📹 VIDEO | During the General Audience today, #PopeFrancis said the wounds inflicted by the #coronavirus crisis will only be healed if we put the common good first. Read the full story here:https://t.co/KmTWveg6Ps #Catholic #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/B2vjL67XqV
— Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) September 9, 2020
press release
Pope Francis’s Call to the Apostolate of Politics https://t.co/lAoqZSaImd
— Rafael de Arízaga (@RafaeldeArizaga) September 10, 2020
My comments:
Lots of Latins making much out of yesterday's Wednesday audience text because the political principle of the common good is used by Pope Francis. When the number of misunderstandings concerning the common good cannot even be resolved by the thick Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (i.e. the patriarchate of Rome), a short presentation by Pope Francis in relation to COVID-19 will be insufficient and may even be dangerous in so far as it is open to misinterpretation and distortion. While the exposition of the common good by Pope Francis (or his ghostwriter) is generally correct with respect to its primary use, it is erroneous in so far as it applies "common good" to different scales of political ordering in an univocal rather than equivocal manner. Such a naive understanding of the "common good" leads to statism even if it is out of "good motives," because the intention and that which is ordered to the end intended are both disordered. As you may be able to tell, to actually unpack those claims would require more than the amount of time allotted for a Wednesday audience. But scale is an issue of which those specializing in Roman Catholic social teaching (i.e. moral theology with respect to political life) are generally ignorant. The tentative nature of RC social teaching should be admitted, but the more this pope makes use of it, the less possible this will become, given the Latin tendency to over-inflate the authority of the bishop of Rome. I suspect the next encyclical will highlight the problems of Latin ecclesiology once again, despite scholastic musings about what makes for ex cathedra teaching (e.g. having the proper formula) and conditions for infallibility.
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