In the wake of his death, Pope Benedict XVI received praise from Catholics throughout the world for defending traditional liturgy and practice, which Pope Francis appears compelled to eradicate. Few of those Catholics, however, realize that the late pope propelled Francis’ environmentalist and economic agendas before Francis ever succeeded him.
By doing so, Benedict promoted the radical, utopian egalitarianism and globalism that marked Catholic social teaching since the 1960s. That teaching, in turn, reflects capitulation to a materialist humanism bordering on secularism.
Benedict’s 2009 encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” advocated reforming the United Nations to create a “true world political authority” that would regulate international and domestic economies for “the common good,” he wrote. The mission for such a body, whether the United Nations or a successor, would be to design a “directed” global economy that would “open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale,” Benedict wrote.
Why would such redistribution be necessary? “To manage the global economy … to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration,” Benedict wrote. Protecting the environment, he added, would involve “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources, so that countries lacking those resources can have access to them.”
The authority Benedict envisioned would be no mere advisory body. It would “have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums,” he wrote, “so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.” In the process, this proposed authority would regulate international law and diplomacy to give “poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making.”
Such regulation, Benedict continued, “seems necessary to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity.”
Benedict believed a supranational authority could succeed where individual nations failed in solving economic problems.
“Today, as we take to heart the lessons of the current economic crisis, which sees the State’s public authorities directly involved in correcting errors and malfunctions,” he wrote, “it seems more realistic to re-evaluate their role and their powers, which need to be prudently reviewed and remodeled so as to enable them, perhaps through new forms of engagement, to address the challenges of today’s world.”
Benedict wrote those words 14 years ago. Since then, the world’s economy has only gotten worse.
But the late pope was no anomaly. Benedict’s views represent a train of thought that began at the Second Vatican Council, which met between 1962 and 1965 to develop a Catholic response to the modern world. In 1965, that council produced a pastoral letter, “Gaudium et Spes”, which provided the foundation for the church’s current approach to economic, political and social problems, as the following statements illustrate:
“Never has the human race enjoyed such an abundance of wealth, resources, and economic power, and yet a huge proportion of the world’s citizens are still tormented by hunger and poverty, while countless numbers suffer from total illiteracy.
According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown. For by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others, he can neither live nor develop his potential.
Therefore, there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious. Hence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person.”
In 1963, Pope John XXIII, who summoned the council, used his encyclical “Pacem in Terris” to advocate creating an international “public authority with power” that would devise and impose solutions.
“Today the universal common good presents us with problems which are world-wide in their dimensions,” John wrote, “problems, therefore, which cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization and means co-extensive with these problems, and with a world-wide sphere of activity. Consequently, the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such general form of public authority.”
In 1967, Pope Paul VI repeated that call in his encyclical, “Populorum Progressio.”
“Such international collaboration among the nations of the world certainly calls for institutions that will promote, coordinate and direct it, until a new juridical order is firmly established and fully ratified,” Paul wrote.
“We give willing and wholehearted support to those public organizations that have already joined in promoting the development of nations, and We ardently hope that they will enjoy ever growing authority.
As We told the United Nations General Assembly in New York: ‘Your vocation is to bring not just some peoples but all peoples together as brothers. . . Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a world authority capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political planes?’ “
Benedict often and approvingly cited Paul VI’s encyclical in his own.
The ideas the Second Vatican Council generated — and that ensuing popes, including Benedict, amplified — constitute official Vatican policy. Cardinal Peter Turkson, then-president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, cited Benedict’s and Paul’s encyclicals in 2011 to justify establishing the kind of body they advocated.
“In a world on its way to rapid globalization, orientation towards a world Authority becomes the only horizon compatible with the new realities of our time and the needs of humankind,” Turkson wrote. “The birth of a new society and the building of new institutions with a universal vocation and competence are a prerogative and a duty for everyone, without distinction. What is at stake is the common good of humanity and the future itself.”
In 2016, while addressing the UN, Turkson relayed the Vatican’s support for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, part of Agenda 2030, the embodiment of radical globalist egalitarianism.
Francis has done more than any other pope in trying to implement the agenda that his predecessors — including Benedict — advocated. As FrontPage Magazine explored numerous times, especially in 2020 with “The Roman Globalist Church,” Francis wants economic redistribution and environmental sustainability to become the hallmarks of his papacy.
By making that choice, as FrontPage discussed, Francis deemphasizes such moral issues as abortion. Perhaps because Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor from Columbia, serves as a papal advisor. Sachs wrote the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals — and believes abortion is pivotal to controlling population growth.
An eight-day period in May 2021 revealed how Francis implements the Vatican’s prime directive.
On May 6, the Vatican began a three-day conference on health care, with an emphasis on COVID-19. Speakers included Chelsea Clinton, noted abortion advocate, who participated on a panel entitled “Building a More Equitable Health Care System for All.” The program praised another speaker, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, for his “initiatives to create a sustainable, low-carbon future for all.”
The next day, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, responsible for doctrine as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, released a letter discouraging American bishops from withholding Communion from elected officials who support abortion. In issuing that letter, Ladaria contradicted both the Catholic catechism and canon law.
Then on May 14, the Vatican played host to a one-day symposium, “Dreaming of a Better Restart.” The title imitates the World Economic Forum’s emphasis on a “great reset.” Sachs spoke on a panel addressing “Financial and Tax Solidarity.” John Kerry, the Biden Administration’s climate envoy, then delivered the keynote speech for “Integral Ecological Sustainability,” a session that discussed “Climate Change and Sustainable and Fair Energy and Food System Transformation.”
Six months later, Francis urged members of the Paris Peace Forum to use the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to fundamentally restructure human society:
“Faced with the consequences of the great storm that has shaken the world, our conscience therefore calls us … not to follow the easy path of returning to a ‘normality’ marked by injustice, but to accept the challenge of assuming the crisis as ‘a concrete opportunity for conversion, transformation, to rethink our lifestyle and our economic and social systems.’“
The partial quote referring to “a concrete opportunity” came from Francis’ own address to the UN General Assembly in September 2020.
Make no mistake. Thanks in no small part to Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate,” the Vatican now stands firmly with the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in plotting the course of human destiny.
Whether the Vatican will remain standing with the faith it claims to uphold has become an open question.
Judeo-Christianity prepared the ground for Marxism. What Marx essentially did was secularize Judeo-Christianity and dress it up in pseudo-scientific gibberish. Marxism is a religious fish out of water and must re-immerse itself back in religion to survive. That’s why you see such a profound affinity between Marxism and the Catholic Church, between Marxism and Islam, the Red-Green Axis. It is the Judeo-Christians on the Left, not on the Right, who have the logical and consistent interpretation of their religion. The logical end-game of Christianity has always been a global theocracy. Pope Francis is perfectly correct when he said,
“I can only say that the communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian. Poverty is at the center of the Gospel,” he said, citing Biblical passages about the need to help the poor, the sick and the needy.
“Communists say that all this is communism. Sure, twenty centuries later. So when they speak, one can say to them: ‘but then you are Christian’,” he said, laughing.”
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it. The people in the rising religious movement today, know that full-well…. Socialism is really helping religion. The bigger the statism, the more people are accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready… for religionists to take over the lead away from the more secular side…. The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
“Is religion more dangerous in America than socialism or collectivism?” https://peikoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/2009-07-20.071_B.L.mp3
Yeah, you posted this garbage yesterday. It had zero effect yesterday and it will have zero effect today. But I love it when you hog the comment board with your endless propaganda that no one reads.
The welfare-state is the beginning of full blown socialism.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman
“Holy Scripture and the Welfare State” – Richard M. Salsman
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=62cb3cac24f2
It shouldn’t be surprising that a Jesuit arrived at such an interpretation. The Jesuits have had an effectively secular mindset for a long time.
In 1967 Ayn Rand wrote a masterful essay “Requiem For Man” thoroughly demolishing and ripping to shreds “Populorum Progressio”.
“The kind of sense of life that produced the [papal] encyclical “Populorum Progressio” . . . was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an institution.
The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind—hence hatred for man—hence hatred for life and for this earth—hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth—and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism….
The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.
Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force….
No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.
It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.
Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism—the same goal, global rule by force—the same enemy, man’s mind….
There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.” – Ayn Rand, “Requiem For Man”
At the time, Paul VI was trying to mend relations with Communist regimes, so Rand’s critique concerning his papacy would have had merit. But since Rand died in 1982, I wonder if her opinion of Catholicism’s relationship to Communism changed during the papacy of John Paul II, who was virulently anti-Communist.
Like a moth to a flame…..see pic of pope, write many anti-Christian screeds. Pavlov’s dog personified.
You are an American Lutheran, the German Lutherans were staunch supporters of Adolf Hitler as the logic of Lutheranism would predict. And today the American Lutherans are dedicated to destroying America by aiding and abetting the illegal alien invasion, they receive tax-payer loot to aid the illegal invasion all in the name of Christian altruism and self-sacrifice.
Other Christian denominations are also participating in the destruction of America doing the same thing, the Catholic Church, the Methodists, Jewish organizations too, all in the name of altruism and self-sacrifice.
“As for the Lutherans, most had followed the lead of such figures as Pastor Adolf Stoecker; they had rejected capitalism as an evil, Jewish idea, incompatible with the spirit of Christianity….
Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the fact that the Germans of the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers .” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America”
I wonder if it is possible for you to attack “my” American Lutheranism without taking the easy obvious way out by throwing your repeated boring Hitler attacks into the mix, as most ignorant leftists do.
You are most certainly an ignorant, insecure, lazy excuse for a person who has not much going on his life.
Did you get that date with Danusha yet?
Like a moth to a flame you seek me out every single day to attack me with personal insults and ad hominems but you never address or refute the ideas or the facts I present. Such is the nature of your brutish character.
And I’m not the only one you attack with insults, it’s your knee-jerk modus operandi with any one who dares to disagree with you, you have the soul of a totalitarian. You have the soul of a Leftist.
Aw THX, let’s have a pity party for you. I doesn’t want to discuss your “ideas and facts” as if they were worth my time or anyone’s time. As if they were actually ideas and facts.
You have no ideas and facts. Just your religious bigotry couched in lotus flower language along with a bunch of worn out oft repeated quotes from your girl friend and her familiars.
As a true Christian I can no more be a leftist or a totalitarian than Pope Benedict was.
So I will go on insulting you….endlessly…..because I know it gets to you….because you know I can see through your B.S. and your grift…..and because I know you have no life besides this small corner of the web.
You are so pathetic you can’t even look for a job when provided with links.
“As a true Christian I can no more be a leftist or a totalitarian than Pope Benedict was.”
Benedict certainly was no leftist. But I wonder if he ever realized that the world view he promoted in “Caritas in Veritate” would produce the kind of totalitarianism he lived under as a youth and hated. After all, “with teeth” (his words) would imply some sort of enforcement mechanism for recalcitrant parties. Such a “true world political authority” (again, his words) certainly wouldn’t be all roses, lollypops and unicorns. Just look at how dysfunctional the UN is. And Benedict wanted either to reform that body or replace it with a stronger one?
Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand. Marxism. Leonard Peikoff. THX the parrot.
“Is there any difference between the encyclical’s philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: “Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism,” The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: “The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul’s newest encyclical yesterday as ‘the church’s definitive answer to Marxism.’ . . . ‘The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,’ Father Murray said. `Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism—humanism that recognizes man’s religious nature.’”
Amen….
So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism—and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.
And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress—and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side—then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.” – Ayn Rand, “Requiem For Man”
The logic of Christianity does not lead to individual freedom and capitalism but to the tyranny of a collectivist theocracy.
“The Pope’s Deeply Christian Attack on Individual Freedom” – The Ayn Rand Institute
The Church leaders through the years have made it sound like
a one-world government will make all men brothers and solve
the eternal problem of haves versus have-nots once and for all.
That the leaders of the one-world government would be
unelected bureaucrats – and that ordinary people would have
no say in who is running their lives – never enters the discussion.
The Pope today has spoken many times of the evils of the
individual self. Even though Jesus said God the Father sees and
loves each individual. It seems the question of whether the
Vatican remains standing with the faith has already been answered.
Freedom in a religious context does not mean SECULAR freedom, the secular freedom to pursue your individually chosen, selfish, and personal happiness. On the contrary freedom in a religious context means only the freedom to choose to serve Almighty God, your Lord and Savior, by self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, and prostrated humility for your Almighty God and Lord.
According to religion, if you choose the freedom not to serve the Lord then you will be damned to Hell for eternity, that’s not secular freedom, but it is religious freedom in the Judeo-Christian context. According to religion, life on earth is a punishment for Original Sin, you are born a depraved sinner because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience of Almighty God. In the Judeo-Christian context you were born not to pursue your secular freedom and secular personal happiness but to seek salvation from Original Sin by sacrificing yourself for God and neighbor. You are your brother’s keeper.
Are you free? Hardly. You are a slave to the goddess of the Objectivist religion.
The vast majority of modern American Christians, Catholic and Protestant, are so secularized they simply don’t realize how secularized they’ve become. They drop the full context of Christianity all the time, in effect acting as Cafeteria Christians, but the serious and consistent professional theologians do realize and understand the full context of Christian dogma and what it logically and necessarily leads to and demands.
“RELIGION VS. AMERICA” by Leonard Peikoff
And it was Pope John, Paul II who granted the pardon to Galileo admitting the early church was wrong about the Sun being the center of the Universe and not the Earth which they thought the Earth was the Center of the Universe back then