"Catholic social teaching" is best addressed by the European right wing (organicism, integralism, distributism, social credit, national syndicalism, corporatism, and ultimately fascism/falangism). Because the American right wing is relentlessly capitalist and (classical) liberal, the American Church had no one else to turn to but the Democrats.
Whatever "Catholic social teaching" meant in the 19th century, when it was associated with traditional monarchies, and whatever it meant in the early 20th century transitional period, when all political, social, and economic structures in Europe were shaky and everyone in Europe was going to extremes, since WWII it's generally been associated with the Christian Democratic parties, parties which tried to synthesize political democracy and what remained of traditional morality with the new institutions of the welfare state. Whatever that synthesis would be in American terms, in Europe faced with Communism and militant socialism it was a conservative project.
In postwar Germany and Italy, Christian Democratic parties have generally been the conservative parties. Not entirely, of course, there are a few small "liberal" parties that used to combine free market philosophy with middle class values, but in Germany, as in Britain, the liberal party (the Free Democrats in Germany) have tended to become more "liberal" in the American sense. Italy's Christian Democrats have pretty much collapsed since the end of the Cold War, and the remnants have joined the opposing left or right coalitions.
As for America, c'mon, really. You know about Prohibition. You know about immigration restriction. You probably know about Al Smith. You may know something of the public school wars of the 19th century. You know that the evangelicals of the day -- the Methodists and other denominations that have since become "mainstream" -- were the backbone of the Whigs and then the Republicans, and that they didn't much like the Irish or the Catholics or alcohol or festive German Sundays or even dancing. You know all that, but you take this down a totally different -- and much less justified -- road.
Now I agree that there's something in a pure free market ideology that doesn't fit in with Catholic social teaching. You might reflect on how well it fits in with the teaching of other religions. I don't know how things are now, but in the 60s, Catholics were less inclined to be ideological free marketeers, but also less inclined to be ideological socialists. It cut both ways. Maybe it was because American Catholics still felt a bit foreign here or maybe it was because they didn't have the idea that a single text or single idea could dictate what should be done in practice. But in any case the reasons why Catholics leaned to the Democrats for so long are quite different from what you want to believe now.
I gather you were a Catholic for a while and moved on. These aren't things you might have heard in church, but "cradle Catholics" -- whatever their current religious or political beliefs -- are aware of them.
I expected to make someone mad, but I don't quite know what I said that offended you. It was not my intention to say "Catholics are a bunch of fascist pigs" but merely to point out that there are European right wing traditions different from the American ones and that if they had been given that choice American Catholics might have never got roped into following the Democrat party wherever it went. As a matter of fact, there are national syndicalist and even falangist parties in the United States, but they represent a tradition that (unlike racism and Marxism) is totally alien to this country. I didn't say they were good or bad but just alien to capitalist vs. socialist America.
As for prohibition, that (as you well know) began as a left wing reform movement allied with women's rights, pacifism, prison reform, abolition, Fourierism, and other such causes. While it eventually moved to the right, to this day there are conservatives (and FReepers) who consider Prohibition a thoroughly left wing project. The same goes for the public school system, which began in effect teaching Evangelical Protestantism as the true religion (while claiming to be non-sectarian) but which now has become so anti-religious that Protestants have turned against it.
I gather you were a Catholic for a while and moved on. These aren't things you might have heard in church, but "cradle Catholics" -- whatever their current religious or political beliefs -- are aware of them.
My six year sojourn in the Catholic Church is well known here on FR. I sadly found out that the "universal church" isn't quite so universal, having little use for people from rural American Protestant Republican teetotaling backgrounds. Perhaps they should warn all prospective converts that only urban Democrats who still think they're persecuted Irish need apply.
I also spent four years in the John Birch Society which, after initially supporting Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists historically, eventually went full-blown Confederate (and probably Compact Theory) and now declares the Republican party an evil organization founded by Communists to destroy chrstian civilization by freeing all those Commie Negroes (who, if they really were Commies, should never have been imported into the South when reactionary rednecks would have picked cotton just as well) and elected the man the late Alan Stang called "the first Communist president" (the e--vil Abraham Lincoln). Of course never mind that this same John Birch Society constantly cheers for highly centralized regimes elsewhere (Franco Spain, Chiang China, Salazar Portugal, Papadopoulos Greece, etc.). Now the Republican party has been exposed as our nation's engine of destruction as opposed to the pure, sweet, sinless, spotless, immaculate Democrat party and its immaculately conceived hero Thomas Jefferson (who sympathized with Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati while those "awful" Federalists were horrified).
In other words, I'm down to my last nerve with this Federalist/Whig/Republican bashing by my "betters," so please spare me the story of how Boss Tweed was actually a combination of Roland and El Cid. Okay?
Sorry. I'm not really mad at you, just tired.