Free Republic

The first time Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, met Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan, the congressman was talking about St. Thomas Aquinas. Cardinal Dolan reminisced about the meeting and their subsequent friendship and correspondence during his Sirius Catholic Channel radio show Thursday.The meeting took place at Carthage College, a Lutheran school in Kenosha, Wisc., Dolan, then bishop of Milwaukee, was there to receive an honorary degree; Ryan, a fourth-term congressman, was the commencement speaker that year.“He gave — I timed it — nine minutes, which is excellent, on St. Thomas...

Michael Sean Winters, blogging for the National Catholic Reporter, has written a lengthy piece asserting that Paul Ryan’s “dissent” from “Catholic Social Teaching” makes him a not very good Catholic and a “dangerous” choice for vice president. Others are far more qualified than I to discuss Catholic social teaching and Ryan’s understanding of it (see, e.g., Michael Novak, “Jesuits Rebuke Ryan,” and George Weigel, “Ryan vs. Georgetown”). But Mr. Winters begins his piece with an account of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “dissent” from Catholic social teaching, and that account is wrong in nearly every particular. That, I am qualified to...