Sometimes it is tough to be a both/and guy in an either/or world.
Progressives love to drive wedges and their media cohorts love to hit upon them with a sledge hammer. Language is their chosen soft spot. This has never been more apparent than since the election of Pope Francis just over a week ago.
For two or more generations progressives, both inside and outside of the Church, have hijacked the Church’s Social justice teachings to promote things ancillary or even opposed to the Church’s teaching. Pope John Paul II said Catholic social teaching “rests on the threefold cornerstones of human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity.” Yet, progressives have successfully removed many of these the cornerstones to the effect that the tower leans decidedly to the left.
The steady drumbeat of the progressives and their enablers in the media has successfully convinced many social justice, particularly Catholic social justice, requires that we support any and all government solutions and even forms of government condemned by the Church. They have been so successful at it that even the words ‘social justice’ make conservative and traditional Catholics cringe. Of course, conservative and traditional Catholic are all for human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity just as much as we are for dogma and doctrine, but we don’t like to talk about it, lest we get lumped in with the progressive wing-nuts. And there is the rub…
