A Marxist in the Vatican?

In Exploring Religious Ethics today, we discussed the first sections of Evangelium Vitae, the 1995 Papal Encyclical defining the "gospel of life" threatened by modern secular society's "culture of death." (Text available here.) Predictably, this was the first Catholic theology most of the students had read: "How does he get off saying what's a just punishment," asked one student, who was justly punished by a long explanation from me of the authority thought by Catholics to inhere in the Holy See - not an authority we need to recognize (though she's Catholic), but which it's important to understand, especially in connection to its sacramental role. (I'm still praying over what balance of justice and mercy is called for by this comment : "However eloquent and passionate he may be, I cannot get past his biblical shenanigans.")

It was also their first exposure to Catholic social teachings. To several, the critique of the alleged amoral "individualism" of modern society sounded like critiques they had encountered before - by Marxists. John Paul II must have been turning in his grave! But it was a revealing observation. The public voice of Catholic social teaching has been eclipsed by the single-minded attention to abortion by a religious right uncommitted to the rest of the gospel of life (for them, as some wag said for the first President Bush, "human life is sacred until the moment of birth"), and then undermined by the moral failure of the hierarchy's collusion with the sexual abuse of children.

I hope it was refreshing and edifying for them to encounter words like these, quoted approvingly from Vatican II:

"Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practise them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonour to the Creator."

(Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 27)