Cosmos The In Lost
. . . The Mater et Magistra dispute led to many ironic consequences. In defending National Review’s capitalist Catholicism, Buckley and Wills had provided a rationale for social liberals to ignore church teachings on sexual matters, which was especially pertinent after the Vatican released the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968), reiterating opposition to birth control and abortion. Wills himself moved to the left in the late 1960s, breaking with Buckley over the Vietnam War and civil rights. About the core issue of the Mater et Magistra debate, Wills argued in his 1979 book Confessions of a Conservative that “[t]here is something about laissez-faire individualism that is historically at odds with Catholic tradition—but this is a matter not reachable by papal fiat or by those who challenge the sincerity of their fellow believer’s religion.”
No use blaming the Democrats, the victory of the Buckley conservative-Republican-capitalist Catholic faction set up the conditions for dissent for years to come. In other words, Buckley was the bump and set before the Kennedy spike of papal teachings (out of bounds). The two sides have words hand in hand against Catholicism ever since.
The deleterious effects of the conservative-Republican-capitalist coalition for the Catholic Church can be gleaned in Keith Michael Estrada’s guest post where he goes down a long and inglorious list of ideologues whose names you know all too well. It is a very long piece, but there’s one passage that you should definitely not miss, because it burns down the bitter harvests we should have always expected from American conservatism and its worship of capitalism:
One need not look beyond the advocates of the capitalist system to see its inconsistency with Christianity. For example, F. A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, and Ludwig von Mises’ The Anti-capitalistic Mentality do a fine job of demonstrating the position that the values of solidarity, simplicity, modesty, restraint, fair prices and just wages, mutual aid, and moderation are destructive when it comes to supporting a capitalist way of life. Instead, their level of support for competition, individualism, self-interest, materialism, relativism, autonomy of the market, etc., along with their poorly masked embrace of social Darwinism which converts into a passive economic genocide of the poor, contradicts the Christian faith, in general, and Laudato Si’.
Now that really distills the real options like nothing I’ve read before, perhaps even better than the Charles Taylor essay on the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism (“Several Reflections on the Theme of Solidarity“) I once translated back into English.
I apologize for messing with your cliches. I grew up with this one too. In the diocesan newspaper George Weigel and Richard McBrien columns used to be set on pages opposing each other. I used to read Weigel religiously thinking he was a faithful Catholic to McBrien’s cafeteria Catholicism. The newspaper is defunct, but this image of false opposition remains with me. But now I know they both ate in the same cafeteria, which Buckley, Weigel’s forefather, helped to build. Knowing is half the battle.
How about a new cliche?
Grazie, ma non grazie, conservatorismo!
Not being a rich conservative (or liberal) I’m stuck with the question, “To pay rent with a credit card, or not pay rent with a credit card?” That’s a real question.
You can help resolve some of it through the paypal button on the right side of my homepage.
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