Pope Francis’ Tweetstorm on Holiness

After releasing Gaudete et Exultate, Pope Francis used his twitter account to highlight some key points on holiness:

Good Intentions Are Not Enough for Good Citizenship

Millennial editor Robert Christian has a new article at the Messenger of Saint Anthony. He writes:

At civil rights museums, you will see pictures and clips of angry, hateful bigots that spew bile and threaten violence. But you will also see people that, in their tone and word choice, sound very measured and reasonable, as they explain why the evil of segregation is actually benevolent. They will insist that those most harmed by segregation actually benefit from it. They will announce their devotion to justice for all, but justify inaction by contending that order is more important at that time. They may announce that they believe it is God’s will.

Did they sincerely believe all of this? Some very likely did. Human beings can rationalize anything. People of bad will supply excuses for injustice to perpetuate their interests and desires. They tailor their arguments to the values of the ambient culture so that others will find such arguments compelling. In their ignorance, often their willful ignorance, others embrace and repeat the lies.

This is a reminder that having good intentions on social and political issues is not enough to be a good person or a good citizen. If one perpetuates evil by unthinkingly repeating reasonable-sounding, but ultimately foolish distortions and lies, one is complicit in such evil. Slavery was defended as a social good. And today, we hear similar ‘humanitarian’ and supposedly Christian rationales for banning refugees, disregarding climate change, ignoring mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing, perpetuating plutocracy, justifying widespread abortion, and completely ignoring racial injustice. These justifications are swirling all around us. Watching moderate, middle-of-the-road white Americans defend segregation as a positive good serves as an important reminder for all of us to examine our beliefs and arguments to ensure that neither prejudice nor laziness has led us to embrace that which is intellectually incoherent and incompatible with authentic Christianity.

The full article (subscribers only) is available here:

Pope Urges Economic Leaders to Support Integral Human Development

via Vatican News:

Pope Francis expressed hope that the upcoming World Bank Meeting may yield positive results that favor “an authentic integral development that is respectful of human dignity.”

Speaking on Wednesday at the conclusion of the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope mentioned Saturday’s World Bank Spring Meeting in Washington and encouraged participants to make “efforts for financial inclusion that aim to promote the life of the poor.”

Democrats Must Not Forget About the Importance of Economic Justice

On Christmas Eve, I was in a coffee shop in my hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. While there, I overheard a group of women discussing a newspaper article about transgender issues.

One woman said, “You know—I would care more about this and want to learn more if the only thing I didn’t focus on every day was making a living for me and family.”

She wasn’t a deplorable person. She struck me as a decent woman trying to move forward in life.

Democrats speak eloquently about social justice and civil rights. But as surely as safeguarding human dignity depends on both those things, it depends on people being able to simply secure their livelihoods—the ability to face the day without a series of unjust and impossible choices: the mortgage or medication, lunch money or groceries, visiting a loved one in the hospital or keeping your job.

We must never underestimate what it means to be able to provide for you and your family and how deeply it destroys you when you can’t.

In this illusory contest between social inclusion and economic opportunity, Democrats must reject the false choices that divide us against each other.

We choose both.

You can watch me discuss this and more in my latest Fox News appearance:

Pope Francis’ Prayer Intentions for April 2018: For a Just Economy

The economy cannot attempt only to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded. It must follow the path marked out by business leaders, politicians, thinkers, and leaders in society who place the human person in first place, and do everything possible to ensure that there are opportunities of dignified work.

Let us say “no” to an economy of exclusion, an economy that kills. And let us fight to achieve a “yes” to an economy that lets live because it shares, includes the poor, and uses profits to create communion. Let us raise our voices together, asking that economists may have the courage to reject an economy of exclusion and know how to open new paths.

Two-Thirds of US Millennials Can’t Identify What Auschwitz Is

Embed from Getty Images
via the Jerusalem Post:

Forty-one percent of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz was, according to a comprehensive national survey of Holocaust awareness and knowledge among US adults…

Two-thirds of Millennials interviewed, between the ages of 18 and 34, could not identify what Auschwitz is…

The study found that 11% of US adults and over one-fifth of Millennials (22%) hadn’t heard, or were not sure if they had heard, of the Holocaust.

While approximately six million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust, nearly one-third of all Americans (31%) and over four in every 10 Millennials (41%) believed that two million Jews or less were killed during the Holocaust.

Almost half of US adults (45%) and Millennials (49%) could not name one of the over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust.