Mark Shea on Neoconservatism

That secular messianic impulse is why I keep banging on about the sinister rhetoric of Creative Destruction that is animating the latest Big Thinkers in their Wilsonian/Machiavellian attempts to create heaven on earth (in this case, via democratic capitalism). Ideologies that attempt a short cut around human nature via violence (whether jihadi or Creative Destroyer) are menaces. The common rhetoric these ideologies share with the Commies is, as the Marxist loves to say, no accident. There are few things more dangerous than a couple of Christian virtues cut off from the Tradition and used as the basis of a militant movement unashamed to use violence in pursuit of the Millennium.

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It June 12, 2007.

Mark Shea on War Zealots, Master Planners and Machiavellian Schemers

For me, it's 2006 and I'm highly suspicious of all moral calculations that appeal to a clock for legitimacy. I plod along, looking at just war teaching, and find myself increasing puzzled as to how to unscramble the various eggs our Best and Brightest have scrambled for us in recent years. On the whole, though I disagree with the Pope's remarks as they stand (since I believe in Just War teaching), I find myself thinking that I'd rather live in a world of people who err as the Pope does than in a world of War Zealots and Master Planners with big ideas for a New American Century based on "creative destruction" and other Machiavellian schemes. In short, I don't have much in the way of solutions, but I have a clearer and clearer idea of who I trust as I try to think things through.