[livius]

Gads! What diocese do you live in?

Our local bishop is a good guy in a lot of ways (very pro-life, pro-family), but he's a nitwit when it comes to his view of social life. He too spent many years in LatAm. He seems to regard the US as the true villain on the world stage. Barf.

[CatoRenasci]

The Church has long been hostile to capitalism, apparently regarding it as somehow bound up with the Protestant heresy. Hence, in Europe at least, you have all sorts of Christian socialist parties (e.g. Bavaria, the most Catholic part of Germany). The socialism is also a large part of the traditional Catholic identification with the Democrats in the US.

Back in the mid-70s, I read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and some other exemplars of liberation theology. There were (and are?) plenty of bishops and even cardinals who bought this tripe.