Also, see BaalTyranny.blogspot.com CANON button.
Some quotes from the article:
The Pope is engaged in a struggle to bring the
Church into the modern age. And American conservatives are fighting him every
step of the way.
The world’s most renowned Christian theological
guide is, of course, the Pope.
Each Pope, therefore, must make use of the richness
of Church tradition, while also ministering effectively to a world of
ever-evolving challenges and realities.
Legendarily plainspoken Philadelphia Archbishop
Charles Chaput said that the right wing of the Church “generally have not been
really happy” with Francis’s papacy.
In May 2014, conservative Catholic writer Michael
Brendan Dougherty published a provocative op-ed in The Week arguing that
“Catholics must learn to resist their Popes—even Pope Francis.” Dougherty suggested that the legitimacy of
papal teaching—and in a sense, the principle of papal infallibility—was subject
to review by the greater body of Catholic faithful. The duty of the believer,
he concluded, “is not just to rebuke and correct those in authority ... but to
throw rotting cabbage at them, or make them miserable.”
There have always been grumblings about popes, but
the differences in opinion between Francis and the movement collectively known
as the “American right” appear especially numerous.
Irving Kristol, an influential neoconservative,
wrote in his 1976 essay “What Is a Neoconservative?” that conservatives should
be “respectful of traditional values and institutions” as a central tenet of
their politics and practice. Kristol believed that obligation to “the
sovereignty of traditional values” kept people moored to the past in a way that
prevented the nihilism that leads to authoritarianism and anomie. The freedom
of markets and appropriate weakness of the state depend on citizens preferring
traditional modes of living to the heady vertigo of progressivism.
Suspicion of a Catholic gesture toward modernity—and
thus the world—colors the attitudes of conservative Catholics toward him.
Pope Francis approaches the past with dialogue,
not mere deference, in mind. He knows that the only useful approach to the
past is to recognize it as a work in progress. This has the effect of imbuing
accumulated tradition with no special authority over current conclusions. The
present and the past must speak as equals, as both are works of human effort.
From that alone conservatively disposed Catholics might flinch. This
attitude—this disposition—allows him to utilize a modern lexicon while drawing
on Church tradition. Consider, for instance, his remarks on financial
inequality, in which he called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic
benefits by the state.”
Every blowhard with a stake in unmitigated
capitalism, from Rush Limbaugh to The Economist, has had their turn at accusing
Francis of sundry McCarthyist infractions, Marxist, Leninist, and otherwise.
Francis’s handling of tradition and modernity
privileges neither, but rather produces a workable synthesis of their
contributions. Conservative appeals to the past, in contrast, rely on the sort
of “decline” narrative for which they seem especially partial. Newly elected
Republican Senator Joni Ernst used her response to this year’s State of the
Union Address to reminisce about her childhood in Iowa, recalling that “[my]
parents may not have had much, but they worked hard for what they did have.” Ernst’s
words harken back to a time when people were satisfied with poverty. They also
cast modern-day folk in a less-than-flattering light: We don’t work for what we
have and instead subsist on oft-maligned handouts like welfare. Finally, those
who do work have less to show for it than the imagined bootstrappers of
yesteryear, thanks to the regulatory bogeyman that is the federal government.
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