate it and that the United Nations should be involved.  National banks have, after all, done such a good job that we should now make the effort transnational!  And is this the same UN that had nations such as Saudi Arabia and, till recently, Libya on the their human rights commission?  Wasn’t there a UN financial corruption investigation still going on?  Is this the same UN that is pushing contraception pretty much in every poor country on earth?  Was that a different UN?

Another high point in the new “white paper”: “These measures ought to be conceived of as some of the first steps in view of a public Authority with universal jurisdiction; as a first stage in a longer effort by the global community to steer its institutions towards achieving the common good.”

Uh huh.

Go here to read the brilliant rest.

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WJ
WJ
Wednesday, October 26, AD 2011 1:19pm

So, this is part of what Benedict XVI says in Caritas in Veritate:

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.

What is so different between this and the “white paper” derided by Fr. Z and others? I understand that the white paper specifies the kind of political authority beyond that proffered in CIV, but does this make Benedict’s proposal any less daft on Fr. Z’s reading? Note that to say that not everything in a social encyclical is binding is not to say that you are free to consider it stupid, worthless, and unworthy of consideration. So what’s the difference between the proposal of this document–with which I don’t agree, by the way–and CIV?

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