The Catholic Challenge — Ian Buruma

Church adherents pose no inherent threat to liberal democracy. The problem in the US is that people in the highest positions of authority, Catholic and Protestant alike, are pushing at the barriers between church and state, erected so carefully by America’s founders to ensure that the people, not God, would govern.

Part of the tug of war (historical dialectic) between liberalism and traditionalism, with fascism and communism in the background.

Interestingly, Catholic social teaching, beginning with Rerum novarum (1891), is an attempt to navigate between liberalism and traditionalism in political theory and capitalism and socialism in economics.

Catholic social teaching is distinctive in its consistent critiques of modern social and political ideologies both of the left and of the right: liberalism, communism, anarchism, feminism,[5][6] atheism,[7] socialism,[8] fascism, capitalism,[8] and Nazism[9] have all been condemned, at least in their pure forms, by several popes since the late nineteenth century.

Catholic social doctrine has always tried to find an equilibrium between respect for human liberty, including the right to private property and subsidiarity, and concern for the whole society, including the weakest and poorest.[10] — Wikipedia, link above.

Project Syndicate

The Catholic Challenge
Ian Buruma