Pope Francis’ Misguided Attack on Libertarianism

— by Polydamas

When Argentinian bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elevated on March 13, 2013 to become Pope Francis, he was the first pontiff ever selected from the American continent and from the southern hemisphere. Much like former American President Barack Hussein Obama, much of his appeal in the mainstream media is predicated upon his pathbreaking background and his unabashed use of his office to advance a radical leftist agenda wedded to authoritarianism.

The radical leftist politics of Pope Francis are not in the least unusual for Argentina or for Latin America. They are the predominant politics of every university and institution of higher learning in Latin America. Marxist politics and economics permeate both the ivory towers of academia and lowliest slums of Latin America, if not worldwide. It is not in the least bit extraordinary for an Argentinian or for a Latin American to subscribe to radical leftist ideology. However, it is most extraordinary for the highest official of the Catholic Church to maintain these viewpoints.

In Latin America and elsewhere around the world, the Catholic Church is seen as a bastion of conservative religious and political belief. It is, generally, an island of timeless moral stability in a roiling sea of Marxism. Whereas leftism is an atheistic and irreligious ideology that worships the almighty state as the possessor of ultimate wisdom and power, the Catholic Church believes in the almighty God as the source of all. Leftism denies the existence of the soul and espouses that evil is a meaningless social construct. To the left, morality is adherence to the fashionable conformist ideologies of the day which it considers to be enlightened. In contrast, the Catholic Church believes that evil exists in the human soul and is a deviation from ages-old morality. Yet, both Catholicism and Marxism are proponents of authoritarianism which rejects individualism.

Pope Francis’ attack on libertarian philosophy, as reported by Thomas D. Williams in the April 28, 2017 edition of Breitbart News, titled “Pope Francis Warns Against ‘Invasion’ of Libertarianism” (http://bit.ly/2oFoeER), is a completely misguided attack on individualism and individual liberties. While the Pope may be very knowledgeable about Catholic history and religion, his condemnation of libertarianism stems from his ignorance of its history and the scholarly works that constitute its foundations.

Pope Francis condemns libertarianism as a dangerous philosophy which elevates the individual over the “common good”. His condemnation evidences a common denominator which the Church has with secular statists — authoritarianism. Both agree that every individual has two masters, a king or civilian authority on one hand and an ecumenical leader on the other. They may disagree among themselves which one of them should have more power over the individual, but both of them agree that the power to command the individual belongs to them and not to the individual.

Who has the prerogative to determine what is the “common good” to which each individual must submit? The Church believes that it should determine the “common good” based upon religious strictures. Prior Popes decreed that the “common good” required building ornate cathedrals at great expense and conscripted the labor of the people. Prior Popes sent young men to their deaths in faraway lands because the “common good” mandated religious crusades. Not to be outdone, kings and other sovereigns deemed themselves the arbiters of the “common good” and sought to impose confiscatory taxation upon their people because building a new palace for His August Majesty or various public works were rationalized to constitute the “common good”. When kings and states wished to stimulate their faltering economies and to replenish their treasuries on the grounds of “the common good”, they fomented conflicts and blithely sent young men to their deaths in wars of conquest.

Consider also that, in the 15th century, Aztec priests sacrificed scores of people every day to their sun god Huitzilopochtli by ripping out with sharp obsidian knives the beating hearts from the chests of conscious victims or flaying them alive or decapitating and dismembering them. These daily blood sacrifices were deemed indispensable to the “common good” of the Aztec people, who were charged with the collective duty of nourishing Huitzilopochtli with blood and hearts to give him the strength to draw the sun across the sky every day. A victim who refused to part company with his heart, skin, head or limbs would undoubtedly be considered “selfish” for not dutifully contributing them to the community for the “common good”.

Libertarian philosophy completely rejects the utilitarian calculus that underlies the “common good” that the happiness of the many or the needs of the many justify the sacrifice of the few. Libertarianism is the profound philosophy that each human being is uniquely valuable and is an end in an of himself, not the mere means to an end which is ordered by his betters. It is the remarkable belief that human beings are not lowly pawns in a chess game played by Popes and kings, to be conveniently sacrificed for some supposedly “higher purpose”. It holds that the people who are called upon to sacrifice their lives, their liberties, or their properties, for what their religious or secular leaders consider the “common good”, must not be coerced by force or by threat of force, but must do so of their own free will after full disclosure.

The so-called “invasion” of newfangled libertarianism — which Pope Francis considers “so fashionable today” — is, in actuality, more than 325 years old and can be traced back to the 17th century writings of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1683) and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) and, later, to the founding fathers of the American Revolution. The Pope’s complaint against libertarianism is nothing more than an implicit affirmation of the authoritarian framework of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (1680), extolling the divine rights of kings to rule the earth.

Pope Francis’ attack on libertarianism is a misguided nostalgic yearning for the power of the “good old days” when authoritarian Popes and kings used and disposed with the snap of their fingers the lives, labors, and belongings of lowly persons for the “common good” which was what they saw fit.  Thankfully, for those of us who are neither Popes nor kings, those “good old days” have irretrievably passed.


Pope Francis Warns Against ‘Invasion’ of Libertarianism

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

Breitbart News

April 28, 2017

Pope Francis had harsh words to describe libertarians Friday, saying they deny the value of the common good in favor of radical selfishness where only the individual matters.

“I cannot fail to speak of the grave risks associated with the invasion of the positions of libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in school and university education,” the Pope said in an message sent to members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences meeting in the Vatican and subsequently shared with Breitbart News.

“A common characteristic of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is the idea of ‘living well’ or the ‘good life’ in the communitarian framework,” Francis said, while at the same time exalting a “selfish ideal.”

Members of the Pontifical Academy are currently engaged in a workshop bearing the title “Towards a Participatory Society: New Roads to Social and Cultural Integration,” which began Friday and will run through May 2.

Francis said that libertarianism, “which is so fashionable today,” is a more radical form of the individualism that asserts that “only the individual gives value to things and to interpersonal relations and therefore only the individual decides what is good and what is evil.”

Libertarianism, he said, preaches that the idea of “self-causation” is necessary to ground freedom and individual responsibility.

“Thus, the libertarian individual denies the value of the common good,” the pontiff stated, “because on the one hand he supposes that the very idea of ‘common’ means the constriction of at least some individuals, and on the other hand that the notion of ‘good’ deprives freedom of its essence.”

Libertarianism, he continued, is an “antisocial” radicalization of individualism, which “leads to the conclusion that everyone has the right to extend himself as far as his abilities allow him even at the cost of the exclusion and marginalization of the more vulnerable majority.”

According to this mentality, all relationships that create ties must be eliminated, the Pope suggested, “since they would limit freedom.” In this way, only by living independently of others, of the common good, and even God himself, can a person be free, he said.

This isn’t the first time that the Pope has taken issue with popular social and political trends.

In March, Pope Francis told leaders of the European Union that the populist movements that are sweeping many parts of Europe and other areas are fueled by “egotism.”

Populism, he said, is “the fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and ‘looking beyond’ their own narrow vision.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *