The Detroit News has published an opinion piece by Fr. Robert Sirico on our increasingly contentious public discourse, socialism, and the religious left titled ‘The dangers of creeping toward socialism’:

The popes have traditionally condemned socialism in the strongest possible terms as being patible with Christianity, because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.

This irreconcilability to Christianity is related to socialism’s deep-seated materialism. In reducing human persons and society to the product of economic forces, it fails to see them as empowered economic actors who bring their own ambitions, plans and talents to the service of others in the marketplace.

The market need not be a hostile alien force cruelly or capriciously divvying out success or failure, but it can engender a way of talking about the plans, purposes, hopesand desires of ordinary people. Any centralized economic plan necessarily does violence to the many plans which people are already engaged in because of its political dominance.

The entire piece is well worth your attention. For more from Fr. Robert on the religious left also check out my recent interview with him on the Acton Line podcast.