Catholics & Socialism

There is a large and vibrant Catholic left. We have written about them quite a bit on this blog.

My earlier post this evening taking Barbara McGuigan and EWTN to task might be misunderstood as an attack on Catholics and the Church generally or might be deliberately distorted as such an attack. As Gus Hall used to say, our argument is with the capitalists and not with God. We're not going to get distracted by engaging in a fight with the religious right.

The folks at the Orate Fratres blog are conservative or reactionary Oregon Catholics. They recently posted an article by Stephanie Block on why socialism is supposedly a dirty word. It's a plain-spoken and simplistic piece without much content to it, but the author and the people running the blog clearly attached some significance to it. I responded by offering up some of the first postings on our blog which dealt with Christianity and socialism from a left-Catholic perspective as an alternate point of view. Those pieces were certainly dogmatic and written in the language of liberation theology at that moment. They only withstand the test of time for the hopelessly pedantic or the most sectarian among us who do liberation theology.

Orate Fratres ran my comments. You can read the article and see my response here. Readers who have an interest in this area may want to join in.