Thoughts in Solitude - Thomas Merton

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” † † †
THOMAS MERTON
-Thoughts in Solitude
© Abbey of Gethsemani
"Your way of acting should be different from the world's way"...Rule of St. Benedict.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Sacred texts: Vatican embraces iTunes prayer book

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is endorsing new technology that brings the book of daily prayers used by priests straight onto iPhones.

The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes application created by a technologically savvy Italian priest, the Rev. Paolo Padrini, and an Italian Web designer.

The application includes the Breviary prayer book — in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Latin and, in the near future, Portuguese and German. Another section includes the prayers of the daily Mass, and a third contains various other prayers.

After a free trial period in which the iBreviary was downloaded approximately 10,000 times in Italy, an official version was released earlier this month, Padrini said.

The application costs euro0.79 ($1.10), while upgrades will be free. Padrini's proceeds are going to charity.

Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, praised the new application Monday, saying the Church "is learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelizing, as a way of being able to share its own message with the world."

Pope Benedict XVI, a classical music lover who was reportedly given an iPod in 2006, has sought to reach out to young people through new media. During last summer's World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, he sent out mobile phone text messages citing scripture to thousands of registered pilgrims — signed with the tagline "BXVI."

Monday, December 1, 2008

The Bailout economy: A house Built on Sand

by Rev. Robert A. Sirico

In a very familiar parable, Jesus tells the story of two home builders. One built a house on sand, the other on rock. The house on the rock withstood the weather. The one built on sand did not fare so well: "The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall thereof" (Matthew 7:24-29).

If the parable were retold today, it might include an episode in which treasury officials and members of Congress cobbled together a bailout program for the owner and lender of the house on the sand. No matter how much money they spent, however, the ending would be the same.

Six weeks ago, when the $700 billion bailout of failing financial firms was being considered, the country was swept up in the debate. The bill, which created the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), passed with thin public support. Washington claimed that the bill was necessary to keep the world from an economic Armageddon. Many people suspected that it amounted to little more than welfare for Wall Street.

Who was right? Consider the dramatic change made to the way the program works, as announced last week by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. He said that the government would no longer purchase toxic assets from failing institutions. It would now start giving the money directly to lenders. In other words, the entire rationale of the bailout changed overnight.

Why the change? The problem with the original idea is that it violated every common-sense rule of business. The government would pay far more than the market would bear and then, no doubt, we would watch as the market price slid to the bottom. Every time a supporter claimed that this was a good deal for taxpayers, you could almost sense the rise in deep skepticism. If you believed them, I've got a house built on sand to sell you.

Recent weeks have illustrated just how difficult it is to turn bad assets into good ones, and reverse the direction of downward price pressure. Short of suspending all market trading, it can't be done. The case of the insurance giant AIG demonstrates the point. In September, the government gave AIG $85 billion. The money vanished and AIG reported more losses. Now it is expanded to $150 billion. That should last a few weeks anyway.

It seems that Paulson and others have learned a valuable lesson here. The house can't be saved. Instead they are turning to save the lenders, a course of action which seems a bit more viable but no less a path of folly. Washington is now looking carefully at which banks to save and which to let go. This amounts to a process of picking winners and losers. It gives a competitive advantage to those institutions that were marginally worse at assessing risk.

Think about what it means for policy priorities. The lender who made possible the house on the rock does not need a bailout. That which lent money to the builder who built on sand is getting assistance from taxpayers. How does this constitute a just solution?

The pressure to continue buying bad assets, however, is not going away. Today we see demands for direct infusions of cash to auto makers, airlines, ever more insurance companies and mortgage dealers. Next we will see demands for bailouts of even such national essentials as coffee retailers. Where does it all end?

What are we being saved from here? The free market system is one of discovery, one of trial and error and one of trial and success. It is a continuous process of learning. To seek to protect those who make errors from the consequences of their choices is to distort and destroy the system itself. It is as futile as trying to save the house built on sand.

It is as though we woke up one morning to discover that failure has been outlawed, and that even if some banks do not want the money, money will be forced upon them anyway, to save them from themselves - indeed, to save them from capitalism.

We have heard many pronouncements on the vice of greed, but we need to remember that the consumerist mentality is not merely the desire to live better, but is rather the confused idea that only in having more can we be more. Some have invented a new rule of life that might be put thus: "consumo ego sum." ("I know that I exist because I consume goods").

How common it has become to live outside one's means, whether it's the huge flat screen TV we think we can't do without or the newest automobile or the house larger than our income can afford. Then there are the imprudent risks assumed in piling up debt on mortgages with a hubris which assumed that values could only continue to rise at 10 percent or better per year.

Thrift, that "handmaid of enterprise," was mothered by scarcity, a scarcity that unregulated pricing in a free market has, better than all economic systems in human history, served best to mitigate. What an obscenity, then, that the principle of thrift should be invoked by those who oppose this system of natural rationing and allocation, preferring instead top down systems of distribution that would bring poverty and ruin to any economy that took them seriously for any length of time.

Wall Street has been skewered and denounced in almost every attempt to examine the moral dimension of this crisis. Yet, Wall Street is too often denounced for all the wrong reasons -- as a surrogate for the free economy, for seeking and making a profit, as though the alternative was somehow a preferable moral result.

No, if we are going to offer a moral critique of Wall Street, this should not be done because free markets allocate and produce capital, without which people's homes and savings evaporate. Rather, it should be done because all these previously private businesses are now waddling up to the governmental trough begging to be nationalized and asking for their share of the dole.

It was the institution of government that unleashed those vices of greed and avarice encouraging people to build on sand. It did so by first placing a policy priority on the good idea of home ownership but pursued it with a fanaticism that neglected other goods such as prudence and rational risk assessment.

Moreover, official banking centers enjoyed subsidies that distorted that most sensitive of price signals--the very price of money--to delude both investors and consumers into believing that capital existed to support vast and extravagant consumerism when in fact such capital and savings did not exist. More sand! These tendencies to encourage consumerism and greed occurred in a market deluded by interventionism, not a market that was permitted to work within its own indigenous mechanism of risk, reward, and justice.

As we have seen so often in the past century's experiment with socialism, the real story is in the Parable. It is a story of economic and moral folly. May we finally learn its lesson.