A Response to George Weigel

George Weigel recently claimed that Centesimus Annus was still relevant for rejecting any notion of a “third way”; that it definitively enshrines capitalism. Richard Aleman responds:

‘George Weigel, who openly dissents from Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate  is still making his case for free market economics based on his misrepresentation of John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus.

Weigel’s insistence that Pope John Paul II’s encyclical embraces, “[the] free market of the liberal democracies” is nowhere to be found in the text. The “free market,” a self-regulating system determining prices, wages, interest rates, and so forth, with little or no interference by government, is the same economy described as shooting from “a polluted spring” by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and “radical capitalistic ideology” by Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus:

“… there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.” ‘

Read the rest, from The Distributist Review:

http://distributistreview.com/mag/2011/09/the-continuity-of-centesimus-annus/