Where is our love for St. Francis?
Pope Francis must be very disappointed at the reception given to his latest Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.
Why This Reaction?
There are deep cultural reasons why the Encyclical is falling on barren soil. A cascade of errors committed during the last five hundred years has poisoned our (agri)cultural ground. Not until we remove those poisons from the ground can the seed of Love grow.
We should not be surprised. Our errors go further back than 500 years. My Lord and My God, Jesus, talked of Love and He was killed by Roman and Jewish elites 2,000 years ago. If we did not understand Jesus, is there any hope that we can possibly understand Pope Francis? We have been forgiven, but we still do not know what (the hell) we are doing.
Not easy to overcome deep-seated obstacles, but hope springs eternal.
The Complexity of the Issues
Issues are complex. If they were not, we might have solved our problems a long time ago. A specification. It is not the meaning and the functions of Love that are complex. They remain constant. One of the roots of our errors is the practice of analyzing most issues from the point of view of Faith and Reason. This turns out to be a wrong combination of tools. To untangle our thinking processes, we must use all the virtues, not just Faith.
If we start from Love, we discover that we can pass from the framework of Faith and Reason to the framework of Reason within the Virtues. We pass from the primacy of Reason to the primacy of Love. We pass from an unbridled Reason to a bridled Reason.
THE TANGLE OF FAITH AND REASON
Why Is This Construction Fundamentally Wrong
Faith is a theological virtue. Reason is a tool of our mind. The two do not mix well. Willly-nilly, together they lead us to establish the primacy of Reason. There is indeed a way to use both constitutive elements of our humanity in a constructive way, but not without careful analysis and treatment.
Writing about Virtue-Based Morality, it became exceedingly evident that, especially during the last five hundred years, we have been using Reason to justify our errors. Hence, the cascade of errors listed above; hence, the abyss of cynicism, relativism, and nihilism into which our culture has fallen.
Hence, the attempt of Fratelli Tutti to lift us all out of that abyss.
And indeed we must get out of that abyss. Indeed, we can. Here is one way.
TO SET THINGS RIGHT: WE MUST USE ALL THE VIRTUES
Establishing the Primacy of Love
To reverse the decline of the last 500 years, we must establish NOT the primacy of Faith over Reason, but the primacy of Love. To avoid our singlehanded focus on Faith, we move upward along the chain of theological virtues, toward Love.
If we start from there, we realize that the Virtues do not stand alone; they require each other. Alone, they are empty sacs. They are pure words. It is in relation to each other that they acquire their dominant faculty: As St. Thomas pointed out, they offer us Power, "the peak of power," power over ourselves above all.
We will then even gain the courage to control the power of the bully.
This is how we proceed. Descending down the ladder, we meet and we make full use of the intellectual virtues: Wisdom, Science, and Understanding. There, there is where Reason belongs. Reason is the indispensable tool of our mind through which we study Science, any science.
Saint Francis preaching to the birds outside of Bevagna (Master of Saint Francis) ~ Wikipedia
The Unequaled Importance of Justice
Soon after the conjunction of Love and Science, comes the relationship between Love and Justice. Justice is indeed a virtue above all, political justice first, economic justice second - economic justice fully specified in a set of economic rights and responsibilities, as identified in Concordian economics.
Without political justice we cannot love others, cannot love others even in the abstract; without economic justice we cannot love others in the concrete. We are so unaccomplished that we cannot even love ourselves. And if we do not love others, and we do not love ourselves, we cannot possibly love God (Oops. Nature? Evolution?).
In a rather amazing occurrence in the life of human beings, economic justice is nothing new! All the history books tell us that economic justice is a project which, uninterrupted, guided our daily lives from Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas, all the way to the Doctors of Salamanca.
The economic justice project was abandoned by John Locke, who urged us to concentrate our attention on the justice of property rights.
Did Locke ever conceive of the retaliatory response from Karl Marx and the Socialists, who mechanically said: Yes, indeed. Let us talk of the injustice of property rights.
And there we are today.
What Is the Solution?
The ultimate solution to our intellectual and moral ills can be found in the rediscovery of the many functions of Love. Hence, the importance of St. Francis; the hence the importance of Pope Francis' insistence on Brotherly Love.
As a layman, I am perhaps allowed to call attention to the wisdom of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. I find in this work, not a discovery of sentimental love, but the self-discovery of true, deep, universal Love.
Guided by St. Ignatius, to my secular age I say, listen to what Jesus actually said, not to what other people tell you Jesus said. Following myself this recommendation, I was surprised to discover the full solution to our economic ills, namely, I was able to discover that the fullness of economic justice resides in Our Father: Systematically destroy all debts every seven years; do exercise your four natural economic rights and responsibilities if you want to make your own daily bread.
The Solution to Our Abysmal Treatment of Life
If we have economic justice in the world, the earth will not be trampled upon - just as the rightful aspirations of MAGA People will not be trampled upon, and poor people will not die of hunger, malnutrition, and homelessness.
The issues go well beyond economics. Another central error of our age is the lack of recognition of this fundamental relationship: No freedom, no moral action.
To concentrate on some of the most gut-wrenching problems of the moment, with economic justice we will eventually solve even the abominable dilemmas presented by abortion. We will leave behind the evident truth that no one should be forced to pay for other people's abortions. When people will be able to pay for abortion out of their own pockets, we will get out of today's legal and political muddle. Abortion will then be discussed as a moral dilemma. Everyone will have to assume moral responsibility for abortion. The responsibility towards one's God.
There is a certain cowardice in hiding behind the naked power of the state to deny abortion. The Church has the moral responsibility to clarify all the complex ramifications of abortion. Above all, it is the moral responsibility of the Church to clarify that asking for an abortion means denying the infinite power of God.
To go a bit deeper into the issue, two complementary considerations. Especially among Catholics, there seems to be an animus toward people who do not observe our moral standards. This is not a charitable frame of mind. Indeed, it seems to me that there is today a huge missed opportunity to exercise our virtue of Love toward a person who is considering an abortion, or toward a person who is considering a sex change, or toward a person who is considering homosexual acts.
With the Church performing its moral responsibility, we will find the way to reach the goal of Pope Francis: This is how we are going to become all brothers, Tutti Fratelli.
Francis and others treating victims of leprosy or smallpox ~ Wikipedia, artist unknown
|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carmine Gorga – see Wikipedia, Google Scholar, and Gravatar (a Globally Recognized Avatar). He is a Fulbright Scholar, president of The Somist Institute. In 1965, after a summer of intense intellectual struggle with the General Theory, Dr. Gorga changed one equation in Keynes’ model of the economic system and found himself in a completely new intellectual world; this is the world of economic justice (not social justice) that existed before John Locke and Adam Smith. The transition to Concordian economics, greatly assisted by Professors Modigliani and Burstein, can be found in The Economic Process (2002), a book whose third edition has been annotated—again—by JEL in December 2017 (p. 1642). For the fullness of economic justice, the core of Concordian economics, see here and here. For a full understanding of Concordian economics, Gorga has gradually realized, we need to go beyond Individualism and Collectivism, toward Somism (men and women in the social context); from Capitalism and Socialism/Communism we need to go to Concordianism; then we need to pass from Rationalism to Relationalism. See The Relational University of Gloucester, MA.
|
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)