Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is now Pope Francis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This son of Italians who emigrated to Argentine became all of the rage on Wednesday when he was elected Pope.\u00a0 To be sure, for as ardently as its enemies wish its demise, the eagerness with which the world greeted Pope Francis proves that the Church, with its 1.2 billion members, shows zero signs of going anywhere anytime soon.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Pope\u2019s namesake is the thirteenth century Italian saint, Francis of Assisi.\u00a0 The latter was a wealthy young man who turned his back on worldly success and made a vow of poverty. He founded his own religious order and demanded of his sizable (and ever growing) following that they too do the same.\u00a0 For the remainder of his natural existence, the Saint, wearing no more than rags, lived among the most impoverished of the impoverished, ministering to their material and\u2014more importantly\u2014spiritual needs.\u00a0 St. Francis didn\u2019t lament his poverty: he revered it.\u00a0 In so doing, he inspired hope and faith in the poor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Saint has been widely heralded as \u201cthe Second Christ,\u201d such was his humility, compassion, and love for all <\/em>of God\u2019s creation.\u00a0 The world, it was Francis\u2019 conviction, has a sacramental character, for it reflects the glory, the beauty, and the goodness of the God Who created it.\u00a0 It should be revered, yes, but because divine activity everywhere pervades its parts, each provides cause for delight as well.<\/p>\n St.Francis referred to animals as well as the sun and the moon as his siblings.\u00a0 When he became sick near the end of his life, he even referred to his illnesses as his \u201csisters.\u201d<\/p>\n For sure, he was a great and devout man.\u00a0 Equally certain, the Catholic world\u2019s new Pope took the name of the Saint precisely in order to signify that he shares his namesake\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n This sounds all fine and good.\u00a0 However, while it may very well be too soon to say much in the way of criticism of Pope Francis, some initial reports of his views on \u201csocial justice\u201d most definitely do not <\/em>sound fine and good.\u00a0 Compounding my concern is the optimism on the part of many in the media as well as many Catholics that his \u201cLatin American\u201d background makes him just the man to \u201creform\u201d the Church.<\/p>\n Whether used by so-called secular \u201cprogressives\u201d or Catholic clerics, the call for social justice is the call for a larger, more powerful, more intrusive <\/em>government.\u00a0 That is, it is the demand for a government that is capable of and willing to confiscate the legally owned resources of some citizens so as to \u201credistribute\u201d them to others.\u00a0 When social justice is the order of the day, anything other than a robust, activist government is not an option.<\/p>\n It is crucial for everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, to grasp this: social justice and liberty are mutually antithetical.\u00a0 Liberty, at least the liberty that those of us in the Anglo-sphere have traditionally prized, consists in a decentralization<\/em> of power of a kind that the American Constitution guarantees.\u00a0 Liberty presupposes a resolutely non-<\/em>activist, even anti-<\/em>activist government, a government that is like an umpire or a referee, one made \u201cof laws, not men,\u201d as we say.\u00a0 A government fitted for social justice, on the other hand, is of a fundamentally different breed.<\/p>\n Yet it isn\u2019t just that the call for social justice is a call to undermine liberty.\u00a0 Social justice is actually a great injustice<\/em> to the poor and<\/em> the non-poor.<\/p>\n Charity is a Christian excellence that consists in human beings voluntarily expending their time, energies, and treasure\u00a0on helping those of\u00a0their fellows in need.\u00a0 Social justice, in stark contrast, coerces <\/em>the better off to relinquish their resources to an omnipresent, alien, impersonal bureaucracy.\u00a0 Worse, it makes this demand upon them for the ostensible purpose of benefitting others\u2014\u201cthe poor\u201d\u2014who claim to have a \u201cright\u201d to their goods.<\/p>\n By leading them to believe that their misfortunes are attributable solely to others who must now give them their just desserts, the concept of social justice engenders resentment in the poor while discouraging <\/em>them from working to improve their plight.\u00a0 At the same time, social justice provokes the same bitterness in the non-poor who are compelled to work longer and harder for a bunch of ingratiates who claim to be entitled to it.\u00a0 As a consequence, real charity diminishes.<\/p>\n Social justice destroys the only thing that enriches lives both spiritually and materially: community.\u00a0 The omnipotent government that it requires and the adversarial attitudes that this government in turn generates make sure of this. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n To be fair to Pope Francis, he is not at all atypical of the Church in promoting social justice.\u00a0 A lifelong Catholic like me can only hope, and pray, that among the ways in which he will \u201creform\u201d the Church will be to recognize the error of his\u2014and its\u2014ways and call out social justice for the injustice that it is.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is now Pope Francis.\u00a0 This son of Italians who emigrated to Argentine became all of the rage on Wednesday when he was elected Pope.\u00a0 To be sure, for as ardently as its enemies wish its demise, the eagerness with which the world greeted Pope Francis proves that the Church, with its…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n