Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
CAFTA/Culture of Life: enemies?
CAFTA/Culture of Life: enemies?
May 15, 2025 12:23 AM

John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relevance. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship (PDF) claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of life.” They provide a list of vague quotes by a Colorado bishop and conclude (somehow–I cannot quite follow their reasoning) that free markets are “clearly” inconsistent with a culture of life.

To jump immediately to rhetoric like this–and what’s more, to do so without an actual reasoned argument behind it!–is not only irresponsible, but smacks of trite political lobbying. If this group is truly concerned with a better society, they will consider the freedom inherent in the people for which they claim to advocate and allow them fair access to greater markets. They ought to use some economic prudence here instead of resorting to sound-bite politics, throwing around “culture of life” as if it were the latest political buzzword.

Instead, they have slapped this powerful term onto their half-reasoned view of CAFTA, capitalizing on the term’s moral connotative power, using it to advance a half-truth. It is crucial that sound economic thought is employed by Christians before tossing out irresponsible rhetoric involving our most powerfully relevant terminology. Otherwise, we appear to be no different than other flapping mouths blasting the landscape with an irrelevant wind.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
3 Modern Economic Lessons from an Ancient Tax on Windows
King William III of England needed money, so in 1696 he decided to implement a new property tax. To make sure the tax was progressive (i.e., affected the rich more than the poor), the parliament devised a seemingly clever idea: they’d use the number of windows as an index for the value of a house. The assumption was that larger homes, presumably owned by the wealthy, would have more windows than the houses of the poor. All a tax assessor...
The Federal ‘Anti-Poverty’ Program that Taxes the Poor
Imagine you’re at the checkout line at the supermarket and the clerk asks how much e your family earns each year. Offended, you ask why that is any of her business. “We need to know to determine how much sales tax you need to pay,” the checker politely explains. “If you’re classified as the ‘working poor’ you need to pay more sales tax.” “I think you have that backwards,” you helpfully add. “You mean the working poor need to pay...
Italian nativity scene adds holiday sparkle to downtown Grand Rapids
Special window display at the Acton Building For the holiday season this year, the Acton Institute has a very special window display facing Veteran’s Park and Fulton Street in downtown Grand Rapids. The window display, “Wise men still seek Him” features a rare nativity set, Cathedral glass-inspired paint, and more. Acton’s president and co-founder, Rev. Robert Sirico, inspired the work, wanting to create a proper display for his personal precepio (extended nativity scene). It’s said that in 1223, St. Francis...
6 Quotes: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae)
Fifty years ago today, on December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae). This document produced by the Second Vatican Council clarified the Catholic Church’s views on religious liberty, changed the way the Church interacted with states, and helped foster ecumenical relations with other faith traditions. Since the release of Dignitatis humanae, the importance of defending religious freedom has e even more necessary. As Archbiship Charles J. Chaput has said, “In some ways, the...
Abraham Kuyper and the ‘Bearer of Principle’
“What might Abraham Kuyper teach us as Americans prepare to go to the polls next year?” asks David T. Koyzis in this week’s Acton Commentary. “I believe that he can help us to vote more intelligently by clarifying the true nature of representation in a democratic munity.” Kuyper treated representation in Ons Program [Our Program] published in 1879 in the platform of the newly established Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands. The delegate conception he titled the “imperative mandate,” in which...
Aslan’s Song of Stewardship
When wethinkabout “stewardship,” our minds tend to revert to the material and the predictable. We think about money or the allocation of resources. We think about growing crops or creating goods or financial investment andgenerosity. For the Christian, however, stewardship goes much further, weaving closely together the tangible andtranscendent in all areas of life.“Stewardship is far more than the handling of our money,” write Lester DeKoster and Gerard Berghoef. “Stewardship is the handling of life, and time, and destiny.” In...
More Fear Mongering on GMO Foods
In an email last week, GMOInside.org – a coalition opposed to genetically engineered and genetically modified organisms, which counts shareholder activist group As You Sow a member – blasted an email chock-a-block with material for two previous posts (here and here). And es a third PowerBlog post about the activists’ effort to roll back Senate support for the Safe and Affordable Food Labeling (SAFE) Act, dubbed the DARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know Act – get it?). Readers...
Rev. Sirico: Fox TV’s unserious ‘Lucifer’ nothing to get upset about
Fox TV is prepping for a Jan. 25 release of a new show titled “Lucifer,” where “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, the original fallen angel, Lucifer Morningstar has abandoned his throne and retired to L.A., where he owns Lux, an upscale nightclub.” Fox adds helpfully, “He’s no angel.” A report by Barbara Hollingsworth on notes that “a number of faith-based and conservative watchdog groups are panning Lucifer.” Among others, she interviewed Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and...
Does Microlending Solve Poverty?
If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. But what if a man knows how to fish but can’t afford a fishing pole? Or what if he knows how to sew but can’t afford a sewing machine? Can farm, but lacks a plow? The recognition that some people have skills to make themselves self-sufficient but lack capital to buy the tools they...
Facebook and the Institutional Forms of Social Good
Over at Think Christian, I take a look at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and derive a lesson from Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man in Mark 10. A basic lesson we can take from the decision to organize the initiative as an LLC rather than a traditional non-profit corporation is that pursuing social good is possible in a wide variety of institutional forms. A for-profit incorporation doesn’t preclude a main, or even primary, purpose aimed at social good. Just...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved