That Was Going On? Really?

Muddle-Headed Pope on Arms Manufacturers

From the Huffington Post:

TURIN, Italy (Reuters) - People who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian, Pope Francis said on Sunday.

Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.

“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.

“It makes me think of ... people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today ... they say one thing and do another.”

Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars. He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”

That’s right. In one and the same speech, he condemned arms manufacturers, and lamented the fact that the Allies did not bomb the railway lines to the death camps.

And with what were the Allies supposed to bomb the rail lines? Bombers. Built by weapons manufacturers. Most likely B-17s (built by Boeing) or B-24s (built by Consolidated).

Has the Pope even noticed the contradiction?

As Marc Livecche has noted:

With what, precisely, did he intend the allies to bomb the rail lines? The 20th Century ought to have convinced us, including us Christians, that those kinds of folks who enjoy genocide cannot usually be talked out of their malevolence with prayers or harsh language – they most often have to be forced out of it. If soft power cannot get those who are murdering the innocent to stand down then hard power is necessary to knock them down. Such business is about more than “hate, fratricide, and violence.” If stopping genocide is a good thing to do then those who have done it – and those who supply the tools to help them do it – have, well, done good. To be sure, the motives of some who sell arms might be mixed. But while this might, in those cases, marble our moral evaluation, we oughtn’t allow the marbling to eclipse the good nor to forget that, just as soldiering can be a Christian vocation, so too can be making the tools of their trade.

Livecche then deals with the notion that Christians can somehow opt out of war and violence:

It will do no good to claim, as some have, that this is the business of the government and not of Christians. To claim that God ordained the sword for the government to maintain just order but that he has called Christians away from such business in order to provide an alternative, peaceable kingdom is, in my judgment, the true hypocrisy – not the notion of Christians providing weapons of war. If the peaceable kingdom were a viable alternative to hard coercion then, surely, God would have ordained such a kingdom instead of, rather than alongside, the government’s sword. Given that God has ordained the sword, I stand among those who infer, therefore, that the sword is necessary. And if the sword is necessary then that makes the peaceable kingdom parasitic – because it cannot remain in a world in which the good do not bear arms. The idea that Christians should allow their neighbors to dirty their hands while keeping their own souls clean is, frankly, morally abhorrent.

A Jesuit Pope

Some comments on the new Pope from George Weigel, published in National Review:

The first Jesuit pope? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. Bergoglio is an old-school Jesuit, formed by classic Ignatian spirituality and deeply committed to an intelligent, sophisticated appropriation and proclamation of the full symphony of Catholic truth — qualities not notable for their prevalence among members of the Society of Jesus in the early 21st century. I suspect there were not all that many champagne corks flying last night in those Jesuit residences throughout the world where the Catholic Revolution That Never Was is still regarded as the ecclesiastical holy grail. For the shrewder of the new pope’s Jesuit brothers know full well that that dream was just dealt another severe blow. And they perhaps fear that this pope, knowing the Society of Jesus and its contemporary confusions and corruptions as he does, just might take in hand the reform of the Jesuits that was one of the signal failures of the pontificate of John Paul II.

There will be endless readings of the tea leaves in the days ahead as the new pope, by word and gesture, offers certain signals as to his intentions and his program. But the essentials are already known. This is a keenly intelligent, deeply holy, humble, and shrewd man of the Gospel. He knows that he has been elected as a reformer, and the reforms he will implement are the reforms that will advance the New Evangelization. The rest is detail: important detail, to be sure, but still detail. The course is set, and the Church’s drive into the Evangelical Catholicism of the future has been accelerated by the pope who introduced himself to his diocese, and to the world, by bowing deeply as he asked for our prayers.

The failings of the Jesuit order are very visible at Marquette, which is less a Catholic university than a typical secular, politically correct place.

Will the new Pope change that? We doubt it, but if he provides strong moral leadership it may have the effect of making campus bureaucrats less bold in thumbing their noses at Catholic teaching.