Just to help you along, though: The Church's positions on abortion and euthanasia are DOGMATIC. The Church's positions on government welfare, the death penalty, and the war in Iraq are prudential (at best) and NOT DOGMATIC. If that bothers or confuses you, well, it was none of your business in the first place.
As to the welfare state, read Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII (1893) for doctrine. As to the death penalty, the Papal States were perfectly capable of keeping prisoners out of circulation but executed miscreants in any event. At the coronation banquet of Sixtus V, two teen-aged highwaymen who were merely robbers, were hanged from the rafters of the banquet hall and Sixtus V observed that there would be no tolerance of armed criminals in the Papal States as demonstrated by the executions. As to the War in Iraq, the decision to make war is a judgment left by the Church to secular leaders who must, necessarily, know more than Church leaders as to why the decision is made. Wars must be conducted according to recognized objective rules and morally. Renato Cardinal Martino is not the pope and likely never will be. The pope is the monarch of a sovereign nation and, more importantly by far, the leader of the Catholic Church militant on earth but even his authority has limits well-recognized in the Church itself, which is the only recognition that counts.
The pope is not subservient to the State Department or to Adam Smith or to critics of Catholicism. If that bothers you or confuses you, again, it is none of your business since you are not Catholic.
I am a Catholic with a general but not slavish preference for many capitalist ideas and I am very enthusiastically favorable to this war and I favor the death penalty in most instances where it is applied and I am still a faithful Catholic in communion with the Holy See. Other Catholics take other positions on these non-doctrinal matters. Some of us like steak and some are vegans (not me!). If that confuses you, we do not have an obligation to satisfy whatever standards you may wish to apply to our Church which is not your own. We also pride ourselves on avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy in the pews or democracy in the pews. Whatever your church may be (if any), we will generally refrain from advising it as to how to conduct its affairs.