Day: September 18, 2015

For Pope Francis, people are more important than ideas | Crux

If I were the pope, I’d object to a headline like the one above on grounds the copy editor is making me look like a nitwit.

As to the story, it opens like this:

ROME/BUENOS AIRES — As Pope Francis prepares to visit the United States, it’s telling that many Americans are still trying to get a political read on him. Some are convinced he’s a leftist reformer, some see him as a conservative in sheep’s clothing, and many are just a little bit confused.

Actually, for some who consider it muy dangerous to separate thinking from loving one’s neighbor, it seems the Holy Father is confused.

How I swerved away from conservatism as a young Jesuit . . .

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

Studying scholastic philosophy in the mid-50s,

we were a potentially influential group, which is why one group sought our membership in a mailing. This was the newly established Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) – free-marketers who wanted to convert us Jesuits to the cause.

At least two popes had got there first, however, Leo XIII and Pius XI, in their encyclicals which rejected “rugged individualism.” As a papist of the first water, I couldn’t buy what ISI (still existing, newly named with same initials) was selling. I responded to their pitch, quoting the popes, and they took me off their list. This was too bad. I could have used some free-market thinking in the years ahead. Indeed, I am more inclined to think these days that the popes were victims of bad advice, as by German Jesuits working for Pius XI who were unduly influenced by German political theory.

In any case, thus died a free-market tinge to my socio-political mentality. A few years later, I fumed at William F. Buckley’s dismissal of John XXIII’s “Mater et Magistra” – “Mater si, magistra no” – in which Catholic “social doctrine” (actually social “advice” or exhortation) was reiterated and expanded. How dare he? He had no heart. Worse, he had no obedience to go with his Catholicism.

His dissent represented something of an advance in the independence of lay people, but I was part of no such advance. As a loyalist and in my way a company man, I rejected conservatism anew and bought the liberal (better “neo-liberal), near-statist option, though involving salubrious hostility to Marxism, of course, as corrective. In any case, to endorse a position was to act on it. A religious-motivated conversion to social liberalism was a call to action, if I may use a phrase that became a Catholic (neo-)liberal rallying cry, then a conference, then a Chicago-based national organization of many decades standing, even to this day.