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*Image: View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City by William James Bennett, c. 1827 [The Met, New York]

By Hadley Arkes, The Catholic Thing, Sept. 10, 2019

Hadley ArkesAnother report in the unfolding story of this pontificate:  The redoubtable Daniel Mahoney, who reads and sees everything, brought me the account of Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, who has been serving since 1998, and now under this pope, as the head Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.   Just last year he told a reporter that, “at this moment, those who best realize the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”  He focused his praise on the Communist regime for “defending the human person” – this in a regime that has taken compulsory abortion as one of its defining policies.

A former colleague of mine, from a wealthy family in Brazil, used to say that she was a Marxist and a Catholic. I thought that anyone who could say such a thing could not possibly understand either one.  And yet here we are in an age when young people in America have been credulous enough to be drawn to something called “socialism” – and drawn even with the examples still around us, in Cuba and Venezuela, of the impoverishing and lethal effects of these regimes.

Leo XIII and John Paul II put out ample warnings about the moral inversions that may settle in as people talk themselves into a concern for relieving the conditions of the poor. For they often detach themselves from the moral framework that puts in a central place the primacy of the “human person.” ….

 

Read more at  https://www.thecatholicthing.org