Papal confidantes rue 'prosperity gospel', distorted 'American dream'…
Wealth and success as synonymous with true religious conviction, and consequently, sees “poverty, sickness and unhappiness” as a lack of faith
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2018/07/18/papal-confidantes-rue-prosperity-gospel-distorted-american-dream/
NEW YORK - In a follow-up to their much-discussed July 2017 article condemning an alliance between conservative U.S. Catholics and Evangelicals as an “ecumenism of hate,” papal confidantes Jesuit Father Antonio Spurdo and Presbyterian pastor Marcelo Figueroa have published a new essay in which they criticize the “prosperity gospel” and its influence on the idea of the “American Dream.” In their latest essay in the influential Rome-based Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, the authors argue that the prosperity gospel, which traces its origins to the Unites States in the late 19th-century, views wealth and success as synonymous with true religious conviction, and consequently, sees “poverty, sickness and unhappiness” as a lack of faith.
In their essay, however, the two specifically identify its origins in the United States, where the American Dream - the idea that the country is a place of “open opportunity” where migrants can pursue the prospect of success in ways “unreachable in their old world” - has been translated into religious belief, defined by affluence. While Spurdo and Figueroa offered a shorter critique of the prosperity gospel in last July’s essay, blasting “prosperous televangelists” who “mix marketing, strategic direction and preaching, concentrating more on personal success than on salvation or eternal life,” their latest piece provides a more explicit indictment of the “theological justification for economic neo-liberalism.”