A real conservative vision

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Economic quagmire seen due to moral decline
By Jeffrey Kuhner | Saturday, August 1, 2009


Conservatives are searching for a leader. Move over Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney. Pope Benedict XVI has emerged as the great conservative champion.

In his recently issued and much anticipated third encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate" ("Love in Truth"), the pope lays out a brilliant blueprint for addressing the seminal problems of our age.

Contrary to headlines, the encyclical is not an anti-capitalist tract. The pope is not a red Tory who puts "social justice" and statist economics above free markets. He does not call for big-government liberalism. Instead, he upholds free markets while also addressing the moral and theological roots of culture.

The pope rightly argues that the current economic crisis was caused by rampant greed, irresponsible financial speculation and the failure of government regulation. In other words, it has occurred within a moral vacuum, where Christian love and truth have been abandoned in favor of crude materialism.

The crisis has become "an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future." The economic debacle is simply a symptom of a deeper and more dangerous moral crisis. The only solution, he says, is to restore Christendom -- what used to be the essence of Western civilization.

He puts forth a vision conservatives should embrace. The pope is articulating a conservative humanism characterized by individual freedom, responsible capitalism, the importance of national sovereignty and distinct cultural identity, voluntary trade unionism, decentralization of political power and moral traditionalism.

The pope does not blame capitalism for the world's current economic problems. On the contrary, he states unequivocally, "Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations." Instead, he stresses that a market economy is shaped and driven by cultural underpinnings. If the culture is rotten, gangster capitalism inevitably flourishes. If it is morally healthy, a socially responsible free market takes root.

The pope is pro-globalization, pro-trade and pro-scientific innovation -- even demanding that wealthier countries lower protectionist trade barriers to products from poorer nations. This will lower consumer prices and help boost exports for developing economies.

Yet the pope believes in a redistributive capitalism in which wealth is distributed more equally to the poor and disadvantaged. The state has some role to play -- unemployment insurance and local charity, for example. But much of the redistribution should be voluntary and part of a mutually beneficial exchange. In other words, he is calling us to follow Christ's injunction to take care of the weakest among us.

The pope rightly argues that the "values of Christianity" are "not merely useful but essential for building a good society and for true integral human development." The West, however, is embarked upon a radical secular experiment. We are rejecting our Judeo-Christian heritage. We are suffering from profound spiritual malaise fostered by the loss of moral absolutes. The result is hedonism, consumerism sexual permissiveness and individual gratification. As in ancient Rome, this leads to gradual social disintegration.

Although the pope never explicitly says it, the West is dying - literally. Fertility rates in every European country are below replacement levels. A total fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman is needed if the population is to sustain itself. In the European Union as a whole, the birthrate is just 1.5. In Germany and Austria, it is 1.4. In Italy, Spain and Greece, it is a meager 1.3. The only nation that is close to replacement levels is France at 2.0 -- and that is mainly because of the soaring birthrates of its large Muslim community.

In America, the fertility rate is slightly above 2.1, but much of that is because of Hispanics and their offspring, who still have numerous children. Cradle-to-grave welfare states require young workers to support the costly pension and health care programs for aging citizens. Hence, every Western country has embarked upon a policy of massive Third World immigration. The result is multiculturalism and a direct assault on the West's historic and cultural core. Demography is destiny - and the future is not with the West.

The pope thinks the key to the West's revival is to return to the faith of its ancestors: the Roman Catholic Church. He states clearly that any good society begins by defending the right to life from conception until natural death. The traditional family based on the marriage of one man and one woman is the seminal institution of any viable social order.

Pope Benedict's conservatism is a bulwark against the evils of modern liberalism. The left's main project has been to construct a society without God; to create a new man -- one who is the center of all things. In the 20th century, leftists embraced communism and fascism. They failed. Today, it is socialist multiculturalism and radical environmentalism. They will fail as well.

In essence, the pope believes the economic crisis is a result of a moral crisis: Its ultimate solution will therefore not be found in tinkering with the material -- as in simple policy reforms -- but in renewing our spiritual underpinnings.

The pope understands this eternal truth: Societies cannot endure for long without a belief in God and a submission to His will. We are ignoring him at our peril.


Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Copyright 2009 The Washington Times, LLC

Le Curé d’Ars + 1859

Memoria sancti Ioannis Mariae Vianney, presbyteri, qui, quadraginta amplius annos paroeciae ipsi commissae in vico Ars prope Bellicium in Gallia actuosa praedicatione, oratione et paenitentiae exemplo mirum in modum ministravit et cotidie pueros et adultos catechizans, paenitentes reconcilians atque ardenti caritate e sacra Eucharistia velut e fonte hausta refulgens tantopere provexit, ut longe lateque consilia sua diffunderet et permultos ad Deum sapienter duceret.
(2005 Martyrologium Romanum)





"My little children, your hearts are small, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of loving God."

(Thanks to Fr. Z for that quote.)

On the feast day of this great but unlikely saint, I ask for his prayers as I make hurried and frantic preparations to enter St. Mary's Seminary in a little over a week's time.

Here's a really good article from Zenit I just found :

(http://www.zenit.org/article-26225?l=english)

Curé d'Ars: Model Priest
Confessor Knew the Importance of the Basics
By Karna Swanson

NEW YORK, JUNE 19, 2009 (Zenit.org).- After more than 2,000 years of existence, there isn't much the Church hasn't addressed, faced or witnessed.

Granted, times change. New challenges continually present themselves. Progress is made. And while the Church continually works to keep step with the twists and turns of history, it sometimes breaks step and simply returns to the basics.

This is what Benedict XVI did recently when he declared a yearlong celebration of one of the most basic and fundamental elements of the Catholic Church: the priesthood.

Beginning today, the Church will dedicate one full year to remembering what it is to be a priest. This will not only be an opportunity for priests to rediscover their vocation, mission and passion for Christ, but it's also a chance for the rest of us to rediscover what a gift the priesthood is for our own lives.

The Pontiff chose as the occasion for this jubilee year the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Mary Vianney, known as the Curé d'Ars.

By linking the Year for Priests with St. Vianney, who is also the patron of parish priests, the jubilee not only celebrates the basics of the Church, but also the basics of the priesthood itself.

As a priest, Father Vianney took upon himself many of the projects parish priests take on. He set about to restore the parish church, he founded an orphanage and did acts of charity for the poor. He also did some pretty extraordinary things. He had supernatural knowledge of the future and the past, and he performed healing miracles, particularly on children.

But it was in the basic duties of parish life that he excelled, namely preaching, offering spiritual direction, and, most notably, hearing confessions.

Rocky road

John Mary Vianney was born in Dardilly, near Leon, in 1786. His early faith formation took place within the context of the French Revolution, which pushed the practice of the Catholic faith underground. Later in his ministry, he would deal with the consequences of the revolution, which led many of the faithful to leave the Church.

The road to the priesthood wasn't an easy path for Vianney. After finally getting his father's permission to pursue his calling, he still needed to get caught up on his studies, as the revolution had interrupted his education. If he wanted to be a priest, he'd have to go back to school with children half his age to learn the basics of reading, writing, and Latin.

Almost nine years later, in 1815, Vianney was ordained. He was 29. Less than three years later, in 1818, the young priest was assigned as the assistant pastor of the church in Ars, a small country village located about 25 miles from Lyon in eastern France. This is where he would spend the rest of his priestly life.

Arriving in Ars, the young priest noticed the loss of Christian faith and morals around him, a lingering by-product of the French Revolution. Father Vianney soon began to awaken the faith of his parishioners through his preaching, but most of all by his prayer and his way of life. His notoriety as a holy priest grew slowly, and Father Vianney soon became known as, simply, the Curé d'Ars (priest of Ars).

Not paparazzi, penitents

By the 1830s, his popularity swelled to the extent that the holy priest became somewhat of a prisoner in the confessional, held there by the hundreds of faithful arriving daily to the village to see the holy curé. Between 1830 and 1845, sometimes as many as 300 people a day would pass through Ars for a chance to confess with Father Vianney.

Overwhelmed with his own sense of unworthiness and weakness in the face of such a great mission, the holy priest tried three times to escape, but all attempts failed. On the third attempt his parishioners actually sent out a search crew in the middle of the night to find him and put him back in the confessional. He stayed there until the wee hours of the morning -- hearing confessions.

In 1853, a group of diocesan missionaries came to the aid of the overworked parish priest, who couldn't seem to get out of his confessional, let alone out of his own parish to take a holiday. His own bishop even told him not to attend diocesan retreats, as Father Vianney had too many souls to attend to in Ars.

By 1855, the number of pilgrims had reached 20,000 a year, and some 100,000 in 1858. There are reports that during the last 10 years of his life, he spent as many as 18 hours a day in the confessional, and that toward the end of his life, he confessed up to 80,000 penitents a year.

Father Vianney spent the last five days of his life hearing his confessions from his deathbed. Exhausted, the Curé d'Ars died Aug. 4, 1859. He was 73.

The parish priest was beatified in 1905, and declared the patron of the priests of France that same year. He was canonized 20 years later in 1925, and declared the patron saint of all parish priests in 1929.

A hero

In 1959, Pope John XXIII wrote a 13,000-word encyclical on St. John Mary Vianney on the centenary of the saint's death. He hailed the holy priest an "outstanding model of priestly asceticism, of piety, especially in the form of devotion to the Eucharist, and, finally, of pastoral zeal."

He was a "tireless worker for God," the Holy Father continued, and "a hero."

"His only motives were the love of God and the desire for the salvation of the souls of his neighbors," the Pontiff affirmed.

John XIII offered St. Vianney as a model for other priests because the saint was a man of God. This, he said, was the secret to the priesthood: "A man who is filled with Christ will not find it hard to discover ways and means of bringing others to Christ."

The Curé d'Ars is also a model for priests because he, like few others, knew what being a priest was all about.

"Holy Orders," he wrote in his Catechism on the Priesthood, "is a sacrament which seems to relate to no one among you, and which yet relates to everyone."

A priest, he continued, is "a man who holds the place of God -- a man who is invested with all the powers of God."

"Everything has come to us through the priest; yes, all happiness, all graces, all heavenly gifts," St. Vianney affirmed. "If we had not the sacrament of orders, we should not have Our Lord.

"Who placed him there, in that tabernacle? It was the priest. Who was it that received your soul, on its entrance into life? The priest. Who nourishes it, to give it strength to make its pilgrimage? The priest. Who will prepare it to appear before God, by washing that soul, for the last time, in the blood of Jesus Christ? The priest -- always the priest."

St. Vianney spoke of the priest as the doorway to the treasures of heaven, "He is the steward of the good God, the distributor of his wealth."

"Oh, how great is a priest," he exclaimed. So great, he noted, that it would be impossible for a priest to "understand the greatness of his office till he is in heaven. If he understood it on earth, he would die, not of fear, but of love."

And a priest, he continued, "is not a priest for himself."

It's often overlooked that a priest does not confess himself or administer the sacraments for himself. All of his priestly duties and functions are done for others. "He is not for himself," the holy Curé reminds us. "He is for you."

When you see a priest, you should say, "There is he who made me a child of God, and opened heaven to me by holy baptism; he who purified me after I had sinned; who gives nourishment to my soul."

"The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus," he added. "When you see the priest, think of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

This year, we have the opportunity to just do that.


[Karna Swanson is the editor of ZENIT's English edition.]
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St. John Vianney, ora pro nobis !

Sacred Heart of Jesus, make me a priest like him !