Church teaching and its motivations
On the Pope Leo thread, @ChastMastr summed up his opinion on my economic explanation for the American RCC's pro-immigration stance with:
To which I replied...
So there it is.
I don't really see a need to drag in ulterior motives when basic Christian morality in a time of extreme cruelty toward the weak and downtrodden explains it well enough.
To which I replied...
Do you think that that could just as easily be reversed, and I could say to you "I don't see a need to bring in religious motivations when basic self-interest will do?
So there it is.
Comments
2. When it comes to making guesses about other people's unknown motivations, you can choose to err on the side of charity or not. The direction you choose has some effect on your mental health and how you relate to people in general. It's something I keep in mind, having seen the end-of-life personalities of a few people who chose poorly--or not.
Social justice, in many cases (again, not all), comes a long way behind.
This.
I think it is both affect and effect. The affect of your mental health regarding people will effect your mental health as well. It is a vicious circle.
Just to be clear, I don't really see it as a question of a charitable vs. an uncharitable guess about motivations. I think it's more a convergence of self-interest with ideology, and Pope Leo likely isn't sitting down and saying "I'm gonna tell everyone I'm doing this out of Christian compassion, even though it's just to bolster the socioeconomic standing of the church."
FWIW, it is pretty clear that the RCC(in common with most other religious institutions, to be sure) is somewhat selective about whose human rights it chooses to champion on behalf of "basic Christian morality". But, again, I would not put this down to conscious deception.
Could you give a concrete example of the problem you're trying to address?
And where Churches do have developed teachings on social justice you can bet the press will ignore them, especially if theres a randy vicar available instead to fill column inches. In fact I suspect that is the case for most churches.
I presume you are talking about sermons vs discussions?
I would hope that a sermon did try to relate the "timeless truths" to a congregation's "here and now". After all, it's not an academic paper. And, except in exceptional situations, one shouldn't use a prewritten homily out of a book or journal, which can't relate to the local situation. A sermon (or "message" in Baptist parlance) is "God's Word to God's people, here and now" - at least. one prays and hopes so!
Do you mean individual churches or denominations?
In practice I don't think the most widespread churches in the world as a whole are particularly concerned about that, because most of them are some form of Catholic or Orthodox in the Global South/Majority World and simply have more important things to be concerned with. Ime churches in the Global North/Minority World get so invested in sexual matters mostly because they ignore the issues that are more pressing in the Global South. That said, I would say that even in the Global North the RCC for eg is much more concerned about supporting immigrants than anything to do with sex.