How nice, he thought, until he realized that planning officials were going to put the project on top of his company's existing building.

He was one of many people I had interviewed for my 2004 book about the abuse of eminent domain—the government's right to take property upon payment of "just" compensation.

The US Constitution allows such takings for roads, courthouses and other public use, but the courts have expanded that definition to allow the government to take private property if it deemed the new use more beneficial than the old one.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo decision gave governments the imprimatur to do so, although Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent still resonates: "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.

As for the victims, the government now has a license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more."

I thought of that case, as well as many sad interviews with victimized property owners in various eminent domain and other property rights disputes, after reading Pope Francis' latest encyclical called Fratelli Tutti, or "Brothers All."

This pope has repeatedly diminished the importance of private property and free markets, but he usually leaves enough wiggle room so his supporters could describe what he meant in "proper context."

We need no such context this time.

"The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right," Pope Francis explained.

"Yet it often happens that secondary rights displace primary and overriding rights, in practice making them irrelevant."

He added that, "the right to private property is always accompanied by the primary and prior principle of the subordination of all private property to the universal destination of the Earth's goods."

There's plenty to debunk in this 43,000-word missive—from its description of the market system as one based on exploitation, to its call to for stronger international institutions.

But I'll focus on the pope's distorted view of property and his failure to grasp how this supposed secondary right undergirds those primary values of life, family, and brotherhood.

As this nation's founders recognized, property is the foundation of those bigger things.

The city's taking of my friend's business devastated him—not because of some dollars-and-cents accounting.

In many (but not all) of these cases, the government eventually reimburses owners for the assessed value of their properties.

A business, however, is not merely the collected value of its bricks and mortar. It reflects the hard work and creative energies and vision of its owners.

From his lavish Vatican surroundings, the pope describes property ownership as something secondary and even tawdry, yet even in doing so he reinforces the primacy of property.

"To care for the world in which we live means to care for ourselves," Francis wrote.

"Yet we need to think of ourselves more and more as a single-family dwelling in a common home."

Note the reference to a person's home.

One need not own a house to have a home, but ownership is the linchpin of our other freedoms—and the best assurance that we can provide for our families and help others. Continue reading

The move by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, an office of the Vatican's central bureaucracy, may represent the first such outside audit of the Vatican's coffers.

The office oversees the Vatican's property, providing cash flow to its bureaucracy, and manages the city-state's overall financial portfolio.

Continue reading

After more than 20 years of discussions, the country's Chamber of Deputies has passed a bill returning the former property to 17 churches, of which the Catholic Church is the largest.

Under the bill, which is yet to be debated by the Senate, the state will gradually cease financing the churches over a period of 17 years.

The churches are to get back land and real estate worth $NZ4.5 billion and be given $NZ3.5 billion in financial compensation for unreturned property.

The largest amount of compensation, $NZ2.8 billion, will go to the Catholic Church.

Applications for property return must be filed by original owners. Because of population shifts, parishes that are now small may gain large properties and parishes that have grown large may gain nothing.

A spokeswoman for the Czech Catholic Bishops' Conference, Veronika Vyvodova, said the Church is yet to discuss how to handle the restored property.

"We are at the very beginning. It is clear that negotiations inside dioceses must be held in order to prevent discrepancies and to secure a certain level of solidarity," she said.

The Church may let or sell the property it receives, or use it for business purposes, the newspaper Lidove Noviny reported.

This has been done by some religious orders that have had property returned in the past. For example, a former monastery in Brno, returned to the Bohemian-Moravian branch of the Roman Union of the Order of St Ursula, hosts a shopping centre and earns money for the Order.

On the other hand, the north Bohemian Trmice parish's effort to run a logging business ended in its bankruptcy and a loss of property.

Source:

Prague Monitor

Image: Prague Post

The approval of the document followed two days in which speaker after speaker articulated the participants' frustration at growing clericalism in the church and what they viewed as sustained efforts by church authorities to slow down or reverse many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

They took issue with a wide range of teachings, policies and practices in the church — from

• the bans on artificial birth control
• women priests
• married priests
• the church's treatment of women.

Speakers criticized the way bishops have handled clerical sex abuse; the church's treatment of gays; lack of consultation with the laity; mismanagement of church funds and property; closings of parishes and sales of the closed churches to pay off diocesan debts; and politicization of the Eucharist by some bishops who threaten to withhold Communion from insufficiently pro-life politicians.

They objected to Vatican rules requiring literal translation of Latin liturgical texts and forbidding or sharply limiting the use of inclusive language in the liturgy.

Read more of what the 2,000 who met to call for reform had to say