Reuters is saying Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot John Paul II (and who had been hired by the Reds), is being released from prison. Would JPII have looked kindly on it? He openly forgave the man, and I suspect he would have been in favor of release, provided Agca was not a threat to people.
Meanwhile, St. Peter and JPII’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI departed from a prepared homily at his first papal baptisms to condemn the culture of death. Said Benedict, “(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness … displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility.” He also said, “the anti-culture of death was a love of lies and of deceit. It was an abuse of the body as a commodity and as a product.”
It’s interesting for two reasons. From a religious perspective, Benedict’s first encyclical is entitle Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love, and we may have seen some hints of where he is going in it. From a political philosophy standpoint, it finds commonground with a commentary published in the Sunday London Times last week by former NR editor Rod Dreher.
We found — four years into our marriage and two years into parenthood — that, without quite realising it, we had begun to conduct our lives in certain ways that might not have been kosher with the right-wing mainstream but that flowed naturally from our conservative moral and religious beliefs.
We had come to believe that the family, not the individual, is the basic building block of society. The advent in our lives of a child made us more deeply aware of how some of the things we uncritically admired as conservatives, or at least accepted without protest, served to undermine the family and the institutions that we would need to raise good children. …
WE Anglo-American conservatives have had a useful run with our libertarian free-market side, to which we even won over the mainstream left. Now is the time for us to rediscover the traditionalist part of our intellectual heritage and to figure out how to revive it to meet the challenges of the day.
A society built on consumerism will break down eventually for the same reason socialism did: because even though it is infinitely better than socialism at meeting our physical needs, it also treats human beings as mere materialists.
It cannot, over time, serve the deepest needs of the human person for stability, spiritual idealism and authentic community. We should not be surprised that all our freedoms have led to a society in which too many people see, as the London stage play had it, “shopping and f******” as the highest ideal to which we should aspire.
While I only pulled out that portion, the whole article is an absolute must-read. The connection to Benedict’s Culture of Death lies in the false happiness he derides and the false happiness Dreher sees in our cultures mandate to shop and f—. Libertarian economic policies can only exist so long as there are traditional values that create self-imposed checks on greed, which is the opposite of charity and love. When we abandon those two latter principles, we can no longer claim that society will take care of its least members on its own, and the argument for greater government involvement in assisting people’s needs gains credibility.
