Dear iBrattleboro activists,
The Pope praised the Principle of Subsidiarity, which of course can be twisted for most any use, I imagine. I took it as its intended grassroots over central power and posted it in our OEN study group, "Capitalism - a Threat to Life on Earth."
appreciatively,
jay
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jay_jans_080425_pope_benedict_praise.htm
TITLE:
Pope Benedict Praised the UN & Subsidiarity (Rev. MLK Jr Praised the Peace Movement!)
DESCRIPTION:
Pope Benedict made oblique criticisms of Anglo-Americans causing crises, said human rights are only real where based on justice, called for “a greater degree of international ordering based on a broad principle that communities be more important and free of top-down governance. No mention of the wars of occupation! Is his silence not embarrassing for Catholics in a peace movement ignored while thousands of Iraqis/Afghanis die?
TEXT:
In a country where UN bashing is politically correct and derisive commentary on the United Nations is continuously heard and read in the pro-war conglomerate owned entertainment/news mass media, the spiritual shepherd charged with having the protection of all humanity as his flock, would have been expected to come to its defense.
And His Holiness did.
When Pope Benedict addressed the UN last Friday in a long lecture dedicated mostly to invocations of divine faith in praise and encouragements for the institution, three pointedly serious statements stood out as being potentially of immense helpfulness.
The Holy Father noted, in admonishment, the world crisis causing behavior of a powerful few:
“… we experience the obvious paradox of a multilateral consensus that continues to be in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the world's problems call for interventions in the form of collective action by the international community.”
Regarding human rights, the Pope spoke of pretentious and superficial legal formalities meant to distract from the perpetuation of injustices thwarting a universal exercise of real human rights.
“Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power.
When presented purely in terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal.
The Universal Declaration, rather, has reinforced the conviction that respect for human rights is principally rooted in unchanging justice … This aspect is often overlooked when the attempt is made to deprive rights of their true function in the name of a narrowly utilitarian perspective.
Since rights and the resulting duties follow naturally from human interaction, it is easy to forget that they are the fruit of a commonly held sense of justice built primarily upon solidarity among the members of society, and hence valid at all times and for all peoples.
This intuition was expressed as early as the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo, one of the masters of our intellectual heritage. He taught … the saying: "Do not do to others what you would not want done to you"."
[Underlining added - not in the text as published]
Pope Benedict prefaced these two names-unmentioned oblique criticisms, obviously referring to Anglo-American bullying of the world community, with a reference to a succinct prerequisite for fair and felicitous socio-political arrangements for all Mankind.
For the ongoing basely ignorant, dangerous and unethical dominance of humanity through institutionalized disrespect and disregard for the lives of its vast majority, Benedict gave a precise antidote in calling for the implementation of the relatively unfamiliar but wonderfully human fundamental ethical principle of subsidiarity in governance long proclaimed as of being dire necessity by the Papacy:
“The United Nations embodies the aspiration for a "greater degree of international ordering" (John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 43), inspired and governed by the principle of subsidiarity, and therefore capable of responding to the demands of the human family through binding international rules and through structures capable of harmonizing the day-to-day unfolding of the lives of peoples.
Since” international ordering”, “binding international rules”, “structures”, do not seem necessarily assuring of freedom for the “human family”, yours truly looked up the “principle of ‘subsidiarity’ to see if it mitigated against rigid control
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘subsidiarity’ as:
“The idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, cybernetics and management.
The word subsidiarity is derived from the Latin word subsidiarius and has its origins in Catholic social teaching. The concept or principle is found in several constitutions around the world (see for example the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution).
The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person.
Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities … "Positive subsidiarity", which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.
The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle course between the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the various forms of communism, which subordinate the individual to the state, on the other. The principle was further developed in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, and in Economic Justice for All by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops."
The statement by the Holy Father introducing this principal should be latched on to and quoted over and over again everywhere by those who oppose imperialism, and struggle for a more pacific and radically democratic world of respect and fairness for all humanity.
Turns out the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ is fundamental to the protection of healthy societies from the encroachment of materialistic empires. It is also appropriate for understanding the grassroots democratic political economics flaring up all over the third world as local cultures, for centuries dominated, oppressed, enslaved, robbed of their natural resources and bilked of their earnings, while their traditions and way of life were maligned, degraded, destroyed and labeled ‘undeveloped’ ‘backward’, ‘inferior’, ‘pagan’ by predatory institutions of the industrialized nations intruding and conquering by trade or raid.
The ‘Subsidiarity Principle’ is an erudite social studies concept that explains the value of allowing people ‘do what comes naturally’ out from under exploitation of the banks and military of both powerful empires and harsh governments of their subservient satellite nations.
The Zapatista revolt in Mayan Chiapas, Mexico, indigenous cultures in the Amazon basin now successfully fighting off attack from corporations backed by outlaws and corrupted government agencies, closely followed in other places in Latin America, in India, in Australia, in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, where, in kind modest size communities, derogatorily called ‘backwaters’, people are recognizing their own culture, for its time honored nurturing of warmth, happiness and mental health, as superior to the decadence of the ‘developed’ world wherein so many in materialist confusion become alienated from life itself.
In their cultures, as in ancient cultures, greed and selfishness are considered anti-social, ignorant and useless. Of course these ‘subsidiarity principle’ revolutions are in all cases attacked by the aggressing ubiquitous traders and armies of the former outright occupying colonial powers or their implanted co-conspiring comprador elite.
More than half of mankind is oppressed under the antonyms of the principle of subsidiarity:
statism, the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty,
and: capitalism, an economic system based on private ownership of capital, capital being any form of wealth (including natural resources and wealth held in common, such as the planet itself.)
By enlightening us on the principal of subsidiarity, Benedict, perhaps unintentionally gives his blessing to today’s burgeoning movements for grassroots cultural socialism. A community socialism opposed to the formal top down organized state socialism that was born a century and a half ago in reaction to the iniquities of its parent ‘isms’, private capitalism and state capitalism. Shall a new ‘ism’ be coined, ‘culturism’, communityism, localism, humanityism? “Isms’ always foment argument in their defining. Perhaps the Papacy's principle of subsidiarity is simple and clear enough to become useful.
In the new Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela the Chavez government has for years now been enfranchising thousands of the nations poorest communities, asking its own local councils what work they themselves would like to do to better their lives. If approved, the government supplies the tools and expertise where needed, and the members of the communities perform the labor for the project they have chosen. The community could decide to build a water line, a school, a road, a small enterprise or factory, a clinic, a school, a bridge, etc., its their plan that becomes their accomplishment, their subsequent enjoyment and pride. The Cuban doctors that have come in exchange for Venezuelan oil teach students medicine as well as treat patients. See Monthly Review Report from Caracas
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/magdoff040208.html
In islands of enlightenment in the industrialized nations and semi-industrialized nations there are manifestations of a newly discovered confidence in the viability, reliability, nobility and happiness of localities self-implementing what can now be called, thanks to the Pope’s UN message, the principle of subsidiarity. Argentinean workers having had success re-opening shut down and abandoned factories in solidarity, with great ingenuity, feel self-confident and pride in their shared achievements free of supervisors. In Italy self-run cooperative industries have grown and contributed greatly to that nations prosperity. And in many nations employee owned factories and enterprises have made their communities self-sufficient to the point of issuing and using script as local currency to retain financial control of common assets.
Readers interested in a more complete picture and in depth treatment of grassroots-up radical democracy replacing top-down absentee control of their lives, non-participatory economics, fraudulent banking and pseudo-democratic government, might like to look at:
“The Dictionary of Development” - A Guide to Knowledge as Power [a collection of essays] edited by Wolfgang Sachs, containing writings of Ivan Ilyich, Gustavo Esteva and E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful.
We thank the Pontiff for having spoken out for justice, albeit softly, for the respectability and attention our repeating his words will gain. These wise soft spoken dissident pronouncements from such an august international personality, revered by millions the world over, must be taken up and shouted up the blind and criminally insane power elite and their paid collaborating jingoistic defenders in commercial media print and telecast.
But honest and informed dissident voices are not heard in conglomerate owned media, media, which Pope John Paul cited as undemocratic - the same media, however, that covered every moment of his Holiness's week-long visit during both day time and prime time hours.
Shall we not bring Pope Benedict's UN speech to the attention of our clergy so hypocritically silent about the present wars on the third world unmentioned by Pope Benedict?
We would have hoped, and still hope for this Pope, in his wisdom, to instruct his legions of bishops, monsignors, priests, nuns, and lay brothers to join or lead the growing activist peace movement, which fights for coverage and the media reforms spelled out by John Paul II in a society absolutely uninterested in the huge death toll of innocent foreigners from U.S. wars in their very own beloved countries.
We can well appreciate that His Holiness spoke carefully, so not to directly criticize his host's foreign policy while a guest in the U.S. Popes have rarely done so even speaking from Vatican City.
But here in America, Catholics and non-Catholics, Christians and non-Christians alike holiday every year in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who one year before his assassination broke his silence at Riverside Church in New York crying out,
"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering.”
“Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on
hatred rather than love."
I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war.
Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
"For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."-“My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
“Silence is treason!” “Everyone can find his own way to protest, but everyone must protest!”
Rev. King condemned the Vietnam war of occupation and U.S. criminality in the use of its military and covert CIA for a murderous foreign policy in support of predatory international overseas investment and trade in a loud voice!
Yet forty years later, we live in a country whose media hails as heroes, all who were fooled into participating enthusiastically in that immoral and genocidal war Rev. King Jr. dared to speak out against.
Is their Pope's silence not embarrassing for those Catholics who are aware of the lies for which so many thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis have died and continue to die as they fall 'in harm's way' of invading and waring American military forces.
If Jesus Christ had come to New York himself, instead of his celebrated Vicar, would HIS words have been so discrete, uttered so quietly, or would Jesus have had the screams and wailing of Iraqi, Afghani and Somali mothers a half world away in His ears, and have thundered his condemnation as when he threw the money changers off the temple porch?
SUGGETION:
Ask that the Pope have the church join or lead the peace movement!