You’ve obviously never read anything by the Pope - our current one, that is. JPII was unfortunately very socialist in his outlook, but BXVI is not.
He simply demands moral accountability from any INDIVIDUAL, regardless of the economic system of the country they live in. That’s not socialism.
All right I take that back.
The Catholic Church/BXVI have a job cut out for themselves. They were either silent or complicit in much of the change in our social fabric for 40 years. I wish them all the success in the world.
Adam Smith observed that capitalism needed to have a moral and ethical core to be sucessful. He was no socialist either.
Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI affirm that the right to own property is a basic human right. You couldn’t find a stronger opponent of Socialism than JPII—he lived under it. JPII’s Centesimus Annus recognizes that free markets are necessary to proper human sense of self-worth and work.
Benedict XVI if anything has even greater respect for the free market system.
However, neither of them endorses unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. Catholicism recognizes, as did our Founding Fathers, that the common good has a claim on individual property. So neither of these popes would approve of extreme Libertarianism. But neither approves of socialism.
If you knew anything whatsoever about Catholic teaching, you would know that Leo XIII in the late 1800s declared that both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism were wrong. Private property is a fundamental right but the common good has a claim on us all.
Catholics and Pope Pius XII were stalwart anti-communists, so much so that the Communists tried to take him down by claiming he collaborated with Hitler, just like the Communists tried to kill Johh Paul II.
Left and right debates are really about just how the common good’s claim on us all gets implemented. Benedict XVI may differ with you on the extent of that claim of the common good, but that does not make him or John Paul II a socialist.
No one articulated a more full-orbed rigorous defense of freedom than did John Paul II—freedom in all areas, beginning with religious freedom but including property-ownership freedom and therefore free markets.