Pope Francis, the Anti-Capitalist Marxist, is Dead—Good Riddance

 Pope Francis, the Anti-Capitalist Marxist, is Dead—Good Riddance

Pope Francis, the arch enemy of property rights and individualism*, and thus Capitalism, freedom, and prosperity, is dead. I’m tempted to say good riddance, except that the Vatican will likely appoint another Marxian Communist. Why? Because Francis merely reiterated the Catholic Church’s long-held teachings. 

But why would the Church hold to its hostility to a social system that has established the conditions for people to work their way out from poverty? Can Francis really be ignorant of the available facts, empirical evidence, basic economics, or philosophical underpinnings of Capitalism, or of the disastrous history of Capitalism’s antipode in practice, collectivism? 

I think not. The Catholic Church, as an institution, has a vested interest in poverty. When the Church ruled for centuries, what we now call the Dark and Middle Ages, poverty reigned, by design. It is only with the arrival of modern capitalism that general living standards exploded. Over the past 250 years, the Church had a front row seat to observe the rising prosperity, backed up by mountains of literature explaining the theoretical and empirical economic causes of the prosperity. How can any Pope deny these facts? Can the learned leader of an institution that has been around for 2000 years and has seen it all really be so ignorant of the reality of free market economics and the bloody record of collectivism? No. So why Francis’ trade against Capitalism? Easy. “The poor” is the Catholic Church's base. Poverty and Church power are linked.

More fundamentally, poverty and Church morals are linked. If handouts to the poor trumps property rights, then the unearned trumps the earned. If poverty is the standard of morality, where does a social system that diminishes poverty based on individual self-determination leave the Catholic Church? Obsolete. The Church doesn’t care about people who work their way up from poverty. They only care about moving the wealth from those who do to those who don’t. The standard of Catholic moral teaching is self-sacrificial giving. If the ranks of those in need are shrinking, who’s left to give to? Who’s left to be the “champion” of? Poverty, not prosperity, is the Church’s moral standard. Given Capitalism’s record in practice, where does that leave the centuries of Church moral teaching about giving to the poor? 

Francis is the latest in a line of anti-Capitalist Catholic Popes. His demotion of property rights is not new. When Francis says  “the right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods (Fratelli Tutti),” he is reiterating Pope Paul VI in his 1967 Encyclical Populorum Progressio who advanced the totalitarian principle that the “public authorities” must coercively ensure that “created goods should flow fairly to all,” emphasizing that  “All other rights, whatever they may be, including the rights of property and free trade, are to be subordinated to this principle.” Francis is clear that this is not just moral teachings, but must be legally enforced:

The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods. This has concrete consequences that ought to be reflected in the workings of society. Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant. [my emphasis]

The record of these principles is a record of grinding economic collapse, crushing tyranny, and rivers of blood. How could any champion of the poor subscribe to them? Because the Pope does not want to “help” the “underprivileged people.” He wants to preserve their misery and expand their ranks**. Poverty is virtue, and the most virtuous act one can perform is to take a vow of poverty. That’s why the Church hates capitalism. That’s why Pope after Pope condemns Capitalism. We can explain how Capitalism works until we’re blue in the face. It doesn’t matter to the Church, and never has. Why? Because it’s not whether Capitalism works or how it works. The problem is that it works--works to facilitate man’s escape from poverty. 

And they’re smart. No, Francis doesn’t attack Capitalism directly. He just attacks “unfettered Capitalism.” He just attacks Capitalism’s Heart and Soul. He attacks capitalism at its root--profit-seeking, property rights, free trade, individualism, and the ethics of rational self-interest. 

Francis is not ignorant. He’s a Marxist (“the principle of the universal destination of created goods,” or, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”) and a communist (“[W]e need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home.”) and an altruist (“[I]f one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.”). Francis knows exactly what he is saying. And he means it. Francis and the Church are not misguided souls. They are Capitalism’s—and thus the poor’s—arch enemies as much as Communism is. This fact must be explicitly acknowledged by Capitalism’s champions. 

* [“Individualism does not make us more free, more equal, more fraternal. The mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family. Nor can it save us from the many ills that are now increasingly globalized. Radical individualism is a virus that is extremely difficult to eliminate, for it is clever. It makes us believe that everything consists in giving free rein to our own ambitions, as if by pursuing ever greater ambitions and creating safety nets we would somehow be serving the common good.”—FRATELLI TUTTI, P. 105. Note Francis’s disdain for “safety nets” as any kind of solution. Clearly, he’s not satisfied with mixed economy welfare statism. What’s the alternative? Full blown totalitarian socialism.]

** [C. Brad Thompson concurs: “Christian empathy and guilt are also wrapped in a curious paradox: if alleviating poverty and suffering are the goals of Christian ethics and if capitalism (the system based on self-interest) is the economic system that makes that possible, what then is left of the Christian ethic if the ethic of self-interest and capitalism eliminates poverty and much suffering? There would then be no need for the Jesus’s moral teaching. It would seem then that Jesus’s moral teaching is thus stuck between a moral rock and a political hard place. Capitalism reduces poverty and thus reduces the need for the Christian ethic, while socialism increases poverty and thus incentivizes and fulfills the Christian teaching.” 

Related Reading:

Jesus and the Philosophy of Selflessness by C. Bradley Thompson for The Redneck Intellectual

Pope Francis’s Anti-Capitalism is No Misunderstanding

Catholic Social Doctrine is both Socialist and Statist

How the Catholic Church Paved the Way for the Birth Control Mandate

Pope Francis’s Embrace of Anti-Fossil Fuel Agenda Follows From Church’s Anti-Capitalism

The Illegitimacy of Pope Francis's “Legitimate Redistribution” of Wealth—Natalie Ogle for The Objective Standard

Pope Francis: Prosperity, Liberty, and Climate Change are the Common Enemy

Pope Francis’s ‘Authority’ Stems From The Church’s Authoritarian Self-Image

Climate Alarmism and the Catholic Church; Faith-Based Allies in the War on Prosperity

The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages: A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard

The Pope's Reaffirmation

Mamaroneck, NY’s Tree Law Smacks of Theocracy: Climatism Has No Place in the Politics of a Free Society

In ‘My Property, My Trees’: New Tree-Cutting Law Divides N.Y. Town, the New York Time’s Hilary Howard reports on a law in Mamaroneck, New York, that regulates tree removal on private property. Requiring property owners, including homeowners, to get a permit to remove a tree is disturbing enough from a pro-liberty standpoint. But what really got my attention were the rationalizations at the forefront of the new law. Howard reports:

When Robert Herbst returned to his hometown about 30 miles north of New York City in 1992, he wanted his children to be immersed in the lush greenery of his childhood. But over the decades, he noticed more trees coming down to make way for bigger houses.

Mr. Herbst, a lawyer, and other like-minded residents of Mamaroneck, N.Y., view the vanishing trees as a serious threat in the era of climate change.

“We should be protecting trees for our own survival,” said Jacob Levitt, a dermatologist who lives in Mamaroneck. “It’s suicidal not to do it.”

But some residents say they should have the right to remove any and all trees on their properties to make way for more sunlight or a home expansion, or simply because they want them gone.

“People want to landscape the way they want to landscape,” said Eve Neuman, a realtor who lives in the area.

Herbst and Levitt are leaders in the war on tree removal. But, what right do these men and their cohorts have to use the coercive power of the state to impose their values on everyone else? None. Enter “climate change.” 

I wrote these comments, which were not published because the comment section of the article was closed before I could get to it. :

“[V]anishing trees [are] a serious threat in the era of climate change. ‘We should be protecting trees for our own survival. It’s suicidal not to do it.’”

How does one answer such Chicken Little hysteria? You can’t, any more than you can rebut “It’s God’s will.” Yet such quasi-religious rhetoric is used to justify trampling people’s sacred property rights, without any evidence that cutting down a tree would violate the rights and/or safety of anyone else.

If you can use climate change—or “the climate crisis”—as a God-like justification for trampling individual rights to cut a tree on one’s own property by law, then what dictatorial scheme can’t be justified by it? On that standard, none of our liberties are safe. Faith is impervious to reason and morality. But that’s the point, isn’t it? “Climate Change” is the newest calling card of totalitarianism. America beat back tyranny in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWs 1 & 2, and the Cold War—only to give up our freedom to the likes of  “tree advocates?”   

In the Constitution it is written that no law respecting the establishment of religion shall be made. The Founders well understood the threat of theocracy. Yet a new secular religion—Climatism—is exactly what is being established by this law. Totalitarian theocracy is the ultimate goal of anyone who raises climate change as a justification for rights-violating laws. It's a reincarnation of The Divine Right of Kings, and the Separation of Religion and State should apply here. End the madness.

The term “climatism” is not mine. The term was first coined by Robert Bryce, as far as I can tell. Bryce roots the term in economic terms: Environmentalism, Bryce observes, “has morphed into the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.” That’s true enough. But I see something deeper. I see the tentacles of religious dogma and authoritarianism wound through the entire movement. Climatism fits the bill very nicely, in my view. “Follow the money,” says Bryce in explaining Climatism’s grip on policy. But religion provides something far more consequential—and dangerous—moral firepower. Replace God with Climate Change, and you have a new superior power to submit to. And just as “God’s will” is determined by faith leaders who claim to speak for God, and thus must be unquestioningly obeyed, so we have “climate experts” who claim to speak for “the fight against climate change,” and unquestioningly obeyed. Neither authority requires evidence. Any dissident is heretical, which makes you a sinner—or a climate denier on the moral level of a neo-Nazi. . . a holocaust denier.

Of course, like all manifestations of statist assaults, the best moral and practical defense is individual rights.

Related Reading:

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Environmentalism In America Is Dead: It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. by Robert Bryce

Alabama Court’s Inhuman Ruling

In a thoroughly inhuman decision, an Alabama Supreme Court ruling has equated children to mere embryos. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff reports:

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.

The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

An embryo is obviously not a person. An embryo is a POTENTIAL person, not an ACTUAL person. Persons are actual human entities you can see walking, talking, working, and generally going about the activity of living a life.  The embryo-as-a-person claim is a religious view, not a rational, observable, fact-based view. This law will saddle the IVF industry with unwarranted, potentially crippling liability, preventing countless potential human beings from being brought into existence for people desperate to become parents. It will literally turn innocent people into outlaws, ruin people financially—and ultimately landing innocent people in jail for non-murders, if the principle is developed to its logical end. This law is unConstitutional. It is also a moral abomination. It dehumanizes actual people. If the lives and properties of living human beings can be subordinated and sacrificed to potential human beings, it's the end of freedom and flourishing.

IVF is a crucial human value, and the embryo is crucially important because it is central to that end. But no value can ever be put above the value of an actual, individual, living human being—not the state, not society, not the race, not future generations, not God . . . and not the unborn, including embryos. That is the very definition of evil. This law is based on a thoroughly anti-human premise.

Related Reading:

Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos By Tim Craig and Sabrina Malhi

What to know about the Alabama embryo ruling and its IVF implications By Maham Javaid and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

Alabama ushers in the theocracy by Ruth Marcus

My Facebook Post on the Subject

Linda Stamato’s Confused Understanding of Church/State Separation

Christians, please listen. There is no national religion in America, asserts New Jersey Star-Ledger Guest Columnist Linda Stamato, forgetting it.

To begin with, Stamato identifies America as a “constitutional democracy.” It most certainly is not. America, according to the Founders, is a constitutional republic. In the whole of their defense of the new 1787 Constitution in the Federalist Papers, Jay, Hamilton, and Madison make repeated references to the republican principles underpinning the document, not democratic principles. 

The constitutional republic that the Founders created is a system of limited government whose elected leaders are constitutionally bound to law- and policy-making rooted in the republican principles of protecting individual liberty. A democracy prioritizes elections. The difference is stark and crucial.

Stamato goes on to remind us that America has a secular government. That is true. But what does “secular” actually mean? Stamato clearly doesn’t get it. She seems to think that secular means forbidding traditional religion in governmental functions. But secularism is broader than that.

A truly secular government does not promote any belief system, religious or non-religious. She complains that “the high court has been showing a preference for one faith over others.” That is clearly wrong. But neither should the court promote non-faith beliefs. She seems to equate secularism with non-religious “rational” beliefs. But secularism, properly understood, no more promotes atheism than it does Christianity.

Let us review two examples she cites to “prove” that the church/state doctrine was violated by the Supreme Court. She writes:

[T]he high court used the religion clauses to privilege mostly mainstream Christian beliefs. It allowed a coach to openly pray on a school athletic field (Kennedy v Bermerton) and the use of public funds for private schools (Carson v Makin).

But these cases are diametrically opposed. In the Kennedy case, a coach, acting in his capacity as a public school employee, and at a public school function, led a prayer service on the football field in the middle of the function. This amounted to a state sanction of religion, a clear violation of the First Amendment. But the SCOTUS wrongly ruled for the coach.

In the Carson case, Maine parents sought to use a government education voucher available to families living in districts that run no traditional public schools. But the program denies money to parents who choose religious schools. This restriction clearly privileges non-religious parents, which is contrary to secularism. In this case, the Court rightly ruled that any state program that provides taxpayer funds to parents for private schools cannot discriminate against religious parents. This case was framed as “using public funds at religious schools” when in fact it is the private parents, not the state, who are actually spending the funds. Keep in mind that religious parents are taxpayers, too. If taxpayer funds are made available to parents for private education, religious parents have as much right to choose religious schools as other parents have to choose non-religious schools. By the logic of Stamato and the discriminatory Maine law that was overturned, Social Security payouts should be barred from being used to support the recipients’ houses of worship or other religious purposes. After all, Social Security is as much “public funds” as education vouchers. But with vouchers, as with Social Security, the funds are intended to be spent by the recipient according to the recipient’s choice, not the state’s.

Stamato rightly observes that the government should not favor any religion over other religions. But neither should it favor non-religions. A truly secular government does not favor any belief system, religious, agnostic, or atheistic. The Maine voucher system favored non-religion over religion, which violates secular principles. 

Related Reading:

SCOTUS Attacks Religious Freedom

My Commentary On State/Church Separation—a discussion regarding Thomas Hart’s New Jersey Star-Ledger op-ed What's hard to understand about "separation"?

America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters

Separation of Church (or Education) and State

Freedom Of Religion Demands Freedom From Religion, my article in The Objective Standard

RELATED: What Does Freedom From Religion Actually Mean in Practice?

To Keep Government Out of Religion, Keep Religion Out of Government

QUORA: ‘Do you think atheism or communism is the most evil ideology of all time?’

 QUORA: ‘Do you think atheism or communism is the most evil ideology of all time?’

I posted the following answer: 

The question is invalid. Atheism is not an ideology. Ideology is a system of abstract ideas. Atheism (in the conventional sense) is not a  system of abstract ideas. Rather, it is merely the absence of belief in a supernatural God. But I’ll play along.

Communism is atheistic only in the conventional religious sense. It rejects the God of the monotheistic religions. But it doesn’t reject the belief in a “higher” being. It embraces it. It simply secularizes God in the form of a collective that possesses its own consciousness that stands above and separate from the individuals that comprise it, just as religion places its God above and separate from human individuals. This collective, the “community” or society as a whole, is the higher power whose general will is embodied in the state, just as God’s will is embodied in the church (or synagogue or mosque). In Communism's version, the state is in the role of the church, and somehow is able to decipher the will of the collective, and then to impose that will at the point of a gun (there is no other way to impose a collective will).

Of course, the collective doesn’t exist in reality. What exists are individual human beings. The “community” or “society” is an abstraction that, in proper usage, stands for a number of individuals living in a particular geographical region and/or living under a particular legal system. But Communism embodies the idea that the collective stands above and separate from its individual components, who are mere cells in the larger collective organism, and that possesses values and interests and a will that supersedes and are separate from the individuals’ values, interests, and will.

Of course, this cannot be true. The community has no brain or consciousness. It is not an entity. It can’t think, feel, value, or choose. Only actual individuals can do that. Enter the state. Somehow, state officials—holding to the faith of a community “consciousness”—just “knows” what the community thinks, feels, values, or chooses how to act. This is the basis upon which the state acts on what it claims is the community’s good, irregardless of what any of its individual citizens desire. The thoughts, feelings, values, choices, and rights of any particular individuals are irrelevant to the community’s supreme will. This justifies the state’s imposition of communism’s collective moral vision of how the community functions. Being supreme over its individual “cells”, the community is embodied in the state apparatus. The state’s officials or ruling elites consider themselves morally justified to sacrifice any individual’s (or faction of individual’s) interests, wealth, or very lives for the good of the community. This belief system can manifest in no other way.*

Communism, then, rejects the monotheistic God of Christianity or Islam or Judaism. But it does not reject the mystical belief of religion in a higher being. In this broader sense, Communism is not atheistic. It simply secularizes religion’s mysticism, substituting religion’s God with the  Community.** 

Mysticism is the common base of Communism  and religion. A genuine atheist doesn’t believe in any being or deity higher than man. 

To play along, as I said I would do at the outset, let’s reimagine the question. If the question where “Do you think religion or communism is the most evil ideology of all time?”, I would have to say Communism. If the standard is the sheer scale of raw brutality, I would have to say Communism is the most evil. Theocracy, the unity of church and state—which, like communism, also embodies the will of its deity—comes in second place on the scale of brutality.

* [This is why, by its very nature, Communism must inevitably descend into tyranny, poverty, slavery, and murder. Soviet Russia, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, et al, were not aberrations. They were the unavoidable result communist ideology.]

** [Fascism, the other major form of socialism***, also secularizes’s religion’s mysticism. Nazism’s supreme collective is the race. Italian fascism deifies society as a whole. Marxian Communism, for its part, deifies “the proletariat”, or “workers”. 

*** [See my answer to Quora: “Is fascism a capitalist ideology?"]

Related Reading:

QUORA *: ‘Why do people find communism so terrifying as an idea?’

Nazism, Communism, Atheism, and the Enlightenment

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

Related Viewing:

Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind? —A Debate with Dinesh D'Souza vs. Andrew Bernstein

Yaron Brook Answers: Communism vs. Atheism

Pope Francis, Capitalism’s Arch Enemy, Condemns Free Market Capitalism -- Again

Pope Francis is again condemning Capitalism. Brad Polumbo calls out the Pope on the absurdity of his criticisms in The Pope Just Called Private Property a ‘Secondary Right.’ He Couldn't Be More Wrong, published for The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). 

I hate to be critical of a fellow champion of Capitalism. But I have to give this article two cheers. Why? Because the author gives the Pope the benefit of the doubt in claiming he doesn’t understand capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Francis thoroughly understands capitalism. 

The subtitle of Polumbo’s article is:

Pope Francis’s criticisms of free-market capitalism don’t mesh well with available facts, empirical evidence, or a basic understanding of how economics actually works.

Polumbo also states:

There’s no doubt that the Pope is a learned man in matters of religion, and he likely has the best of intentions in preaching his collectivist gospel. But his elementary arguments against free-market capitalism are incredibly weak.

Best of intentions? Let’s delve a little deeper into Polumbo’s article. First, Polumbo offers select quotes from Pope Francis. All italics are mine:

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” Francis wrote in part of a lengthy religious text. “To care for the world in which we live means to care for ourselves. Yet we need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home. Such care does not interest those economic powers that demand quick profits.”

“In today’s world, many forms of injustice persist, fed by… a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings,” Francis lamented.

The Pope decried the free-market “dogma of neo-liberal faith” that views “the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle’ ... as the only solution to societal problems.” He went on to write that “market freedom cannot supersede the rights of peoples and the dignity of the poor.”

Francis reiterated his belief that “if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.” He concluded that “the right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.”

Polumbo understands the vital economic, social, and moral role of property rights. 

Pope Francis explicitly argues that property rights are only a “secondary natural right;” superseded by the needs and wants of others. Taken to its logical conclusion, arguing that property rights are second to the needs of others really means property rights aren’t valid at all, because human needs and scarcity of resources are permanent realities.

Right. Without property rights, “human needs and scarcity of resources are permanent realities.” Any Communist dictator proves this point in spades. Polumbo cites Thomas Sowell and Frederick Bastiat in identifying the social and economic benefits of property rights, but also gets to the moral root of those benefits:

Moreover, Francis is wrong philosophically to dismiss property rights as secondary. We would all agree that the right to life is paramount. But property rights are an extension of the right to life—because a man’s right to life necessarily depends on his livelihood.

“The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation,” Ayn Rand once wrote. “Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.”

Can Pope Francis, the learned head of one of humanity's oldest institutions, really not know the available facts, empirical evidence, basic economics, or philosophical underpinnings of Capitalism, or of the disastrous history of Capitalism’s antipode in practice, collectivism? I think not. And if not, can we credit Him with “the best of intentions?” I think not. 

Can Francis really be ignorant of the available facts, empirical evidence, basic economics, or philosophical underpinnings of Capitalism, or of the disastrous history of Capitalism’s antipode in practice, collectivism? I think not. The Catholic Church, as an institution, has a vested interest in poverty. When the Church ruled for centuries, what we now call the Dark and Middle Ages, poverty reigned. It is only with the arrival of modern capitalism that general living standards exploded. Over the past 250 years, the Church had a front row seat to observe the rising prosperity, backed up by mountains of literature explaining the theoretical and empirical economic causes of the prosperity. How can any Pope deny these facts? Can the learned leader of an institution that has been around for 2000 years and has seen it all really be so ignorant of the reality of free market economics and the bloody record of collectivism? No. So why Francis’ trade against Capitalism? Easy. “The poor” is the Cathloic Church's base. Poverty and Church power are linked.

More fundamentally, poverty and Church morals are linked. If handouts to the poor trumps property rights, then the unearned trumps the earned. If poverty is the standard of morality, where does a social system that diminishes poverty based on individual self-determination leave the Catholic Church? Obsolete. The Church doesn’t care about people who work their way up from poverty. They only care about moving the wealth from those who do to those who don’t. The standard of Catholic moral teaching is self-sacrificial giving. If the ranks of those in need is shrinking, who’s left to give to? Poverty, not prosperity, is the Church’s moral standard. Given Capitalism’s record in practice, where does that leave the centuries of Church moral teaching about giving to the poor? 

Francis is the latest in a line of anti-Capitalist Catholic Popes. His demotion of property rights is not new. When Francis says “the right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.,” he is reiterating Pope Paul VI in his 1967 Encyclical Populorum Progressio who advanced the totalitarian principle that the “public authorities” must coercively ensure that “created goods should flow fairly to all,” emphasizing that  “All other rights, whatever they may be, including the rights of property and free trade, are to be subordinated to this principle.” 

The Pope does not want to “help” the “underprivileged people.” He wants to preserve their misery and expand their ranks. Poverty is virtue, and the most virtuous act one can perform is to take a vow of poverty. That’s why the Church hates capitalism. That’s why Pope after Pope condemns Capitalism. We can explain how Capitalism works until we’re blue in the face. It doesn’t matter to the Church, and never has. Why? Because it’s not whether Capitalism works or how it works. The problem is that it works--works to facilitate man’s escape from poverty. And they’re smart. They attack capitalism at its root--profit-seeking, property rights, and the ethics of rational self-interest. 

Francis is not ignorant. He’s a Marxist (“the principle of the universal destination of created goods,” or, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need) and a communist (“[W]e need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home.”) and an altruist (“[I]f one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it.”). Francis knows exactly what he is saying. And he means it. Francis and the Church are not misguided souls. They are Capitalism’s arch enemies as much as Communism is. This fact must be explicitly acknowledged by Capitalism’s champions. 

Related Reading:

Pope Francis’s Anti-Capitalism is No Misunderstanding

Catholic Social Doctrine is both Socialist and Statist

How the Catholic Church Paved the Way for the Birth Control Mandate

Pope Francis’s Embrace of Anti-Fossil Fuel Agenda Follows From Church’s Anti-Capitalism

The Illegitimacy of Pope Francis's “Legitimate Redistribution” of Wealth—Natalie Ogle for The Objective Standard

Pope Francis: Prosperity, Liberty, and Climate Change are the Common Enemy

Pope Francis’s ‘Authority’ Stems From The Church’s Authoritarian Self-Image

Climate Alarmism and the Catholic Church; Faith-Based Allies in the War on Prosperity

The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages: A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard