Monday, October 18, 2010

The Tea Party and Catholic Teaching

Fr. Robert Sirico was featured in an Our Sunday Visitor article from 10/17 that discusses Catholic teaching and the Tea Party movement.


Here are a few excerpts.
A study commissioned earlier this year by the National Review Institute found that 28 percent of tea party supporters identified themselves as Catholic.

[The Tea Party’s]  common focus is on limited government and reduced taxation, creating a political ideology that combines elements of libertarianism and populism.
The tea party movement has [also] grown out of a shared frustration over the nation’s current economic situation.

According to Father Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the radical extremists in the tea party represent only a small percentage on the fringes of the movement. At its heart, Father Sirico said, the tea party and its view of government are very close to the Church’s social teaching on the principle of subsidiarity, which favors doing things on a simplified level rather than leaving them to a more complex, centralized organization.


“The thing Catholics could teach the tea party is that not every social obligation needs to be viewed with suspicion,” he said. “We recognize that human nature is social as well as individual, and we balance these things out. To say I have an obligation to the poor is [to say] society has an obligation to the poor.”

Read the whole article here.

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