Free Republic

Pope Benedict XVI's social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), is a complex and occasionally obscure document, replete with possible implications for the future development of Catholic social doctrine. Sorting those implications out will take much time and even more careful reflection. Along the information superhighway, however, careful reflection hit a few potholes in the early going, as sundry partisans sought to capture Caritas in Veritate as a weapon with which to bolster the Obama administration's economic, health care and social welfare policies. Thus in the days immediately following the encyclical's July 7 release, we were treated to the...

Chatter abounds around the web about a paragraph calling for a “world political authority” in Pope Benedict’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. John Zmirak writes that it is the only paragraph that he finds troubling. George Weigel concludes that this section and...other statements he finds unacceptable are the result of...the influence of the supposedly ideology-driven Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Weigel suggests that statements influenced by PCJP (as identified by “those with advanced degrees in Vaticanology”) are inconsistent with the rest of the “Benedictine” text. The implication is that we can ignore passages some might find troublesome, such as the...

Pope Benedict XVI signed his latest encyclical Monday, a text on ways to make globalization more attentive to meeting the needs of the poor amid the worldwide financial crisis. The document, entitled "Charity in Truth," is expected to be published soon.