To better appreciate the Pontificate of Benedict XVI, it is helpful to be aware of the social issues of the day, particularly as they impact on the Church and on Catholics in general. I have opened this thread for that purpose. Issues that involve the Pope directly will continue to be posted in the threads BENEDICT XVI and MAGISTERIUM. Commentary on Caritas in veritate has its own thread.
For orthodox Catholics, life issues and Obama go together in a significant way, because a significant number of American Catholics - one must believe they are the cafeteria Catholics, liberals who continue to call themselves Catholic but reject many of the basic tenets of Catholic doctrine - including respect for human life, one of its most basic teachings based not only on a commandment of God but also on natural law - which they find inconvenient or contrary to their political-cultural ideology.
And so they find common cause with the current President of the United States who has absolutely no scruples in telling the Pope that he will work 'to reduce abortions' while pushing legislation on all fronts that promote and encourage abortion and other anti-life practices favored by the liberals.
Six months into his presidency, some people are now realizing that Obama does not walk on water, that he is, in fact, a politician of the Chicago kind who is also dead set on 'transforming' American society through a radical program of barely-concealed socialism.
Here is a six-month review from The Economist, published in London:
The Obama cult
If Barack Obama disappoints his supporters,
they will have only themselves to blame
From The Economist print edition
Jul 23rd 2009
Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, said he was running for president to revive “our national soul”. He was not alone in taking an expansive view of presidential responsibilities. With the exception of Ron Paul, all the serious candidates waxed grandiloquent about their aims.
John McCain said he modelled himself on Teddy Roosevelt, a man who “nourished the soul of a great nation”.
Hillary Clinton lamented that America had no goals, and offered to supply some.
And let us not forget the man they all sought to replace, George Bush, who promised, among other things, to “rid the world of evil”. Appalled by such hubris, a libertarian scholar called Gene Healy wrote
The Cult of the Presidency, a book decrying the unrealistic expectations Americans have of their presidents.
[NO, it is more the unrealistic hopes and ambitions that their President sells them!]
The book was written while Barack Obama’s career was still on the launch pad, yet it describes with uncanny prescience the atmosphere that allowed him to soar.
Mr Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern American politician. People scream and faint at his rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser”. An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.”
He sets foreign hearts fluttering, too. A Pew poll published this week finds that 93% of Germans expect him to do the right thing in world affairs. Only 14% thought that about Mr Bush.
Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it.
As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”.
As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons.
On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”).
The Founding Fathers intended a more modest role for the president: to defend the country when attacked, to enforce the law, to uphold the constitution—and that was about it. But over time, the office has grown.
In 1956 Clinton Rossiter, a political scientist, wrote that Americans wanted their President to make the country rich, to take the lead on domestic policy, to respond to floods, tornadoes and rail strikes, to act as the nation’s moral spokesman and to lead the free world. The occupant of the Oval Office had to be “a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen and father of the multitudes,” he said.
The public mood has grown more cynical since then; Watergate showed that presidents can be villains. But Americans still want their commander-in-chief to take command. It is pointless for a modern president to plead that some things, such as the business cycle, are beyond his control. So several have sought dubious powers to meet the public’s unreasonable expectations.
Sometimes people notice, as when Mr Bush claimed limitless leeway to tap phones and detain suspected terrorists. But sometimes they don’t. For example, Mr Bush was blamed for the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, although responding to natural disasters is largely a local responsibility.
So he pushed Congress to pass a law allowing the president to use the army to restore order after a future natural disaster, an epidemic, or under “other conditi0n(s)”, a startling expansion of federal power.
Mr Obama promised to roll back Mr Bush’s imperial presidency. But has he?
Having slammed his predecessor for issuing “signing statements” dismissing parts of laws he had just signed, he is now doing the same thing.
He vowed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but this week put off for another six months any decision as to what to do with the inmates.
Meanwhile, he has embraced Mrs Clinton’s curious notion that the president should be “commander-in-chief of our economy”, by propping up banks, firing executives, backing car warranties and so forth.
Mr Healy reckons that Mr Obama is “as dedicated to enhancing federal power as any president in 50 years.”
Nonsense, say his supporters. Taking over banks and car companies was a temporary measure to tackle a crisis. When the danger recedes, Mr Obama will pull back. The restructuring of General Motors, for example, is comfortably ahead of schedule. And far from lording it over Congress, the president has if anything abdicated too much responsibility to it.
These are all fair points. But Mr Healy’s warnings are still worth heeding.
Mr Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy — energy and health care — so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them.
Perhaps he is hurrying to get the job done before his polls weaken any further. In six months, his approval rating has fallen from 63% to 56% while his disapproval rating has nearly doubled, from 20% to 39%. Independent voters are having second thoughts. And his policies are less popular than he is. Support for his health-care reforms has slipped from 57% to 49% since April.
All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint.
Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong.
The following editorial from the coming issue of NCRegister more or less sums up the current state of the national debate in teh United States over Obama's intended healthcare reforms. The title is a stretch since it quotes only what the Holy Father said directly about health care.
Benedict on health care
by THE EDITORS
August 9-22, 2009 Issue
The health-care debate is a perfect example of why Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on the economy is called
Caritas in Veritate — Charity and Truth.
Think of it this way: Psychologists who have attempted to care for people’s mental health without regard to the reality of sin end up leaving people at the mercy of the worst psychological disasters. A medical community that rejects the sacredness of human life ends up killing more people — embryos and the elderly — than they save.
And economists who reduce people to economic entities — ignoring human love and the truth about the human person — find that they just make problems worse.
Health care is a perfect example. Charity and truth are why we have health care in the first place. The modern health-care system started with Christ’s command to “heal the sick.” Dedicated religious invented hospitals. Catholic nuns and brothers staffed them and allowed them to proliferate. Health care was affordable to all who needed it because, at its heart, it was a service of charity that responded to the dignity of the human person.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Catholic organizations provided education and health care that were practically free. At the beginning of the 21st century, the atheistic movements that worked so hard to unshackle society from the chains of the Church are faced with a society searching for, and not finding, lifelines to replace the ones the Church once provided.
Of course, there are plenty of other factors in the health-care situation America faces.
In order to head off labor unions, employers in the early 20th century started to add benefits, among them medical plans. Today, it is an expectation that employers will provide health-care benefits. That, in turn, means that health-care costs have been hidden from consumers for years: The money for the insurance comes out of their paycheck (and their employer’s account) before they see it.
The litigation explosion in the past 50 years in America has also caused a new dynamic in health care: Providers have to pay huge malpractice insurance rates, a cost they pass on to the medical insurers, who pass it on to you and me and our employers — or to prospective employers if we lose our job.
Yet health care remains a right. “The political community has a duty to honor the family, to assist it, and to ensure especially,” says the Catechism (No. 2211), “in keeping with the country’s institutions, the right to medical care, assistance for the aged, and family benefits.”
That doesn’t mean that all health care must be government-provided. After all, the Catechism is careful to use that phrase “in keeping with the country’s institutions” and also stresses the right to private ownership, housing and emigration — none of which are expected to be provided at government expense.
What, then, does it mean? How can we ensure the right to medical care in the face of our gargantuan, overpriced mess of a health-care system?
Pope Benedict’s encyclical gives his fundamental answer. “Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. … Development, social well-being, the search for a satisfactory solution to the grave socioeconomic problems besetting humanity, all need this truth.”
In particular, Catholic social thought has translated this love and truth into the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.
The principle of solidarity means we ought to love our neighbor, feed the poor, clothe the naked, and care for the sick.
On the one hand, the market alone will not achieve solidarity. “In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well,” writes the Holy Father (No. 38). He emphasizes: “Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function.”
On the other hand, “Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone,” he writes, “and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State.”
The principle of subsidiarity, on the other hand, is the Catholic belief that the person closest to a need has the strongest ability — and clearest duty — to provide care.
These two principles are at the heart of the health-care question: We are meant to help each other, and the person closest to the problem is responsible for assistance.
Pope Benedict XVI is careful not to place this responsibility solely on the shoulders of the marketplace or the state.
He nicely distinguishes between an over-reaching state on the one hand, and a laissez-faire approach on the other, when he writes (No. 58), “The principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa, since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism, while the latter without the former gives way to paternalist social assistance that is demeaning to those in need.”
These two principles are helpful when assessing the health-care legislation being proposed in Washington.
Questions to ask: Does the proposal help us expand health care? In other words, does it allow us to cut the true factors that drive health-care costs — or does it kowtow to those who are responsible for those costs, for instance trial lawyers and pharmaceutical companies?
Also: Does the proposal put decisions about assistance in the hands of those closest to the need? Or does it move those decisions to Washington?
Of course, all of those questions are moot if a health-care proposal fails to protect the right to life. Health care that pays for abortion or pressures older patients to forgo necessary treatment isn’t a health-care system at all, but a death machine.
No matter how it is structured or how many benefits it provides to people, Catholics must oppose any legislator who proposes or supports a death machine.
Love and truth demand that.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/08/2009 16:29]