Sort of political Monday

Here we go again ...
Emulating the Bourbons is not the way to go but when it comes to "social justice" the Vatican never forgets and it never learns.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI said persistent world hunger was a "tragedy" driven by selfish and profit-driven economic models, whose first victims are millions of children deprived of life or good health.

Now let's sit down and think critically here. If this is true, then the worst poverty should be in countries where "profit-driven economic models" have the largest place. So if that is not true, then everything Pope Benedict has said here is wrong. And it is not true. The countries that have most effectively reduced poverty are precisely the ones that have most enthusiastically embraced profit-driven economic models. The difficult question is why does this nonsense keep resurfacing?

I like the Pope. I like him a lot. I've even lost a lot of readers (a lot by my humble standards) by defending him in the past. And I know it is Saint Benedict's feast day today. But there is a huge problem here.

The first temptation is to think the church approaches these issues in a moral as opposed to a purely economic way but that isn't right. The truth is that the church approaches things in a morally loaded way. By insisting on seeing profit as a morally evil thing, by equating profit with selfishness, the church blinds herself.

Before going into that, some more from this recent pronouncement to underline just how bad this stuff is.

In responding to the crisis, international agencies should rediscover the value of the family farm, promoting the movement of young people back into rural areas, the pope said July 1 in an address to participants in an annual conference on hunger organized by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

And then there is this:

The pope called for support of international efforts to promote the family farm as a key component of national economies. The traditional nuclear family, he said, has shown itself to be a competent instrument for agricultural production and for training of new generations in farming.

"The rural family is a model not only of work, but of life and the concrete expression of solidarity, in which the essential role of the woman is confirmed," he said.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the real crisis in the Catholic church is in social and economic policy. What you see above is a pretty naked attempt to reject modern life and turn the clock back.

This was tried, by the way, during the great depression. It was a miserable failure. You may have puzzled at the disaster of the Catholic church in Quebec; you may have wondered how what was once the most devout part of North America is now the place with the lowest church attendance on the continent. Well, an awful lot of it has to do with the church's active support for campaigns to resettle city dwellers on farms during the depression.

Only someone whose understanding of farming was poor and heavily romanticized could imagine such a thing could be good. It's not just that effective farming is specialized and difficult work that most people cannot do. It is that family farms are not very efficient. The cost of doing what the pope proposes here would be to increase poverty and famine to a level so horrifying that we moderns can't begin to imagine it.

It would also be to reduce the quality of life of the people who would be working these family farms and to shut off any chance they might have for improvement. (Yes there was a time when most people farmed but that was for the simple reason that they had no choice.)

And it is hard not to suspect that the real concern here is not economic but selfish self preservation. For if the third world follows the west into profit-driven economic prosperity, one of the inevitable consequences of that will be a decline in church authority. We know this because it happened in the west.

“Rural Veneto was at the time the most Catholic region in Italy, with an extremely solid, grassroots presence of the Church,” Magister explained. “But even in Veneto in the first half of the twentieth century – where almost everyone went to Mass on Sundays and to confession at least once a year – the birth rate was cut in half in the span of one generation.

“It went from 5 children per woman in 1921 to 2.5 children per woman in 1951 because of generalized recourse to contraceptive practices, the most widespread of which was coitus interruptus.”

 I can understand why the church isn't keen to go through all that again. Particularly as the third world is one of the few places the church is growing in leaps and bounds. It is also one of the few areas where young men are joining the priesthood in significant numbers. To lose all that now would really hurt.

But that pain is nothing compared to the unnecessary pain millions would go through if we follow the incredibly bad advice Pope Benedict has dished out here.