Most Rev. Joseph F. Naumann, D.D., Archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas
On Catholic World Report, Carl E. Olson interviews Rev. Joseph F. Naumann, the Archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, about the HHS mandate, the Ryan budget, and what the Supreme Court ruling means for the religious freedom fight.
Read more on ‘We didn’t pick the time, nor did we pick the fight’…
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
This Saturday, June 30, is the 211th birthday of Frédéric Bastiat, one of the greatest political philosophers of the modern era. Considered among the founding fathers of classical liberalism, Bastiat is known for his simple and direct explanations of political and economic realities, his arguments against oppressive economic regulations and his clear and concise vision of a government of limited, enumerated powers, operating under the rule of law and unencumbered by favoritism or distributionist policies.
Bastiat drew on his Catholic faith and the writings of Adam Smith and John Locke to articulate a vision of limited, efficient government that respects each citizen’s God-given dignity, strictly adheres to the rule of law, and allows for a largely un-regulated economy in which individuals are free to pursue their interests through peaceable exchange with each other. His best-known works, and those most central to his ideas, are The Law and The Seen and the Unseen, articulating his central political and economic ideas, respectively. Read more on Bastiat’s Vision…
Fr. Hans Jacobse
On the Observer blog (and picked up on Catholic Online), Antiochian Orthodox priest Fr. Hans Jacobse predicts that the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling will, “by the middle of the next generation” lead those who worked for this program — or ignored the threat — to be “cursed” by their own children. “The children will weep by the waters of Babylon, unearthing old movies and books of an America they never knew,” Jacobse writes.
In response to the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare’a individual mandate, National Review Online launched a symposium — a roundup of commentary — which posed the following question: “What’s next for both conservatives and the Republican party on health-care reform?” Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg contributed this analysis:
Read more on Samuel Gregg on the Supreme Court and the Individual Mandate…
Obviously many people are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s ruling today. The decision was rather surprising for a number of legal and political reasons.
Writing about the HHS mandate in an Acton commentary in January, Dr. Donald P. Condit pointed to the moral threat that his health care legislation poses. Nothing has changed with today’s Supreme Court ruling. Condit wrote:
With the passing of time, it has become painfully obvious how relativistic and clouded are this administration’s sense of ethics. The subsequent threat to our liberty is crystal clear and faith leaders representing diverse traditions are speaking out against the White House’s assault on religious freedom in the most forceful way.
It is obvious that ‘Obamacare’ strikes against every aspect of Acton’s Core Principles. You can see more related to that point on Acton’s Health Care page.
Anytime I can get a progressive/dissenting Catholic magazine/blog like the Jesuit-run America simultaneously to quote papal documents, defend the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, embrace the Natural Law and even yearn for a theological investigation “by those charged with oversight for the Church’s doctrine” of a writer suspected of heresy, I consider that I have had a good day.
And to think that all this was prompted by two sentences of mine quoted in a New York Times story on an attempt by adjunct professors at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University to form a union! Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer asked how I made sense of the resistance on the part of Duquesne, a Catholic University, to unionizing efforts by adjunct professors in light of the Church’s teaching about unions. We had a pleasant half hour talk on the subject in which I first explained that the Church generally looked favorably on unions – certainly not all of them, at all times or in all places, and not at all they do, and not as an end in themselves, but rather for the well-being of those workers and their families (i.e., that the Church’s support for unions is contingent). This favorable bias does not mean that workers are obligated to join a union, nor that management is obligated to accept the terms of a union. The right to join a union, in Church teaching, is rooted in the natural right of association, which of course also means that people have the right not to associate. It all boils down to the details of the specific case, meaning that Duquesne was probably considering the ever-rising costs of education and its impact on the lives of students and their families.
It was in this context that I uttered what the America magazine/blog writer Vincent Miller deemed offensive when I observed that Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, “In the industrial revolution, [when] the church was concerned about communism, and not just capitalism but savage capitalism . . . People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh today.” Read more on Rev. Robert Sirico: Reply to America Magazine…
Renaissance Center (GM building). Creative Commons: paul (dex) bica via Compfight
Some time back I argued that urban farming and the entrepreneurial spirit in Detroit was something that should be embraced rather than dismissed. Detroit mayor Dave Bing has given verbal support for urban and community farms in the past, but in many cases some regulatory hurdles remained and he was somewhat skeptical at times about the importance of large scale urban agriculture projects.
This week, 40 pastors and church leaders are gathered to discuss important ideas of integrating faith, work, and vocation into our daily lives. Vocation is integral, not incidental to the missio Dei, the work that God has called us to do each day. The pastors and church leaders represent a diversity of evangelical traditions and geographic locations in the US.
For those wanting to read the recently released decision, the Alliance Defense Fund has a copy of the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.
On C-Span2′s BookTV, Rev. Sirico talks about his new book, ‘Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy’, and argues that moral people should embrace capitalism and the free market. This talk was hosted by the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC. The next scheduled air times are Saturday, June 30th at 7pm ET and Sunday, July 1st at 6:15am ET.
