Fantastic talk!

Desmund Tutu's, No Future Without Forgiveness, is about the commission  charged with trying  to bring reconciliation and peace between blacks and whites in post-Apaartheid South Africa.

They rejected two possible avenues: Nuremburg-stlye trials (which would have failed, because so much evidence and so many of the witnesses were lost), and general amnesty (which would have been unjust, pushing resentments underground to erupt later).

They chose "a third way."  Amnesty for any crime that was publicly confessed and put on record.  No one could be prosecuted for a crime he voluntarily confessed.  Unconfessed crimes were still prosecutable.  

This created an enormous incentive for truth-telling.  One of the results is that many wives, children, friends and colleagues saw someone they loved and trusted step forward and confess to rapes and murders.  And they were completely shocked.  Until then, they would have vehemently denied that the person they knew could have done any such thing.

So, to answer your question, James: My mind is open. I don't trust the AP to get things like this right.  Whatever the truth, I hope it comes out.

But a son's assurance that he's innocent doesn't mean he is.

How is a comment protesting caricature and abuse license to abuse?

I am with smokedaddy in being perturbed by the way so many Republicans and libertarians feel free to have at it so personally and meanly  of the man.  It's ugly and it's counterproductive.

An exceptionally beautiful tribute.  Thank you for linking!  I wish I could have known her somehow.  

Yes. Gratitude, and humility.

Also reverence.  Reverence for God, reverence for tradition, for human life, and for the natural world.

Conservatives see life as a gift to be cherished.

Here's a passage from that book of Bergoglio's homilies I mentioned earlier:

As Paul VI and John Paul II tell us, man is the subject, beginning, and end of all political, economic, and social activity— each man, all of man, and all men. 

Therefore, we cannot truly respond to the challenge of eradicating poverty and exclusion if the poor remain objects targeted by the paternalistic and interventionist action of the state and other organizations, instead of subjects, where state and society generate the social conditions that promote and safeguard their rights and enable them to be builders of their own destiny.

So, a Catholic critique of monarchism would involve emphasizing individual rights, the sovereignty of conscience, the relation between personal dignity and self-governance, etc.  

It wouldn't condemn monarchism as absolutely inconsistent with CST, but it would want it constrained by provision for the rights of individuals.

A Catholic critique of lefty Catholics would likely focus on their lack of due regard for the principle of subsidiarity and the dangers inherent in big government and centralized power.  It would distinguish between community and a destructive communitarianism.  It would also likely be concerned with showing how government interference with the economy more often than not ends up hurting, not helping the poor.

A Catholic critique of capitalism will focus on the problem of conflating economic prosperity with human prosperity, of showing the dangers of de-stablizing natural communities, etc.

No, I don't think that's quite right.

Catholic  social teaching is grounded in a few basic values and principles:

- the dignity of the human person

- the priority of moral goods and values over utilitarian goods and values

- the dignity of work and the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor

- the principle of subsidiarity, etc.

Given these, the Church opposes totalitarianism.  It also opposes the absolutizing of free markets.

Within those broad moral lines is room for a lot of diversity and divergence on the level of practical policy.  There are lefty Catholics (like Dorothy Day), monarchist Catholics (can't think of one at the moment) and libertarian-leaning Catholics (like Fr. Sirico) whose views are deliberately based on CST.

It's meant to be very broad.  Secular policy is in the competence of the laity, not the clergy.  And it will vary dramatically according to various cultural, historical and other factors.  

I call that a caricature.

He may support more government than you do, but it's false to say that he doesn't believe in limited government.

I agree.  But I don't think that's what he was doing.  And if we're taking one aspect of his political career or thought and treating it as if it's the essence of who he is and what he stands for, then we're doing the same thing.

Interpreted rightly, I agree with him here.  He is pointing out (albeit clumsily) a reductive philosophy of life and governance that is alien to traditional conservatism, specifically in conflating liberty and license. 

It's one thing to say "I don't like him" or "he's not my cup of tea" and another thing altogether to say "he's not likable."  

If he were speaking of libertarianism generally, then I'd judge it a strawman.  But I agree with him that that there is a strain of libertarianism that absolutizes the individual and disregards the common good.  I also agree with him that that it is a dangerous and destructive strain.

This is a terrible thing to say.

Sounds to me like you've bought the media caricature.  

Touché.  Except that, if I remember correctly, he spoke of a strain of libertarianism (i.e. one that embodies a radical individualism and disregards the common good), in which case he wasn't caricaturing but describing.

I'm still frosted over the way Republican establishment types (aided by libertarians generally) caricatured and abused Rick Santorum.

He's not only great on conservative economic populism, he's the only politician out there willing to put up a fight for marriage, on which everything else depends.

For another example of a moral leader who critiques both the spiritual annihilation that is communism and the spiritual atrophy that afflicts the materially prosperous west, see Solzhenitsyn:

The Russian was even courageous enough not to hesitate to criticize the West—including our country. In a 1993 Address to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein entitled “We Have Ceased to See the Purpose,” Solzhenitsyn said that the defeat of communism in many ways left the West worse off. There was no longer any “unifying purpose” to mask the deepening moral vacuum characteristic of modern, progressively more technological life as such. “All we had forgotten,” Solzhenitsyn contends, “was the human soul.” The prevailing answer to “what a human being is” remains far from complete. What we have been given, he explains, is “an extremely intricate trial of our free will” brought on by our technological success.

To me he seems rather to be saying that in some places in the world we have terrible material poverty and deprivation, while in others there is material abundance and spiritual poverty.  And these two "conditions" are both rooted in a forgetting of God, a misrespect for the dignity of human life, and a loss of communion (i.e. solidarity) with one another.