Millennials receive a lot of criticism from older generations for their SJW snow flakery and their professed love of socialism. A lot of this criticism is well deserved.
When those who believe in capitalism discuss the origin of the younger generation’s rejection of the free enterprise system and embrace of big government, it’s not uncommon to hear them blame the education system.
There’s a lot of truth in this, of course. Thinking of my own experience in public education from thirty and forty years ago, I never learned much about free-enterprise. Doubtless, things have gotten worse in that regard since I was in school. But to blame only the schools, by which many people mean our socialist public schools, for the problem is inadequate
Socialism isn’t some new phenomenon in the United States that suddenly sprang from the ground with the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It wasn’t as if when I, or my parents, or even my grandparents were growing up that America had a fully functioning capitalist economy.
Socialism has been around in the United States for at least 100 years. That’s probably news to many people.
Here’s something else that’s probably news to a lot of folks: The Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS) has been, during that whole period, at the very center of the socialist movement in America.
You don’t have to take my word for it either. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), actually brags about this on its website.
In a news release on 8/29/19 titled “USCCB Chairman Issues Labor Day Statement During The Centenary Year of the United States Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction,” the USCCB celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction, a tract written by Jesuit John Ryan and published by .
Ryan, who would later serve in the Roosevelt administration and help implement the New Deal in the 1930’s, had been a public intellectual since the publication of his 1906 book A Living Wage. According to John Robbins in his groundbreaking 1999 book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, Ryan himself described his political/economic system as “Essential Socialism” and “Semi-Socialism,” so there’s little reason to question that what Ryan advocated, and what the USCCB is celebrating, is, in fact, socialism.
The Bishops’ Program was issued by the Administrative Committee of the National Catholic War Council, which would later be renamed the USCCB, and sets forth the political and economic program the RCCS would pursue over the ensuring decades. In his piece, Ryan called for, “government unemployment, sickness, invalidity and old age insurance; a federal child labor law; legal enforcement of labor’s right to organize; public housing; graduated taxation on inheritances, incomes, and excess profits; regulation of public utility rates; worker participation in management, and so on” (Robbins, Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 84).
So just how successful was Ryan in getting his program of “Essential Socialism” implemented? According to Robbins, Catholic writer Aaron I. Abell wrote in 1963 that, “All the immediate measures set forth in the Bishops’ Program were adopted in whole or in part.” This was a mere 44 years after the Bishop’s Program was published, which is not much time at all when you consider the tremendous changes that were required to implement Ryan’s program.
Worth noting too is that Abell wrote what he did in 1963, shortly before the explosion in socialism that was to take place under President Lyndon Johnson in the mid to late 1960’s. If the USCCB was successful in implementing socialism in America in 1963, how much more is that the case today, seeing all the socialist legislation that’s been enacted in the years since.
By way of example, consider socialism in medicine. Nationalized healthcare in the form of the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed in 2010. In a 2013 interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan boasted the RCCS had been pushing for national health care since 1919. Fact checkers Politifact reviewed Dolan’s claim and, citing the 1919 Bishops’ Program that called for the state to provide insurance against illness, invalidity, unemployment and old age, declared Dolan’s statement to be true.
One of the takeaways from all this is that before we Gen Xer’s, Baby Boomers and Silents get too worked up at Millennials for their socialist leanings, it’s important for us to understand that the Protestant system of free enterprise in America has been under attack for a long time. Socialism in America didn’t begin with the elections of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We who are older would do well to examine our own ideas to see if we ourselves haven’t absorbed some of Rome’s socialism.
Further, it’s important to understand one of the main, perhaps the main, source of the attack on constitutional/capitalism in America for the past 100 years has been the USCCB pushing its unchristian, unconstitutional, incompetent program of socialism.
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