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Guest
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
" Yet in the hands of some Catholics, Catholic social thought has been reduced to another argument for what Blessed John Paul II criticized, in the 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus, as the Social Assistance State—what Americans more familiarly call the Nanny State.
In this view, virtually every problem on the 2012 agenda—from the solvency of Social Security and Medicare to federal budgetary discipline and debt reduction—can only be addressed by an increase in the government’s involvement in the economy, the society, the culture, and the lives of individuals.
Such thinking betrays a sorry lack of imagination (not to mention a sorry lack of historical understanding, of the “been there, done that” school).
It is also a crude caricature, and thus a betrayal, of Catholic social thought and the social doctrine of the popes from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI. "
Here is Weigel’s statement in entirety.
eppc.org/publications/pubID.4439/pub_detail.asp
" Yet in the hands of some Catholics, Catholic social thought has been reduced to another argument for what Blessed John Paul II criticized, in the 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus, as the Social Assistance State—what Americans more familiarly call the Nanny State.
In this view, virtually every problem on the 2012 agenda—from the solvency of Social Security and Medicare to federal budgetary discipline and debt reduction—can only be addressed by an increase in the government’s involvement in the economy, the society, the culture, and the lives of individuals.
Such thinking betrays a sorry lack of imagination (not to mention a sorry lack of historical understanding, of the “been there, done that” school).
It is also a crude caricature, and thus a betrayal, of Catholic social thought and the social doctrine of the popes from Leo XIII through Benedict XVI. "
Here is Weigel’s statement in entirety.
eppc.org/publications/pubID.4439/pub_detail.asp