A Response to Fr. Sirico

A Response to Fr. Sirico: Distinctly Catholic: Fr. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, responded to Pope Francis' message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, showing again that libertarians can't be wrapped in Catholic social doctrine.

MGB: What is it with reactionaries who create institutes in the name of those who oppose them? Susan B. Anthony must be rolling in her grave at the use of her name by the anti-feminist Susan B. Anthony Fund. Lord Acton, who publicly condemned Pius IX and his notions of papal infallibility would likewise cringe at the use of his name by Sirico. Francis is simply not a pope he would criticize. No futher comment seems necessary. As a libertarian, if he stuck to his old social libertarianism and ministered to gays in the Church, he might have a worthwhile witness. That he has taken the Prosperity Gospel of the Pentacostals into the Roman Church serves no one. While he is right to educate the Church on liberty, most don’t care about the factions, just the distinction between social and economic liberty. Francis may be more of a social libertarian than we have seen since St. John XXIII. He is not at all an economic libertarian.

The Pope is right to condemn Novick. whose notions of liberty are outdated in the era of CEO capitalism, where the one and his cronies make tools of the many. Hayek was right about freedom. It is not granted, it is innate. This could comport with Aquinas and the sovereignty of the will chosing between competing goods as presented by the intellect. It can be seen as the foundation of modern freedom for the individual. If Francis is responding to Hayek he misses Hayek’s meaning.

Free economic markets are not the problem. It is when CEOs have too much freedom, aka power, and employees and consumers have not enough liberty breaks down. Libertarians seem to ignore that because of their implicit belief that the gains of such actors are always well deserved, which is more like the Prosperity Gospel than Bastiat or Hayek, and certainly not like Christ. Libertarianism that serves the interest of our corporate masters is simply a justification of slavery, not freedom for all. Child labor indeed. You can guess the color of laborers and that brigs us to the nasty streak of racism that many of them hold. You can also guess where their financial support comes from, who pays the piper.

Liberty is most legitiate when mixed with community (I have written for a publication that does this, The Free Liberal. Libertarian socialism, democratic socialism and cooperative socialism are close cousins, which is why the Establishment tries to keep them apart. They are hardly separated from Catholic Doctrie, which scares Acton’s funders. Of couse, the also value social liberty, which many of the authoritarians in the Church cannot quite cope with either.