The team the worked on the original puter claimed that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had a “reality-distortion field.” As Andy Hertzfeld explains, the “reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”

Some countries have this same ability that Jobs had. The Soviet Union, for example, used to be able to convince American leftists that Russia was ing a utopia rather than a land of authoritarianism and starvation. Similarly, China seems to have engaged it’s reality-distortion field for some members of the Vatican. As Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg says,

[Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo] is the Argentine-born and Vatican-based long-time Chancellor of what are called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Having recently visited China, the bishop described the munist state as “extraordinary.”

Why extraordinary, you might ask? Well, according to Bishop Sanchez, China has “no shanty-towns” and “young people don’t take drugs.” Moreover, he said, China takes climate change so much more seriously than most other nations. That’s hard to square with China’s relentless emphasis on economic growth. But, above all, the bishop exclaimed, “those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”

At this point, I started to wonder how the Argentine bishop reconciled some well-known facts about the munist regime—its policy offorced-abortionsin the name of population-control; its use ofmass labor camps; its ongoing problems with rampantcorruption; the growingcult of personalitysurrounding President Xi Jinping; its absence of democracy; its bellicose and militaristicstancein the South China Sea; thesurveillance and censoringof anyone deemed a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power by the Ministry of State Security; its appallingtreatmentof the Nobel Peace Prize activist, the late Liu Xiaobo; itsoppressionof the people of Tibet and other ethnic minorities; itsdemolitionof Evangelical and Catholic churches; and its relentlessharassmentof Catholic clergy and laypeople who won’t support regime-puppets like the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association—with Catholic social teaching.

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