Before you take the new job, your holiness, read a little Adam Smith

London Times Online William Rees-Mogg

IN THE next couple of weeks, the cardinals will elect a new pope. He will be a holy man because the cardinals understand the nature of prayer; he will have been a capable bishop, because the cardinals understand the nature of Church administration; he will have a powerful personality, if not as charismatic as that of Pope John Paul II. It is unlikely that the same lightning will strike the papacy twice running.

What more can one say about his likely views? The next pope will be a socialist; no doubt a democratic socialist, but a socialist all the same. Almost every cardinal and bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and probably every bishop in the Anglican Church, is a socialist. They are socialists in the same sense as Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schröder, or Jacques Chirac, or Bill Clinton. They are all socialists because they have never studied the liberal argument. That is a pity; liberalism may not be enough, but it is the basis of our culture.

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Socialism is at War with Christianity

From Dr. Reynolds blog:

Just as free market economics stems from a Christian world view, so socialism ia fundamentally at war with Christianity. Recently, socialism has become a fad for some Christian college professors. It is not surprising that this would be so since socialism has always flourished amongst the intellectuals and been rejected by the working man. Great union leaders like Gompers and Meaney had no time for the nonsense of socialism as an ideology. Their practical attempts to elevate the conditions of workers through trade unions were opposed by socialists at almost every turn. Healthy unions are the sign of a free society, but to be healthy they must be composed of workers and not be “intellectuals” pretending to be workers.

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How the Pope Fought Communism

Article available seven days only.
Wall Street Journal ANNE APPLEBAUM The Washington Post April 7, 2005

We keep hearing that the late Pope John Paul II helped “defeat” communism. Most descriptions of the pope’s role in the collapse of communism are vague and there is much confusion. An acquaintance fielded a reporter’s call about how the pope secretly negotiated the end of communism with Mikhail Gorbachev. The pope’s actual role in the end of the communist regime was far less conspiratorial, but no less significant.

In essence, the pope made two contributions to the defeat of totalitarian communism, a system in which the state both claimed ownership of all or most physical property and also held a monopoly on intellectual life. No one was allowed to own a private business, and no one was allowed to express belief in any philosophy besides Marxism. The church, first in Poland and then elsewhere, broke both monopolies, physically offering people a safe place to meet and intellectually offering an alternative way of thinking about the world.

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Bishop Hilarion on Pope John Paul II

VIENNA, Austria, APRIL 5, 2005 (Zenit.org).- At least one Russian Orthodox Church official thinks John Paul II will soon be beatified and canonized by the Catholic Church.

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Vienna and Austria, representative of the Russian Orthodox Church to the European Institutions, delivered to ZENIT a comment on the late Pope.

“He was a great Pope, perhaps one of the greatest in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church,” Bishop Hilarion wrote. “There is no doubt that he will soon be beatified and canonized by the Church to which he dedicated his entire life.”

“He was the most influential religious leader of modernity, and he made an impact on the entire human civilization,” he added. “Indeed, his influence went far beyond the Roman Catholic Church, which he headed for more than a quarter of a century.

“His message was heard and appreciated by millions of people all over the world, not only Catholics, but also Orthodox, Protestants, Anglicans, Jews, Muslims, people of other faiths and, what is perhaps even more remarkable, by people of no faith.”
[Read more…]

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When John Paul II went to Poland, communism didn’t have a prayer

Wall Street Opinion Journal ‘We Want God’, Thursday, April 7, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Everyone has spoken this past week of John Paul II’s role in the defeat of Soviet communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe. We don’t know everything, or even a lot, about the quiet diplomatic moves–what happened in private, what kind of communications the pope had with the other great lions of the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher. And others, including Bill Casey, the tough old fox of the CIA, and Lech Walesa of Solidarity.

But I think I know the moment Soviet communism began its fall. It happened in public. Anyone could see it. It was one of the great spiritual moments of the 20th century, maybe the greatest.

It was the first week in June 1979. Europe was split in two between east and west, the democracies and the communist bloc–police states controlled by the Soviet Union and run by local communist parties and secret police.

John Paul was a new pope, raised to the papacy just eight months before. The day after he became pope he made it clear he would like to return as pope to his native Poland to see his people.

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A Man for All Seasons

Wall Street Journal The very modern papacy of John Paul II. April 2, 2005

When the white smoke curled up from the Sistine Chapel on that October evening back in 1978, it signaled that a new Pope had been chosen. His name was Karol Wojtyla. He came, as he said, from a distant land, and as he looked upon the faithful who had gathered on St. Peter’s Square he offered words that would sum up his pastoral mission: “Be not afraid.”
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The Humane Holocaust

“Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness.”

The American Spectator George Neumayr 4/1/2005

The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn’t end up killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that disabled her didn’t doom her; a husband without a heart did.

Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America’s most astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into accomplices to it through the telepathy of “their wishes.” To wonder if we’re on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral compliment at this point. The truth is we’re at the bottom of the slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through them — puzzling over how they got so numerous — we’re reduced to mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.

This is the “humane holocaust” of which Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing “unfortunates” and inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines cheering Schiavo’s death, would anyone have known the difference?

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The culture of death advances

WorldNetDaily.com

On Good Friday, as Terri Schiavo lay dying of thirst in Woodside Hospice, Gabriel Keys took her a cup of water. Gabriel was arrested, handcuffed and taken away.

Apparently, no one taught Gabriel that you do not disobey a judge’s order, even to bring water to someone dying of thirst. As he is 10 years old, he is probably not yet conversant with the new morality, where a corporal work of mercy can be a crime. Perhaps his parents filled his mind with such subversive texts as, “Whoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones, a cup of cold water” shall not lose eternal life.

For Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have been put to death by the state. The coroner’s report should read: This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if imposed on the Beltway snipers.

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Killed by Euphemisms

National Review Online

There was an honest, forthright case for ending the life of Terri Schiavo. It was that her life no longer had any value, for herself or others, and that ending it — the quicker the better — would spare everyone misery. We disagree with that view, holding it wiser to stick with the Judeo-Christian tradition on the sanctity of innocent life. But the people who made this case deserve some credit for straightforwardness.

But while the public may have agreed with the removal of Schiavo’s feeding and hydration tube, apparently there are limits to the public’s willingness to tolerate euthanasia — and apparently its defenders recognized these limits. So we saw euphemism after euphemism deployed to cloud the issues.

Perhaps chief among these was the fiction that we were “letting her die.” On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it’s been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed.

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Who will remember Terri Schiavo?

James Tarentino writes in Best of the Web:

There’s been a lot of talk about the political implications of the Terri Schiavo controversy, much of it centering on the idea that because polls show a majority of Americans in favor of Mrs. Schiavo’s death, having taken a stand for life will hurt Republicans. We doubt it. As Michelle Malkin, Pat Caddell and others have argued, the poll questions are biased to produce a pro-death outcome.

As important, this issue will not be uppermost in most Americans’ minds in 19 months, the next time we go to the polls. National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty has some fun at the expense of those who now argue that the Sunshine State is lost to the Republicans (emphasis his):

Hear that, Florida GOP? You’re doomed, they say, dooooooomed! This time they’re certain of it! A mawkish cable news controversy is going to tear apart your base a year-and-a-half from now, just you wait and see!

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