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Tag Archives: Catholic Social Doctrine
A Forgotten Catholic Hero
Polish friends remind us that “it is the 70th anniversary of the death of Adam Doboszyński (August 29, 1949), an outstanding activist of the national camp. His death was a symbolic beginning of Stalinist terror in Poland.”
The show-trial of Adam Doboszyński began in Warsaw on 18th June, 1949. He was accused of co-operating with the intelligence services of Nazi Germany from 1933, and from 1945 with the intelligence services of the U.S.A. The prosecution was based on forced testimony given in interrogations conducted during his two-year imprisonment. During the trial he repeatedly and consistently denied co-operating with any foreign intelligence services. He explained that he was made to accuse himself under torture. In his final statement he swore by the “wounds and passion of Christ” that he had never been in the service of Germany, the United States or of any other country, and he asked for judgment based on “law, truth and justice.” At the end of the twelve-day show-trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Adam Doboszyński was the author of a very important book,‘The Economics of Charity’, first published in London in 1945.
Doboszyński’s view of national economy was shaped by Catholic social doctrine and especially by the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, along with the social encyclicals of the popes. His critique of both the Capitalist and Communist socio-economic systems was based firmly on the teachings of the Church.
Doboszyński affirmed that Capitalism and Communism, Liberalism and Marxism, seemingly so different from each other, were based on an anti-Christian and Materialistic outlook of life. He criticised Liberalism, which is the root of Capitalism, regarding it as immoral. He affirmed the fact that both Capitalism and Communism are Collectivist and Materialist in nature. According to Doboszyński, the alternative to both was the creation of a national society built like a human organism, in which an individual should not feel alienated, but be supported by the family and the homeland. The basis of this social, economic and political life in the nation was to be bodies of employers and employees, which is essentially the re-establishment of the Christian system of guilds adapted to modern conditions
Reading from a different bible
“We are an integral part of the Palestinian people, yet we are virtually invisible for those in the White House who claim to care about Christianity,” witnesses Fr. Emmanuelle Awwad, parish priest of the Palestinian village of Aboud.
“When they talk about ‘Christianity,’ they seem to be reading from a different Bible.”
Before twentieth-century mass immigration of European Jews to the Holy Land and the vicious Zionist terror campaign that bombed, shot and murdered Palestinian civilians, British civil servants, policemen and soldiers – which eventually led to the imposition of the State of Israel upon the Palestinians in 1948, with the resulting wholesale destruction of Palestinian villages along with the death and forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families – Palestinian Christians constituted more than ten-percent of the Holy Land. Today, less than two-percent.
The Church vehemently opposed Zionism and warned, if implemented, it would lead to the destruction of Christianity in the Holy Land.
“How can we deliver up the country of our redeemer to a people of a different faith? ” – Cardinal Merry del Val (1st April 1904)
“We cannot give approval to the movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we could never sanction it. The soil of Jerusalem, if it was not always sacred, has been sanctioned by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot tell you anything different.” – Pope Saint Pius X (January 1904)
“The Holy See has never approved the project of making Palestine a home for the Jews.” – Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Pope Pius XII‟s Secretary of State (3rd March 1943)
“Catholics would be injured in their religious sentiment and rightly fear for their rights if Palestine would belong exclusively to the Hebrews,” – Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Pope Pius XII‟s Secretary of State (7th April 1943)
In its issue dated 15th May 1948, L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, wrote that “Zionism is not the true heir to the Israel of the Bible……. the Holy Land and its sacred places belong to Christianity, which is the true Israel.”
The coming demise of Liberalism
A Polish friend of SGET sums it up nicely. She writes:
” Economic Liberalism (the base), or Capitalism, dictates the superstructure (Cultural Liberalism) to increase Capitalists’ profits” .
But what does the Church propose in opposition to Economic Liberalism?
Find out in this short article: The Corporatist remedy to Economic Liberalism
Freedom and Order
“From this it is manifest that the eternal law of God is the sole standard and rule of human liberty, not only in each individual man, but also in the community and civil society which men constitute when united. Therefore, the true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State; but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law. Likewise, the liberty of those who are in authority does not consist in the power to lay unreasonable and capricious commands upon their subjects, which would equally be criminal and would lead to the ruin of the commonwealth; but the binding force of human laws is in this, that they are to be regarded as applications of the eternal law, and incapable of sanctioning anything which is not contained in the eternal law, as in the principle of all law. Thus, St. Augustine most wisely says: “I think that you can see, at the same time, that there is nothing just and lawful in that temporal law, unless what men have gathered from this eternal law.”(5) If, then, by anyone in authority, something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law, as being no rule of justice, but certain to lead men away from that good which is the very end of civil society.”
– Pope Leo XIII, Libertas
Capitalism Killed the Family
“It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism.” – G.K. Chesterton
