Tea at Trianon: Is Socialism Compatible with Catholicism?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Is Socialism Compatible with Catholicism?

From The Catholic Herald:

While this socialism-lite approach may help ignite the Democratic base, most proponents remain ignorant of any actual principles — with the exception of an increasingly vocal band of very online Catholics who have embraced the new socialism, and who claim to do so on the basis of Catholic principles.

Thus in a piece I wrote yesterday shining a light on the tragic dimensions of life on a Native American reservation, with a planned economy, and collective rather than private ownership, the Catholic socialists called foul.

I suggested that if private ownership is a natural law — as thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope Leo XIII affirm — then it would follow that breaking such a law could very easily lead to the cultural malaise one sees on reservations. Such a suggestion was considered “profoundly ignorant” by one critic. Another young Catholic defending socialism asked how I could praise the common life of religious friars ministering on the reservation yet disparage the collective ownership that the reservation practiced? Still yet another bellowed that I must be a Hayakian libertarian, or that I must heartlessly oppose the state regulation of vice, or care for the poor. None of these claims were made, nor do I believe such things. (Read more.)