Leading writer voices doubts about encyclical

December 2009

The leading American Catholic writer, George Weigel, has told Polish Catholics the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, fails to present Benedict XVI’s real views and urged them to remain faithful to the procapitalist teachings of their countryman, the late John Paul II.

“There are fragments of Caritas in Veritate, easily recognisable to people who know the mentality and thinking of Joseph Ratzinger, which develop the line of John Paul II,”.

“The trouble is with those fragments which seem to reflect the convictions of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and which show distinct left-wing leanings like similar bodies in other Christian and ecumenical communities.” The article, Capitalism is the only Catholic system called the encyclical a ‘complicated and in places unclear document’ shaped by ‘incoherent sentimentalism’ which embodied ‘a kind of hybrid’ between the Pope’s true beliefs and ‘plots and demands by intellectuals and activists’.

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