%1

Papal disconnect: Benedict's social encyclical

I’ve studied papal encyclicals for over 30 years, and Caritas in veritate (“Charity in Truth”) is the first one I was eager to be finished with. Clearly Pope Benedict XVI wants his message about “integral human development” in the context of global economics to be understood in continuity with Paul VI’s Populorum progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”) of 1967, a document considered the high-water mark of Catholic social radicalism.