Coherence

Image by British Petroleum via Channel4The young, Distributist conservatives at Front Porch Republic can be respectful and wholesome even while being cynically critical of both corporate and government concentrations of power.  In the words of Gregory Wolfe at Commonweal:

...It is highly unlikely that the FPR will be adopted by Republican Party operatives and become a viable political force any time soon — so you might be tempted to write them off as descendents (sic) of Don Quixote — but these guys are, well, smart, and maybe even a little prophetic.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that Catholics of whatever political stripe would find dialogue with the FPR crowd invigorating. I mean, if subsidiarity means anything, then Catholics ought to be wary of the path we’re heading down — wedding the Leviathan state to multinational capitalism. We should all care about the preservation of three endangered species: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

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The Catholic Church: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I'm proud to be a Catholic.  While Protestants were busy reading the Bible, addressing each other as "Goody", building barns, and milking cows, my religious ancestors were hunting down witches and heretics and setting them on fire, writing books about damning people to Hell and following through by actually damning them to hell, devising complex codes and secret societies to keep losers at bay, invading an entire region of the globe in search for a magic cup, building labyrinths, burning surviving classical texts, improving torture techniques, trying to keep a dead language alive, and otherwise founding Western civilization.  But to really appreciate how cool Catholicism is when compared to Protestantism, one need only compare Gregorian Chant to Creed.

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