A lot of Utopian clap trap entered the Church when the Popes ceased to be secular rulers. John Zmirak nails it:
But negative side-effects emerged, many decades later. Back before 1870, when the popes had to govern territory, keep public order, punish criminals and suppress acts of terrorism, those responsibilities kept them grounded, with both feet on earth. No pope could embrace reckless, Utopian political or economic programs, and try to impose them on Christians around the world.
Popes who commanded armies, hanged bandits, and restricted immigration could never teach pacifism, denounce capital punishment, or call for open borders. Their own real-world responsibilities as rulers precluded them from grabbing one single thread from the Christian tapestry, and running with it over the Gadarene cliff, unraveling centuries of balanced thinking.
But now the pope’s territory consists of a couple of palaces, a few museums, and a gift shop. He relies for public order on the Italian government, and indirectly on NATO and the U.S. So things are different.
Popes Now Sound Like Woke Freshmen at Harvard
With Pope Paul VI especially, we saw popes take peace, order, and prosperity for granted — as if they were laws of nature, rather than the difficult achievements of statesmen and citizens. In other words, on various issues, they started acting like high-minded, spoiled Woke college students. Or cosseted elitists in rich blue zip codes, swathed by thick layers of money from any side-effects of their political prescriptions. That was for working class and poor folks to suffer.
In other words, popes ceased to speak as statesman to statesmen, weighing costs and benefits, balancing the claims of various interest groups, and keeping in tension both rights and responsibilities. Instead, the statements of popes (and with them, of other clergymen, on either side of the Tiber) began to resemble secular liberal wish lists, or even the programs of revolutionary movements.
How the Vatican Turned into a Woke NGO
This movement started with Pope Paul pontificating in Popolorum Progressio that the right solution to global poverty was … massive foreign aid, from Western taxpayers to third world governments. (That turned out to be a disaster, as conservative laymen had quickly predicted, doing little but flood the Swiss bank accounts of African dictators in leopard skin hats.)
Next came John Paul II’s unfounded speculation that capital punishment was no longer necessary, thanks to our advances in criminology. In his evolving reflections on a doctrine settled since the Covenant of Noah, John Paul simply left out the primary rationale for capital punishment. He dropped any mention of imposing justice on the worst of evildoers. (Such as the Nuremburg war criminals, whom Pius XII had urged be quickly hanged.) Instead, John Paul kept only the utilitarian argument about social self-defense. So the central argument from justice dropped out of most Christian debates over the topic, down the Memory Hole. We were left sounding like utilitarian hedonists.
Still worse was Pope Benedict XVI’s woolly-headed assertion that our planet needs a planetary government — in order to contain financial abuses and put an end to wars. No one inside the Vatican apparently thought to remind the pope that competition among governments worldwide helps serve as a brake on tyranny. Nor that the most likely global regime that might emerge would be a dictatorship from which there would be no exile, no escape. Except into outer space. (“Help me, Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope!”)
Go here to read the rest. Can anyone imagine Pope Francis in the private sector so much as managing a lemonade stand without bankrupting it? The Popes as rulers of the Papal States involved the Church in many troubles, a lot of them not very edifying, but secular rule also secured the independence of the Church, and prevented the Pope becoming a mere chaplain to the most powerful King. It also tended to bring to the papal throne fairly tough minded and practical men, not given to wool-headed speculation, who contented themselves with passing on unchanged the Gospel truths they had received. (Sung) Mister we could use a Pope like Pius V again.
Don’t read Zmirak these days if you want to maintain an artificially sunny optimism. He does not shortchange on the truth like so many Catholic media quislings do. You can sum up his recent messaging to Catholics with one of my favorite quotes from The Princess Bride: We are men of action, lies do not become us.
A lot of foolishness nowadays is put forward by people who have never had to do a day of honest work. If it was up to me, every pope, bishop, and politician would be banned from office until they had spent at least a fortnight on a farm doing real chores.
@Nate- couldn’t agree more. They have no sense of the real world.
If it was up to me, every pope, bishop, and politician would be banned from office until they had spent at least a fortnight on a farm doing real chores.
A grand total of 2% of the workforce is currently employed in agriculture in this country.
More is the pity Art. A day baling hay taught me quite a bit of respect for those who did this all of their life. A couple of weeks of factory work might be an adequate substitute.
Not sure about this. If you hang out with pigs, don’t eventually stink like them, notwithstanding the valuable experience of the real world thus obtained?! A better theme song might be, to the tune of Chicago’s “Harry Truman”: “The Vatican needs you,
Papa Nono …..” Thoughts?
The Zmirak article also contained this interesting observation:
*
Reckless clerical Utopianism exploded like a slow-motion piñata with the election of Pope Francis, whose ideological alignment with globalist elites and the radical left I’ll examine next time, in contrast to the wise Christian statesmanship of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban.
*
It is interesting how much time the Pope spends hobnobbing with the globalist elites, who are of the ruling class.
“A grand total of 2% of the workforce is currently employed in agriculture in this country.”
Agriculture was not the point of his comment. Hard work in the real world was.
If you hang out with pigs, don’t eventually stink like them, notwithstanding the valuable experience of the real world thus obtained?!
Yes, and that is a good point against popes being secular rulers. But what strikes me in hindsight is how remarkably orthodox the secular ruling popes were. The idea that popes must be theologians and philosophers who are scribbling all the time is a very new development in the life of the Church, and I do not think a happy one. Good rulers have rarely been good writers and vice versa. Pope John Paul II had good leadership skills, but his frequently opaque writings have not proven of much use long term. The unhappy reign of his successor demonstrates that promoting an intellectual to the seat of Peter is usually not a happy choice. Having the dense Pope Francis paraded about as some grand thinker and teacher is simply an embarrassment to the Church.
Zmirak has published a follow-up article ” What Does Pope Francis Get Out of Destroying the West?:
*
https://stream.org/what-does-pope-francis-get-out-of-destroying-the-west/
” Having the dense Pope Francis paraded about as some grand thinker and teacher”
Yes, and moreover I think he himself is painfully aware he’s not remotely the intellectual equal of any of his predecessors, and I’m going back to Leo XIII on that.
And boy, does that grate on him. Besides being contrary to his agenda, that’s a big reason he sparingly quotes them and prefers to repeat himself instead.
But, unlike his immediate predecessors, he’s cunning, ruthless and understands that a motivated minority can make a revolution. “Personnel is Policy” is the first commandment of a successful leader.
That, and he has the measure of his opponents, who are largely feckless chumps.
Zmirak had a great insight. Everything in (or at least of) this world has trade-offs.
Andrew Klavan was recently talking about how, in agricultural or manufacturing economies, failure is easy to identify. In our information age, a company can publish bad ideas as easily as good ones. I loved that observation. The idea of applying it to the Papal States is a mind-blower.
A possible alternative to Popes having the duties of secular rulers: simply stick to the charism of their office and their vocational calling. Preach the gospel to a world that will hear it from no other authoritative source. There is no shortage of folks who will opine on matters of politics, religions, theories of governance etc. But there is only one Church and one installed successor of St. Peter at any given moment. Let the world take care of its own business. Focus on matters of sin and salvation and let the world run itself.
Agriculture was not the point of his comment.
Oh yes it was.
I think Zmirak is suggesting a cure that might be worse than the disease. And it’s not difficult to locate people with temporal responsibilities who advocate all manner of cr!p in today’s world.
Oh yes it was.
Lol shakes his head
A possible alternative to Popes having the duties of secular rulers: simply stick to the charism of their office and their vocational calling.
I’ve read that venerable Pius Xii spent three hours per day in prayer.
I’d be delighted if the next Pope (1) had in the years since his ordination developed a file of homilies (amended irregularly) for every Sunday and every holy day of the liturgical year with a reflection on each of the readings and references to the Church Fathers. (2) devoted ample time to prayer. (3) devoted several hours a day to reviewing recommendations for episcopal appointments. (4) reduced the staff of the Holy See, closing some dicasteries and resorting functions among them. (5) limited his encyclicals and what not to cleaning up messes left by his predecessors. (6) limited active property management to the Holy See’s physical plant, treasures, and equipment, liquidating all other investments and holding funds in the form of securities and cash in various safe harbor countries; (7) limited ecumenical contacts to the Eastern churches and ended inter-religious dialogue. (8) traveled only to Vatican properties in the south of Italy or to spots within the province of Rome; and (9) wouldn’t waste an audience on the likes of Yasser Arafat.
Lol shakes his head
When you get done shaking your head, maybe you and he can come up with criteria for deciding who is working and who isn’t so we can know what’s proper preparation for the Pope.
Plato, “Opinion is not truth.”
Staff Sergeant Clark, “Opinions are like a$$holes. Everybody has one.”
Outside matters of Faith and Morals, nothing the Pope says or writes is more important than your or my brain farts.
The Pope’s job is not to try create an Earthly Eden.
Observation: like all globalists and elitists, PF (a Christian would not hate) hates populists like you and me.
To be evenhanded, The Pope cannot possibly be more stupider than woke left, the academics that spit ‘socialism works,’ or more than 1,000 econ PhDs advising on monetary policy at the US Fed.
Back in The Day, as a college student, I gained summer employment with my local municipality. My job, 3 days a week, was picking up trash on the beach. 2 days a week, I rode shotgun on the garbage truck that emptied the the trash cans on the beach and delivered the contents to their ultimate destination. I was also responsible for climbing into the back of the truck and shoveling out whatever wonders and marvels had not been shoved out by the hydraulic ram. My parents were horrified, but it was a job, it paid and, in my opinion, was better than office work. When I returned to school in the Fall, I was sitting in the Commons one day when a supercilious Yute at another table loudly opined, “We need to educate the masses.” I reflected that the “masses” , as exemplified by the rough-edged,, coarse-languaged, no-nonsense, yet surpringly (to my young self) good-hearted men I had worked with that summer would have educated the Yute by giving him a free ride to the nearest landfill in the back of a barrel packer. And thus began my true education.
No it wasn’t Art.
If it was an even remote possibility of being implemented in any capacity we could sit down and hash out the details. Given that it’s not, what’s the point of the distraction?
Also given that the workforce is ~164.6 million people, even 2% of that is over 3 million people, I think there would plenty of opportunities for the bishops to find someone to work with for 2 weeks.
Given that it’s not, what’s the point of the distraction?
Was I the one who brought this subject up?
You’re the one talking as if this is all about farms.
Farming is the archetype for hard work. It dates back to our earliest days, and it’s been part of every society I can think of. If you want to talk about a type of labor that dates back to Peter, I guess someone could have gone with fishing, but that term can also apply to the casual, relaxed sport. The point of this isn’t that a pope would be better off farming than (say) logging, the point was that any of these jobs might ground a pope in practicality.
the point was that any of these jobs might ground a pope in practicality.”
That’s right Pinky. Work that is hard and in reality.
In the midst of this discussion may I chance at the two largest problems facing the Pope. The most horrible by far is abortion, the greatest holocaust in the history of the world and the soon to be the end of civilization. Second, which is seldom discussed, is the dearth of black Catholics in the USA (3%), which is tragic. In both situations this applies to what a Pope should do…”What man [Pope, Bishop, King included] of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”
the point was that any of these jobs might ground a pope in practicality.”
The producers of capsule biographies tell me the current Pope has worked as a tavern employee, janitor, and lab technician. I’m not seeing the grounding.
You’re the one talking as if this is all about farms.
He brought up farms, not me.
And yet everyone else understood the point but you, Art.
Also I have yet to find any detail sources of the Pope having been a janitor. Just general claims about it from CNN and Time. From catholicpreaching.com I did find:
His father, an accountant, arranged for him to work at a hosiery factory that belonged to one of his clients. For the first couple of summers, Jorge swept the floors and did other types of janitorial services.
Which hardly sounds like anything you’d break a sweat over.
I don’t think anyone has accused you of being the first one to bring up farms. If anyone does, I’ll tell them, “no, someone else brought up farms”. I’m suggesting that your comments are overly focused on farms specifically as opposed to the broader category of essential manual labor. More than that, your previous comment suggests that you understand the difference, since you brought up the tavern, janitorial, and lab work. You must have been able to generalize from the subject of farm work to the broader category and understood the speculated relationship between hard work and grounding.
In all fairness (and slight bias), St JP2 didn’t have it easy. Mother died when he was 9, brother died when he was 12. Hid from the Nazis, struggled through Communist Poland, never shied away from going against the wave of the liberal thinking within the Church and outside of the Church throughout his life. Flat out denounced abortion and anti-life policies, truly stood up for the worker where ever he went, reprimanded world leaders, and was ridiculed by the left whilst he was alive, especially with his vocal stance against the Contraceptive Pill. And last but not least took a bullet whilst Pope. I think he genuinely wanted the best for the Church and took his pontificate very seriously. I felt he recognised he was here to serve, because he didn’t try and defend himself when he was ridiculed and opposed by those inside and outside of the Church.
There are also accounts he spent a lot of time in quiet prayer- hours. And this was the most important part of his pontificate. Because from what I have read it is where he endured a real internal spiritual suffering which he endured silently for the Church. I saw him in Toronto 2002 when Parkinson’s had really took ahold of him. But yet there he was, inspiring the Youth in Faith in our Lord when he could no longer walk unaided. I’m sure there are past Popes which have had the same impact that St JP2 had to the generations they served.
But today….there is a general feeling of emptiness with the current leadership- from the top trickling all the way down to the faithful. There is this aloofness from the Pope, Bishops and Church leaders and you are left scratching your head trying to figure out which planet they are living on.
There was bound to be a letdown at some point. For the entire length of my spiritual consciousness, we had two good and great men as popes. Maybe God grants you a third, but at some point there would have to be a return back to normal. I didn’t think it’d be this big a drop-off, though.
I’ve often wondered if we’d be better off going back to Italian popes. I like Zmirak’s idea here, but I think there’s a benefit in having a lot of Curial experience. Maybe that provides a grounding too, understanding the levers of power and their limitations. I don’t know if this was irony or not, but Benedict was the kind of pope that the Benedictines would produce in earlier centuries. Disciplined in devotion, in thought, and certainly in word. The only “clarification” I remember from his papacy was after the Regensburg lecture, and that was to get the listeners up to speed, not to spin a slip-up.
I like what Southcoast wrote. My real education as a newly qualified submarine reactor operator at 19 years of age was cleaning the bilge in Engineroom Forward, a job I retained for the remainder of my stay on the USS Jacksonville SSN-699. I think every upstart youngster needs a year or two of cleaning up garbage from the beach or wiping down the filthy bilge of a nuclear submarine. Maybe if this idiot Pope had had such an experience as a youngster, he wouldn’t be such a nit wit.
Which hardly sounds like anything you’d break a sweat over.
Why does it not surprise me you’d strike that pose?
A good blue collar job would do wonders for much of the Western episcopate. But only if they never returned to their sees.
The reality is, there is no shortage of American clerics who grew up in working class households but turned out to be lousy shepherds, from priest on up. Cupich leaps to mind.
To the extent there will be a stable (and obviously smaller) next generation of clerics, they will be coming from much more bourgeois circumstances. Between the collapse of working class observance and the costs of seminary classes, there won’t be anybody else to draw from. Sacred Heart in Detroit runs $20,500 per year for tuition alone.