Nothing the leader of the Vatican does or says surprises me but it does surprise me how many people fall for and follow like dumb sheep this man. But then I think on what Paul said in 2Timothy 3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
Now, all of that said ‘The Pope’s Encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” (“Brothers All”) sadly seems more a massive and unwieldy political document than a religious guide to the Catholic faithful.
The encyclical’s intended audience appears to be secular world rather than people of faith. The 43,000-word tome contains almost no discussion of Catholic dogmas.
Although the Pontiff’s diagnosis of the world’s ills seems accurate enough, unfortunately his proposed antidotes — equality of result rather than equality of opportunity and individual liberty, the bedrocks of Western democracies — would seriously threaten freedom.
The Pope, for instance, implies that the twilight of the planet’s centuries old diplomatic nation-state system has arrived, prompting the need for a more globalist political system. Regrettably, that usually brings with it no transparency, no accountability and no recourse. Think of the United Nations, the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court or the European Union.
The Pope denigrates the concept of nationalism by referring to it as “local narcissism.” His support for “open borders” would deny nations the right to sovereignty over their national territories. Pope Francis, a lifelong priest of the Jesuit order, appears to be calling for a system of international organizations that would possess the power to override the will of individual states and have the potential to become a global despotism.
Opposes free markets
The Pope also makes no secret of his opposition to the global capitalist free market economy.
He proposes instead that wealthy countries form a seamless bond with the have-not peoples of the global south. He implies that a redistribution of the world’s wealth is a moral obligation, and should replace free economies that promote growth and jobs and have done more to cure poverty than any other historical development.
The problem with redistribution, of course, is, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “Soon you run out of other people’s money.” After everyone has been made equally medium-poor, then where, without incentives for hard work and production, are further disbursements supposed to come from? Think of the former Soviet Union, Cuba or Venezuela.
The encyclical’s economic platform for a more just world codifies as moral the redistribution of wealth between wealthy and impoverished regions of the world. The pope concludes, erroneously, that the free market capitalist system marginalizes the impoverished and disabled and should therefore give way to a system that provides for a more equitable distribution of earth’s resources.
He reminds the public that the Church has never defended the right to private property as an absolute. Instead, he recommends that it should be curtailed to serve the commonweal. The approach seems to turn a blind eye to the Church’s vast accumulation of property and other goods. Would the Church perhaps care to redistribute that?
This limitation on property ownership is followed up by the right of people to emigrate, individually and collectively, and of their right to progress. What about the right of people not to take all strangers into their house? The concept flies in the face of a historical pattern: that businesses primarily operate under the rubric of enlightened self-interest for the good of all. It is capitalism, not fraternal socialism, that has improved the economic condition of generations of workers and farmers, ushering them into a middle-class status.
The major flaw in socialism seems to be: where does the money continue to come from once the first disbursement runs dry? Socialist politicians seem to assume that since they will not be around forever, the problem of the government’s failure to innovate or produce and distribute goods and services will be somebody else’s problem.
Worse, under Socialism, a coterie of leaders, and their friends and family, live extremely well while everyone else is disincentivized and impoverished, if not worse.
In today’s Communist China, citizens are also subjected to a civilian “surveillance system” that determines everything from their ability to travel to where they can live. Although even totalitarian China, through a state capitalist system, has lifted tens of millions out of poverty — its economic model has been largely to steal information and technology from the West.
It is also within recent memory that socialist ideologies have brought the greatest misery to the greatest number: in Soviet Socialist Russia, in the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, Castro’s Cuba, and now in Venezuela.
Although Marxist-Leninists in the former Soviet Union called each other comrade for decades, these visionaries were responsible for the deaths — often murders — of up to 20 million of their own people. The toll during Mao Zedong’s socialist experiment in the People’s Republic of China has been estimated at more than twice that in just four years.
The text of the papal document cites a plethora of Judeo-Christian scripture as the theological justification for these comprehensive structural changes in the world order.
Unfortunately, the Pope’s agenda, if implemented, would have even further dire ramifications for the United States and its allies in the Free World.’https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-popes-latest-encyclical-reads-like-left-wing-political-tract/