Michael D. Greaney > Quotes

“From that perspective, the Great Reset is a stroke of genius if the goal is to preserve the Keynesian system. It comes across as a brilliant scheme to blend State power and private wealth in a unified effort to impose a condition of dependency (servility) on most of the people in the world.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“That is, the social order is so great a good that even if it is imperfect and not in conformity with nature, ordinarily we must not disobey even an unjust law if it does not force us personally to do wrong. On the other hand, when bad laws, customs, or traditions distort the common good, every person is under a strict obligation in social justice to organize with others to restructure the social order by peaceful (and effective) means. The goal is to make the exercise of individual rights—and thus the development of virtue—once again possible and the social order just overall.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Pius XI realized Aquinas’s notion of legal justice in the Summa Theologica was radically different from the usual understanding. For eight hundred years, people had assumed Aquinas was simply repeating Aristotle, and legal justice was a general virtue that did not look directly to anything.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Every human being therefore has equal natural rights to life, liberty, and private property. This necessarily implies that every human being also has the related—and equally natural—rights to: participate in the institutions of society, receive rewards or punishments according to his inputs, and organize and correct institutions when they are flawed or not functioning properly or within acceptable parameters.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“common good: that vast network of institutions within which individuals realize their particular good. As Pius XI explained in Quadragesimo Anno and Divini Redemptoris, the purpose of social justice is not to substitute for the individual virtues—that is, to make direct provision for individual good. Instead, the purpose of social justice is to make the practice of individual virtue and the realization of individual good possible.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Here was Aquinas talking out of both sides of his mouth and saying that legal justice both is and is not a particular justice! Investigating further, however, Pius XI would have seen the statement, “Legal justice directs man to the common good directly, but to the good of the individual indirectly.”51 Another contradiction!”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Personalism enables us to evaluate a philosophy to see how well, or if, it conforms to the particular, even unique needs of every human being as a human person and special creation of God. Wojtyła’s personalism brings together the concrete, objective reality of each human person and the abstract, theoretical-moral plane of metaphysics (that is, the natural law) to reconcile the actual to the ideal and bring them together to mutual advantage.64 Combining Pius XI’s social doctrine with”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“the Great Reset is based on bad assumptions and false principles. It cannot work.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Within the framework of the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, social justice as developed by Pope Pius XI has a precise meaning. It is the particular virtue directed to the common good. Its purpose is the reform of the institutions of the common good to enable people to practice the individual virtues more effectively. Not unexpectedly, that requires explanation. This is especially so since most people today do not have the background or training to understand the terms with the necessary precision or in the sense they were originally meant.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Nevertheless, people must both participate in economic life and work to become more fully human. We must be both producers and consumers. We cannot just be passive recipients of what others produce. Being a person means more than just existing. It means exercising rights, including economic rights, to become virtuous and thus more fully human.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“To restructure the social order, then, the answer is not a more intensive application of individual virtue but the judicious and appropriate application of social virtue.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Violating the rights of a single human being, even to obtain immense benefits for the whole of humanity, is an attack on the entire common good. Ultimately, the common good can only exist if natural rights such as private property are held “sacred and inviolable.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“democratic in either the European or American sense. It was the logical fulfilment of what Belloc had seen developing half a century before and chronicled in The Servile State: a superficial blending of capitalism and socialism in which an elite presumably takes care of the great mass of people.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Shocking, or at least upsetting to many people, the Reign of Christ the King is not the theocracy so dear to the hearts of many. Neither is it merely a religious conversion so that Jesus reigns individually in the heart of every person. Instead—and this was Leo XIII’s goal—the Reign of Christ the King involves restructuring the entire social order to establish and maintain an institutional environment providing the opportunity and means by which every person can become more fully human—that is, to grow in virtue. As Pius XI explained, the goal of his social doctrine was “the restoration of [the social order] according to the principles of sound philosophy and to its perfection according to the sublime precepts of the law of the Gospel, Our Predecessor, Leo XIII, devoted all his thought and care.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“world.” As Monsignor Taparelli noted more than a century before the near-total application of the New Things throughout the world, mistakes by scientists in the physical sciences can have no effect on how nature operates. Mistakes in philosophy, politics, and theology such as those embodied in the Great Reset, however, have far-reaching consequences in human society.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“In section 53 of Divini Redemptoris, Pius XI noted that individuals are frequently helpless when confronted with socially unjust situations. That being so, it would seem a bit much to insist that every one of us is personally responsible for the whole of the common good. That, however, is the “Fourth Law of Social Justice.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Under the Great Reset, however, people would presumably get what they need without having a natural right to it, and thereby be deprived of the opportunity and means to develop more fully as a human person.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Abolishing private property, however, is at the heart of the Great Reset. This is done by expanding the definition of “corporate stakeholder” to include non-owners and non-producers.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“That is why human persons have the capacity for both individual virtue and social virtue. We must always keep firmly in mind, however, that individual virtue and social virtue are two very different things and must not be confused. Getting them mixed up is one of those seemingly small errors in the beginning that leads to great errors in the end,43 and is one of the most serious problems with the Great Reset and similar proposals.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“That is the real issue. How do we make the world work (really work) for each person so that every child, woman, and man can fulfil his fullest human potential and grow in virtue?”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“This was why the popes have used reason, especially the philosophy of Aquinas, as the first line of defense against ultrasupernaturalism and socialism. It was why people like Newman, Benson, Chesterton, and Sheen kept insisting that faith and reason—common sense—must never contradict one another.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“Catholic social doctrine is natural and is for the restructuring of the social order. It is for every human being, regardless of faith or philosophy. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI stated many times explicitly and by implication that natural law-based Catholic social teaching is for everyone.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law

“society that is individually and socially just—that is oriented to the good of each human person and is therefore structured virtuously—is one that respects the dignity of everyone and does so by adhering or conforming to certain principles. These are the principles of participation, distribution, and feedback, or correction.”
― Michael D. Greaney, The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law