BigBallinStalin wrote:Is it naive of me, or are you overlooking something?
Certainly, promoting ignorance leads to negative outcomes if the audience 'contaminates' the political process. Why do you ignore this, which contradicts your initial position? Then you dodge by restricting the scope of this debate to "American Catholics." Why?
What is the Catholic American economic perspective? I can't really tell if it's changing, but that's not that relevant. If they buy into the pope's propaganda, which politically results in poor outcomes, then obviously the pope's speeches have either led or reinforced his followers' beliefs into forcing their morality onto others. Religious beliefs become actualized within the political process. This has happened in the past as well, so I find it odd that you reject that this does not affect non-Catholics. Maybe you'd like to update your stance?
It's naive of you. In the context of social issues, you are correct that the Church's stance has resulted in relevant American political changes (e.g. pro-life issues). Even from that perspective, I anecdotally don't know many Catholics who vote for politicians purely based on social issues (plus, IIRC, our pro-choice president won 52%+ of the Catholic vote).
But economically, what do Catholics in the United States do? I'd say, again anecdotally, Catholics in the United States are as capitalism-istic as anyone else. There is no collectivity except on a non-government basis (i.e. we don't like paying taxes, we like giving money to the poor). So, yeah, I think it's naive of you to think that the pope's statements have any significant (or insignificant) effect on American Catholics, who are, in almost all cases, good American capitalists first, Catholics second. The pope is not espousing new ideas; these have been the same thing the Church has put forward for hundreds of years. I know thousands of Catholics, none of whom believe in collectivism, all of whom ignore the pope when it comes to these types of economic issues. The only pro-collectivism that exists with American Catholics is that they give money to charities and some of them are members of unions.
So I guess you're putting too much emphasis on the pope's words. I understand your concerns about ignorance generally, but, as I've stated before, people should spend their time on more important issues than issues that have little to no effect. So, I suppose you can waste your time lambasting papal collectivism, but, in my opinion, it's as wasteful as lambasting colleges and universities for hiring liberal professors because they may indoctrinate students.
