The cast of characters escapes me at the moment, but I’m sure the combox commentariat will fill in the details. The ideas of a certain Jesuit were condemned by a Pope. The Jesuits continued studying the book claiming that the ideas condemned by the Pontiff weren’t the ones in the book. The Pontiff rejoinded by noting that he was able to read and not an idiot. The story reminds me of much of the reaction to the latest encyclical.
Underlying most objections to any Vatican claim or any claim for that matter is the objection of competence. We saw this claim about the Iraq War frequently. In one case the claim was that the Vatican didn’t know one way or the other whether Iraq had chemical weapons. I never found the Vatican’s case to be resting upon the veracity of such a claim, but that is a valid objection. More often the objection was that the Vatican did not understand how to address the problem of rogue states with weapons that could be utilized by terrorists on populations half way around the world. This objection could be reasonable, but often it was carried with an arrogance unbecoming of respectful debate. In many cases the Vatican has better information (for example when Israel attacked Lebanon, the Vatican had priests and bishops on the ground whereas U.S. citizens were dependent on AP reports) than her critics. It’s odd that many people hold the Vatican up on a pedestal when discussing such things treatments within the womb, in vitro fertilization, or stem cell research in mind numbing detail, but believe the foreign policy and social justice offices are seat of the pants opinion brokers. (Such isn’t to say that officials within those offices can’t offer opinions of the seat of their pants.)
On the question of economics, one of the big problems in American Catholic debate is that we take it as a given that laissez faire economics is a sound way to build an equitable and stable economy. That opinion is not hold in South America or Asia. It was rejected in Europe around the time of World War II. Every time I hear a libertarian bemoan the Vatican not being familiar with Austrian economics, the desired retort is that they are indeed familiar with it and reject it, or, to put it better, they don’t believe it is the best prism for understanding economic relations. Friedman (not an Austrian, but a classicalist none-the-less) may have had a profound effect in the American academy, but there is a lot more debate outside America.
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