When I lived in Hawaii my family visited Punchbowl National Cemetery to see where my grandfather’s high school buddy was buried. He was killed in the Pacific Theatre in World War II. As a child I had two thoughts that day. It was taking a long time to find his grave simply because it was a sea of stones and I remember thinking at the time, I wonder if his family wanted him buried here, so far from home. Did his loved ones ever see his grave?

Read more on Memorial Day: On Hallowed Ground…

When in Krakow, Poland, for Acton’s recent conference, I was interviewed by journalist Dominik Jaskulski for the news organization Fronda. Dominik has kindly allowed us to publish excerpts from his translation of the interview.

Father Sirico, tell us why your conference, organized with the Foundation PAFERE, is important for Poland.

Today, many people in the world are in a situation of transition. If you do not respond well in such conditions, you may see a repeat episode where – as you had here in Poland — people turned to socialist and communist ideas. I think it’s very important that people understand what culture is and how dynamic it is. With the foundation of a moral framework, it is much easier to choose the proper path of development. In that framework, we want above all to respect the dignity of the human person.

In Poland, we often see a discrepancy between the views of younger people and their elders about the nature of the transformation that occurred. Older people often talk about the loss of state benefits.

It’s quite funny, because less than 20 years ago, when I first came here, I gave an interview in which I was asked about how I thought things would go in the next few years. I said something like this: When the Israelites were leaving Egypt, it took them 40 years to arrive at the Promised Land. That’s mainly because Egypt was still in their hearts. In the Bible, the Israelites constantly asked, “Where is the land of milk and honey? When we were in Egypt, at least we had the dates and other food.” It took a whole generation to accept the changes that occurred.

What about unemployment? Under communism, we all had jobs. Currently, unemployment exceeds 10 percent. A few years ago it was even 20 percent.

Well, I think what the case was in the past in Poland is that everyone seemed to have a job. Authentic work, in which everyone is responsible for that work and understands its purpose, is productive. Many people were employed in Poland, which was not free, but many of these workers had no purpose and were unproductive. And, at the end, it led to massive poverty. Poverty, not wealth, was socialized. If we could measure the level of satisfaction and happiness then and now in Poland, I would be surprised if it isn’t now much higher. Yet it is true that some people find themselves in a difficult situation during the transition. We will discuss this during the conference.

Economics, as we know, has its cultural consequences, just as culture has economic implications. How you assess economic and cultural changes in Poland?

I must say that from all countries historically affected by communism, Poland and the Czech Republic were the most successful in their transformation. In Poland, largely thanks to the Church, the local culture remained intact. Of course, questions about the transformation continue to occur. This indeed was a dramatic shift because this country escaped one of the most horrific, depraved systems in human history. There is a cost, which we had to go through. We just have to understand that this transformation brings together a number of costs. Read more on Interview: On Poland’s Economic and Cultural Transformation…

Time to set the record straight. Some of the comments on my original posting of Faith McDonnell’s article Embracing the Tormentors are representative of the sort of egregious moral relativism, spin doctoring, and outright falsification, that have for so long characterized the “social justice” programs of lefty ecumenical groups like the WCC and NCC. Then, for good measure, let’s have some of these commenters toss in a dollop of hate for Israel and claim that this nation, which faces an existential threat from autocratic Arab regimes frequently and publicly reminding us of their plans to annihilate the Jews or drive them into the sea, is not a democracy. Really? Compared to what? Iran or Syria?

Recall, if you didn’t take time to actually read the article (read the article!), the words of Christian poet and patriot Armando Valladares, who was imprisoned for 22 years in Fidel Castro’s island Gulag. In accepting IRD’s 1983 Religious Freedom Award, he said this:

The honor which you bestow upon me today will have special significance for Cuba’s political prisoners….During those years, with the purpose of forcing us to abandon our religious beliefs and demoralize us, the Cuban communist indoctrinators repeatedly used the statements of support for Castro’s revolution made by some representatives of American Christian churches. Every time that a pamphlet was published in the United States, every time a clergyman would write an article in support of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship, a translation would reach us and that was worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger.

While we waited for the solidarity embrace from our brothers in Christ, incomprehensively to us, those who were embraced were our tormentors…. the Christians in Cuba’s prisons suffer not only the pain of torture and isolation but also the conviction that they have been deserted by their brothers in faith.

Thanks to commenter Neal Lang for reminding us of the Red Terror in Spain. The Spaniards were only following the program of extermination, the destruction of the faith, that was devised by the Bolsheviks and Stalinists. This article cites a Russian report placing the number of deaths of clergy, religious and lay leaders at 200,000 during the Soviet regime. It started early: Read more on Re: Embracing the Tormentors…

Sell! Sell! Sell!

This week’s commentary is from Victor V. Claar, an economist at Henderson State University and the author of a new Acton Institute monograph, Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution. Follow his economics blog here.

By Victor V. Claar

When poor countries grow rich, it rarely has anything at all to do with how many mouths they have to feed or the abundance of natural resources. Instead, across the globe, poor countries of all sizes, climates, and endowments begin to grow rich as two key factors increase.

First, countries grow rich as their human capital improves. Human capital is the term economists use to describe the value that a country’s people possess through their accumulated experience and education. For example, there is little doubt that India’s recent growth explosion is due in large part to the education—including the knowledge of the English language—of its people.

Second, countries grow rich as they invest in and accumulate physical capital: the machines, tools, infrastructure, and other equipment that make the product of each hour of physical labor more valuable. That which both human capital and physical capital share is that they both transform the result of an hour of a person’s hard work into something of even greater value. As the value of an hour of labor rises, employers gladly pay higher hourly rates, knowing that their bottom lines will be the better for it.

If we want to be effective agents in aiding the poor, we should focus our efforts in directions leading to the enhanced value of an hour of labor. That is, we should help poor countries wisely grow their stocks of human and physical capital, all the while bearing in mind that markets and their prices send the best available signals regarding where our efforts can have the greatest impact. The newfound success of innovative micro lending efforts such as Kiva can help show us ways to effectively invest in the accumulation of physical capital by the global poor. Compassion International is a marvelous organization that works to further the education—the human capital—of poor children worldwide, with a financial accountability record above reproach. Read more on Poverty, Capital and Economic Freedom…

On May 21, 2010, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a media statement which sought to identify the way forward for Catholic engagement in the healthcare debate in light of the passage of healthcare legislation. The USCCB stresses that at the core of the bishops’ advocacy throughout the debate was a concern for three principles: (1) the protection of innocent life from the use of lethal force from conception to natural death; (2) the maintenance of conscience protections; and (3) the realization of universal access to healthcare for all, especially the poor and migrants. These, the USCCB stresses, will remain at the forefront of its contributions to the healthcare discussion. The USCCB consequently asks America’s “Catholic community to come together in defense of human life, rights of conscience and fairness to immigrants so we will have a health care system that truly respects the life, dignity, health and consciences of all.”

Read more on What is the USCCB’s Problem with Subsidiarity?…

The Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Faith McDonnell:

Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They “spiritualize” the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.

Read more on Progressive Christianity’s habit of ‘Embracing the Tormentors’…

Some members of the Acton team were in Krakow, Poland, last week for the third conference in our series on Poverty, Entrepreneurship and Integral Development. This conference, which took place on May 19th, was on the topic of Building a Commercial Society: Culture & the Transition to Wealth, and was co-sponsored with the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, the Civil Development Forum, and the Polish American Foundation for Economic Research and Education.

Read more on Acton in Krakow: Culture & the Transition to Wealth…

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone wrote an interesting article the UK Telegraph Saturday called “The New Feudal Overlords of Europe will be the bankers of the ECB.”
Johnson is also the co-author along with James Kwak of a thoughtful and provocative book 13 Bankers as well as a blog on economics. Also on the ECB see my colleague Sam Gregg’s Piece at Public Discourse

Read more on Debt, Welfare and the Road to Serfdom…

Over at Public Discourse, a new article by Acton’s research director Samuel Gregg examines the deeper reasons behind the problems of the euro. In “Europe’s Monetary Sins,” Gregg points out that many of the euro’s present difficulties reflect a basic refusal of Europe’s political class to acknowledge some of the unpleasant economic realities associated with the EU’s social model, as well as a tendency to say one thing while really doing another. In short, Gregg argues that many of Europe’s economic predicaments flow from a crisis of truth, an unwillingness to recognize it, and the subsequent formulation of policy on the basis of untruths and half-truths. The most recent result of this process, Gregg says, is that the independence of the European Central Bank has been severely compromised:

Read more on Europe’s Monetary Sins…