The Pope and “Occupy Wall Street”

George Weigel

After the last papal election, one wit, referring to gape-mouthed progressives who had convinced themselves that This Just Couldn’t Happen, observed that the senior cardinal deacon, announcing the election to Rome and the world, should have said that the new pope was Joseph Ratzinger, “qui sibi nomen imposuit [who has taken the name] Your Worst Nightmare.” That those who thought the worst had come (some of whom had spent the weeks between John Paul’s death and Benedict’s election doing everything possible to prevent a Ratzinger victory) should now position themselves as the defenders of Benedict’s teaching authority strains irony into the gravest implausibility. That these same defenders, presenting themselves as close students of Catholic social doctrine, should propose something as ridiculous as the notion that this deeply learned pope (who in his address to public life has consistently proposed the urgency of linking civil law to the moral law that we can know by reason) is sympathetic to the madcap anarchists of Occupy Wall Street tells us something about the desperation in progressive Catholic circles these days.

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4583/pub_detail.asp