In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you, I am a practicing Catholic and I raise my children Catholic, but I’m not a great Catholic. I follow the rules of the Church to the best of my ability and try to live by the spirit of Christ’s teachings, but I struggle with faith and am not versed in every nuance of the Church’s tenets. I do, however, respect those Catholics who still keep the faith in the same tradition my parents upheld and I benefit greatly from the culture they create in the Catholic community. For this reason, I never want my skin-of-the-teeth Catholicism in any way to diminish the Catholic culture or reflect poorly on it, so I try to stay away from public discussions on religion. Recently, however, many people of different creeds and political stripes have asked me what I think of Pope Francis, and I’m happy to respond, but I must emphasize, this is, of course, only my opinion. I’m not trying to represent the Church or libertarians, or preach or criticize–I’m just recording my observations for those interested in reading them.
I always give the Pope the benefit of the doubt, but boy are my doubts mounting! Here are the main issues I have with some of the positions the Pope is reported to have taken….
Redistributing Wealth
Not too long ago, I sifted through all the relevant writings I could reasonably assess in order to see if any Pope had openly advocated for government redistribution of wealth. From what I could tell, many had come close but no Pope had gone all the way–until now.
This alarms me. The modern state’s use of violence and the threat of violence to take property from its rightful owners (assuming there are any objective laws left in this world, there are clearly defined rightful owners at least of the fruits of their labor) and give it to someone else not only breaks the sixth and eighth commandments, but also makes it impossible for able-bodied producers to live Christ’s exhortation to charity as well as reduces the poor from a default state of virtue (assuming money really is the root of all evil), to being receivers of stolen goods.
As progressive taxation comes closer to absorbing all surplus wages and putting them at the disposal of the modern state, even the highest earners may no longer have the means to engage in meaningful charity. And with what result? The governments in the United States, for example, spend approximately 40% of the country’s production (GDP), the vast majority of which is redistribution of wealth.