Catholic Online Forum

JMJ

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/ ... c-beliefs/

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FabrizioParty like it's 1773

No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist (Pius XI)

Call me crazy, but I have to think that the problems started because Catholic institutions started accepting government money. I keep coming back to the fact that state funding changed the books my Catholic school was allowed to use. From the very beginning, it was a sell-out and whoever made those decisions should have resisted the temptation.

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Rose West
"May God help us not to spoil His work" (Bl. Mother Theresa)

JMJ

Rose,

crazy? That's EXACTLY the problem. Seen from a European perspective though, it's not as if there were many alternatives when authoritarian liberal governments of 1800 declared war on the Church and dispossessed her of all its sources of income that had guaranteed jobs and economic prosperity and provided services ever since the fall of the Western Empire.

The state had confiscated everything: hospitals, convents, land, funds (and executed quite a few bishops, priests, monks and nuns plus untold numbers of lay people). Misery ensued (for Italy that's when emigration begun. Italians hadn't been that poor in a millennium!). Long story short: they gave something back in the form of subsidies. That way, it seemed a form of compromise to avoid further popular rebellions. But it only made the Church more dependent on the state.

Not perchanche, during his recent trip to Germany, the Pope urged the Church to cut all these ties to be completely free to pursue her apostolic mission (In Germany they still have the "church-tax" instituted by Hitler, funny how they did not abolish that feature of the National-Socialist fiscal policies). There are of course some practical problems that go with such a necessary step: if behemotic governments enslave us all by sucking away all our income, how are families going to be free and able to pay for the services they would like to receive from the Church? And if there aren't enough rich Catholics, where are the donations that used to feed, clothe and provide for the education of innumerable poor people going to come from?

Of course the Pope knows all this and he's addressed it elsewhere. But the fact remains that he who controls your money controls you. Time to dump our share of chests of tea into the harbor water, perhaps?

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FabrizioParty like it's 1773

No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist (Pius XI)

In the US, I don't think times were that tough when this trip down the garden path began. I believe the Bishops thought they were doing right when they allowed this to start. They may have even congratulated themselves that they were finally getting a voice in American government. However, there were huge warning bells. So over the last 30-40 years, the aid given to Catholic institutions has been part of the justification for raising taxes. So now the Catholic institutions are dependent upon that money they probably should have refused in the first place.

I don't know how to answer the question about not having enough money to do anything the Church needs to do. If our parish were allowed to concentrate on being a parish and not sending money to things like the CCHD, I think we would have enough to meet our monthly commitments. I suspect like everyone else, a lot of Church institutions need to examine their relationship to financial things.

Incidentally, one of those Italians who came to America, probably in or around the 1880's, settled in Quebec and opened some sort of restaurant or pastry shop that some of his kids have turned into a huge business. I don't know about his first wife, but his second wife was French Canadian and they were my grandfather's parents.

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Rose West
"May God help us not to spoil His work" (Bl. Mother Theresa)

I have a sign from my years with the government:
The Golden Rule of Government Contracts
He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules.

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- Joe Kelley

Death is only a shadow across the path to Heaven.

JMJ

http://usccbmedia.blogspot.com/2011/11/ ... -i-am.html

HHS Exec Rivals Nixon With Line: 'I am Not Trying to Get Anyone Off the Hook

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FabrizioParty like it's 1773

No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist (Pius XI)