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From several years ago.THE COVETOUSNESS OF SOCIALISMAmici, Americani, Compatriotae,Today’s Old Testament reading for Daily Mass is Numbers 11:4b-15. However, the reader should read the entire chapter eleven to see what is actually happening. After wandering around the desert, the children of Israel lamented, ““Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt, and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna.”Hearing this, Moses complained to God about the people, “Why do you treat your servant so badly? Why are you so displeased with me that you burden me with all this people?”God responds, “Assemble for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be elders and authorities among the people, and bring them to the tent of meeting. When they are in place beside you, I will come down and speak with you there. I will also take some of the spirit that is on you and will confer it on them, that they may share the burden of the people with you. You will then not have to bear it by yourself.”And God promises the people meat to eat, “Therefore the LORD will give you meat to eat, but for a whole month—until it comes out of your very nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected the LORD who is in your midst, and in his presence you have cried, ‘Why did we ever leave Egypt?’”With a great wind, the LORD drove in quail from the sea and left them all around the camp site; so all that day, all night, and all the next day the people set about to gather in the quail. But while the meat was still between their teeth, before it could be chewed, the LORD’s wrath flared up against the people, and the LORD struck them with a very great plague. Sacred Scripture says, “So that place was named Kibroth-hattaavah, because it was there that the greedy people were buried.”The Hebrew word קִבְרוֹת הַתַּאֲוָה which is Qibrowth hat-Ta'avah or Kibroth-hattaavah when transliterated into English literally means graves of lust. St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate of AD 400 (not the 1992 Nova Vulgata) gives this phrase as Sepulchra concupiscentiæ which means the Sepulcher of concupiscence (desire, coveting, lusting, greed). And that is the important point in this entire chapter: envy, greed, desire, lust always kills. The one political philosophy that legitimatizes such sin as noble is socialism, the gospel of envy, the doctrine of desire – “Would that we had xxxx for yyyy!” Instead of relying on God to provide as one works for one’s bread (2nd Thessalonians 3:6-12), socialism teaches people to complain against God and demand almighty government deliver. We see that from Numbers chapter 11 wherein the children of Israel, instead of being grateful for the manna that God gave them to eat, complained to Moses (the leader of their government) out of the greedy desire of their hearts for something they did not have nor needed. What was the end result of their greed (concupiscentia)? Death – “the LORD’s wrath flared up against the people, and the LORD struck them with a very great plague.” We see this today in Venezuela where the people voted for themselves a socialist government on the specious pretext of redistributing wealth from “evil capitalists” to the “proletariat,” and now are dying of starvation and persecution at the hands of the leaders whom they appointed over themselves. This is nothing but a repeat of what happened in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century when the communists murdered the Tsar and all his family, plunging the land into a dictatorship of starvation, persecution and murder for the next 70+ years. The Russian then later Venezuelan people coveted wealth that was not theirs to take just as the children of Israel had coveted meat that was not theirs to be eaten. Death and destruction resulted. Yet sadly you’ll likely not hear this from any pulpit, either Catholic or Protestant, because speaking against envy and covetousness (which is rejection of the Lord for an idol) strikes too close to home:“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” Exodus 20:17