Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez calls for the newly nationalized health care sector to grant “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion … for all people, regardless of income.” This is a politician’s way of calling for publicly funded, unlimited abortion-on-demand – as, for instance, is practiced by Canada’s collectivized health care system. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has written that politician advocating this position is in an “objective situation of sin” for which an unrepentant Catholic should be “denied the Eucharist.”
Ocasio-Cortez also supports the ever-diversifying “LGBTQIA+” movement by endorsing the “Equality Act,” which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Doing so, as Heritage Foundation scholar Ryan T. Anderson explains, would “endanger religious liberty and freedom of speech” (as well as “expand state interference in labor markets, potentially discouraging job creation”).
That is to say, judging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political positions, one may conclude the dogma does not live loudly in her.
However, one of her defining characteristics alone could have made this clear: her advocacy of “democratic socialism.”
“Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms,” wrote Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno. “[N]o one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
The misunderstanding of how economics works is deeper than a dispute over dull textbook definitions – demand curves, price indices, and other terms that make people’s eyes glaze over. At its heart, the debate between Christians and socialists represents two diverging futures for the human race – only one of which facilitates its health and flourishing.
Just how far apart are the socialist and Christian views of the matter? The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America – to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs and which actively campaigned on her behalf – took to Twitter to make a few immodest proposals on Saturday. Among them were demands to “abolish profit,” “abolish prisons,” and “abolish borders.”
? Abolish profit
? Abolish prisons
? Abolish cash bail
? Abolish borders#AbolishICE pic.twitter.com/TCFIZqzJrU
— New York City DSA ? (@nycDSA) June 29, 2018
The call to abolish profits flows naturally from the socialist view of economics. “Capitalism,” according to the DSA, “aims to generate profit, and this requires the exploitation of labor, the destruction of the planet, and the immiseration of the vast majority of people.” In the Democratic Socialist’s view, all profits are exploitative, because all value is added by labor.
On the other hand, The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes, in its section on the Seventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”):
2432 Those responsible for business enterprises … have an obligation to consider the good of persons and not only the increase of profits. Profits are necessary, however. They make possible the investments that ensure the future of a business and they guarantee employment. (Emphasis added.)
“Unemployment,” the Catechism continues, “almost always wounds its victim's dignity” and “entails many risks for his family.”
The Christian view holds that profits fuel private business growth, produce more of the goods necessary for our survival, and assure that a business may continue to furnish workers with life-sustaining pay and opportunities to exercise their God-given talents.
A faith-based publication ought not gloss over such substantial rifts between the socialist’s and the Catholic Christian’s worldview in its rush to publish the political celebrity of the moment.
(Photo credit: Jesse Korman. This photo has been cropped and modified. CC BY-SA 4.0.)