To the editor:
Fr. Robert Sirico has a special knack for applying the tenets of our Catholic faith to the socio-political world in which we live. His article “‘Social Justice’ is a complex concept” in the April 14 issue of the Catholic Herald clearly explains how the free market enables the most efficient workplace rewards for all who choose to labor.
Our Christian faith doesn’t demand that everyone, regardless of effort, receive equal compensation. Our government should certainly provide for equal opportunities for all.
However, the Marxist method of redistributing wealth has proven to fail wherever it exists. Appropriately, it is our faith — not the government — which demands that we share our resources with those in need. This is disturbing news to the radical left that feels all money belongs to the government except what they allow us to keep.
As Father Sirico so poignantly explains, the leftists’ preoccupation with other people’s money — who should get how much — is materialism at its worst. The greed of the tax-and-redistribute factions does not achieve social justice. It mostly punishes the successful, and very often, rewards the undeserving. That philosophy has led to more bureaucracy — more people handling and directing other people’s possessions.
Father Sirico quotes the warning of Blessed John Paul II in his social encyclical Centesimus Annus. It is worth repeating. A state which seeks to grab the treasures of others’ toil “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase in public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concerns for their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”
I join Father Sirico in calling that “prophetic.”
Bob Penzkover, Rock Springs