My news item from yesterday on the incredible gap that has widened under President Obama between the rich and the poor received the following criticism. I am impelled to give it a very brief reply. If I upset the defenders of the mega-rich exploiters of the hard-working poor, then so be it. I am a Catholic. I am also Irish and I know the history of what the usurers did to swallow up 95% of the land of the Catholic Irish.
Objector: Of what importance is it how wide is the gap between between the rich and the average person as long as the average person can get by? Are we all socialists?
My reply: I would advise you to read the social encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, both avid anti-socialists. Jesus is the one who said; “Woe to you rich” in Luke’s account of the beatitudes. The mega-rich are robbers, making money out of “nothing” (capitalist thieves) and no Catholic can in justice defend them. No, we must not be envious, that would be a sin, so we leave them to God and we are grateful for what we have, grateful to get by. But it would be cowardice not to condemn the exploitation by the mega-rich robbers of the very poor. Money is behind the arms race and all modern wars. Otherwise, from whom do these war-mongers get their funding to kill? Nevertheless, war is a punishment for sin, the sins of the poor and the rich. Let us not be silent in the face of the lust for $$$ AND THE POWER of the devil that comes with avarice and greed.
