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Entry: Libertarians in Heaven Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/blessed_libertarian#13470 Post contents: Scratch an American “conservative”, and you’ll find a libertarian. Paul Gottfried as much as says so in his new book, when discussing the Old Right. The case can be made that Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater were really libertarians. Well, I’m all for Tory Conservatives doing some bridge-building to the libertarians (and bridge-<i>burning</i> with Fascists, racialists, extreme nationalists on one hand and Hamiltonian-Whig-Neocons on the other). So I welcome this article, but with several reservations. I join several other writebackers in taking great exception to this statement: <i>In this connection we may well read such alleged rightists as Bonald and de Maistre as afterbirths of the Enlightenment, inspirers of the Modernists, and precursors of our own neocons.</i> Bonald and De Maistre would have hated Modernists and Neocons, just as they fiercely hated the Enlightenment (almost to the point of the fideist heresy, condemned [as Purcel mentions] at Vatican I); and Bonald and de Maistre hated also the Whigs, – the Whigs, following Fox, seeing Jacobins as “Whigs in a hurry”. This is the only glaring error in this otherwise good essay. By the way <i>faithless fideism</i> is a nice oxymoron. If Purcell, with the words "alleged rightists", means that Berlin's calling De Maistre a "Fascist" is bull, then Mr. Purcell is quite correct. My other reservation: Catholic Social Teaching stems not from Bl. Pius IX but from his successor, Leo XIII. This Leonine tradition of Social Teaching, it seems to me, differs from libertarianism, and no lesser mortal than Dr. Thomas Woods has written an interesting book to say so. To what extent the Leonine tradition can be brought to rhyme with a libertarian one is hard to say. Thus I would have welcomed a longer discussion from Mr. Purcell on Rosmini’s social teachings. Harry Wisniewski is raising a good question. As for Rosmini’s supposed “liberalism”, I have myself in these pages condemned any attempt to force the faith as Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian. There is no need to review that argument now except to say that the Synods of Carthage and Orange were not staffed with “liberals” or “Modernists”. Boyd Cathey raises other concerns about Rosmini’s work, and I thank him for his link. The condemnation of Rosmini’s work ought to be taken seriously. I would also welcome a link to Ratzinger’s statement from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith which exonerated Rosmini. I would like to see the reasoning. With Boyd Cathey I disagree again, as I have in the past: <i>Quanta cura</i> isn’t an infallible teaching of the Magisterium, inasmuch as the formula for infallibility wasn’t invoked. We don’t need to repeat that exchange. Yet Boyd Cathey is to be credited in not making the mistake of certain “Cafeteria Catholics”: that if a Magisterial statement be not infallible, it could be ignored. ALL teaching of the Magisterium, be it infallible or not infallible, binds all Catholics. That said, there’s not much in <i>Quanta cura</i> that I object to. It nonetheless must be read along with other, and later, statements of the Magisterium. As it is, Good Pope Benedict will be issuing his own encyclical on Social Teaching within weeks. I pray then Mr. Purcell and others will comment on it on this site. I assure Boyd Cathey, keeping in mind another organization to which he belongs, that with respect to his interpretations of Schubert, infallible indeed is Wilhelm Furtwängler! Sent at: 2008 09 07