Readers should ponder these bullet points, however.
- Virtue lies with individual responsibility first, then corporate or communal responsibility.
- Laws exist because people do not take personal responsibility.
- Catholics have bought the entire Pelagian and Protestant teaching on wealth, salvation, and poverty, and good works.
- A lack of clear moral teaching has weakened the Church from within and the encyclical does not address the need for a clear moral apologetic. Why this has disappeared, imho, has to do with the demiss of Classical Education.
- America and the rest of the West has completely lost the ability to judge economic growth and the need for redistribution because of a lack of understanding of previous Catholic teaching. The Pope assumes people know this teaching, but they do not.
- Consequentialism (read at least the Wiki definition if you do not know what this is) is not the basis for Catholic moral teaching.
- Natural law is being denied, even by Catholics
- The Pope assumes people have been reading St. John Paul II and Benedict on social teaching, and moves in the similar mindset of their view on globalism, despite JPII's correct hatred of communism and the long Church's teaching, (rightly so), against socialism--there are other alternatives.
- Americans are not being objective about their own sell-out to gross consumerism and narcissism, and are refusing to be open to a needed corrective. But, the corrective needs to be more focused on personal conversion, responsibility and the need for a Catholic world view, instead of a Protestant or secular one.
- I do not like the reference to global legal take-over of personal responsibility, but the Pope is writing to a horribly irresponsible world--there are other ways, like repentance and conversion.
- To be honest, I believe the West is too far down the road in decay of morality that only God, Who will intervene, can bring about the needed correctives, after punishment. There are precedents in both the Old and New Testament.
more later, am on the run...