“The [capitalist] system is vicious, both ethnically and ontologically…Capitalism degrades men to mere economic factors, to be bargained for at the lowest possible market prices… Brain and brawn workers are still treated as individuals, but not as persons, and therein lies the moral vice of capitalism. They are individual items of cost and not persons with souls, aspirations, self-determination, etc.. Human rights can be saved only by stressing the good Christian concept of person, which per se includes “individual,” as “individual” does not per se include person. At a turning-point in history like our own, when both the Christian and the unchristian revolts are against the pagan past of the Enlightenment, why cling to slogan phrases that arose out of the culmination of this very paganism?”
— Fr. Virgil Michel, 1937, quoted in Michael Sean Winters, Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics can Save the Democrats, 2008.
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