Of course - as Angela noted in a private post - the sexism of the Church comes out even in the language of this, but my curiosity is how unidimensional a lot of analysis is of the Catholic Church, often just lumping it in with other pro-life groups, who are usually allied with the economic Right.
But it did strike me that the Catholic bishops were some of the most vociferous public opponents to Prop 209, Prop 187 and anti-welfare initiatives when I was out in California. This was in notable contrast to such "left" heroes as Jerry Brown who personally told me he thought associating himself with affirmative action was a loser and kept far away from the issue until the movement had organized.
How should the Left deal with such a global institution that actually shares some (if not all) of its beliefs on economic and many social issues (multiculturalism, death penalty, welfare) despite opposition to its patriarchal theology?
This is a subset of the broader issue of left-religious links, but the Catholic Church is a particularly interesing institution for that analysis.
--Nathan Newman
-------------------------------------------
Pop quiz. These words are by a famous living thinker. Can you name him?-- NN ===========================
"While in the past the "class question was especially highlighted as the center of this issue, in more recent times it is the "world" question that is emphasized. Thus, not only the sphere of class is taken into consideration but also the world sphere of inequality and injustice and, as a consequence, not only the class dimension but also the world dimension of the tasks involved in the path towards the achievement of justice in the modern world. A complete analysis of the situation of the world today shows in an even deeper and fuller way the meaning of the previous analysis of social injustices; and it is the meaning that must be given today to efforts to build justice on earth, not concealing thereby unjust structures but demanding that they be examined and transformed on a more universal scale." ------------------------------------------------------ "Understood in this case not as a capacity or aptitude for work, but rather as a whole set of instruments which man uses in his work, technology is undoubtedly man's ally. It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. It leads to an increase in the quantity of things produced by work, and in many cases improves their quality. However, it is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man's ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work "supplants" him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave." ------------------------------------------------------------------ "property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of "capital" in opposition to "labor"-- and even to practice exploitation of labor--is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession--whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership--is that they should serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them."