By Hilary White
LONDON,England, August 10, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A book published under the auspices of an official body of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, has angered Catholics in Britain for its attacks on Pope Benedict. “Catholic Social Justice: Theological and Practical Explorations,” been denounced as a “withering attack” on Pope Benedict XVI and his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. The book has been the subject of dozens of blog posts around Britain by mainstream Catholics, almost all denouncing it as an anti-Catholic Marxist diatribe.
The book is a volume of essays published by Caritas Social Action, the umbrella organization for Catholic social justice and aid organisations in England and Wales. The Caritas website says, “We are an agency of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and part of Caritas International.”
On his Daily Telegraph weblog, in a post titled, “Marxist Malice from Bishops’ Conference,” Damien Thompson, the editor-in-chief of the leading British Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Herald, blasted the bishops of England and Wales for their involvement in the book and their socialist political leanings, calling the book’s economic analysis “sub-Marxist drivel”.
The book, says the editor of the Herald, systematically attacks Pope Benedict and “consists mostly of sub-literate Marxism” in which it “sneers at anti-abortion campaigners and the traditional family”.
“We are told,” Thompson says, “that the Pope’s views on social justice are ‘hardly credible’ in view of the Church’s historic record of violence, torture and theft. We learn that the Catholic clergy teach that ‘men are superior to women’ because they are more in the image of Christ.”
Thompson quotes one of the essays: “We may find that a particular person who calls himself a pro-life campaigner is merely an anti-abortionist. Although many of those with whom he campaigns are inspired to very positive action, he is energized only by the more negative aspects of the struggle in which he is involved. While he is convincing himself that he is motivated only by love, all that others see when they meet him is an avenger.”
Another essay attacks those who try to uphold the traditional family: “Probing below the worst of the noisy rhetoric of the ‘recovery of family values’, one often finds a form of Christianity that is deeply connected to capitalism. Hence the association of ‘traditional’ families with financial as well as spiritual flourishing is made, and in one swift construction an entire capitalist economic system is also vindicated.”
American Randy Engel in his recently published book, The Rite of Sodomy, notes homosexual, leftist cliques are common within Catholic Social Justice agency offices, hence explaining their undermining or at least low interest in advancing Church teachings on the family and sexual morality.
“In other words,” Thompson says about the content of the book, “Catholics in the pew have helped pay for an attack on the Pope.”
Thompson points to the essay by Philomena Cullen, one of the book’s editors, on “the ideology of the nuclear family” in which she endorses “the open family ideology rooted in a feminist perspective”. Cullen is a social policy coordinator of the Bishops’ Conference Caritas agency.
Thompson singles out Bishop Christopher Budd of Plymouth for having written a “glowing” forward, saying that Budd “is undermining the Pope by putting his name to this book.”
He concludes, “How much evidence do Catholics need that the Bishops’ Conference has been hijacked by left-wing activists working under the patronage of bishops who are in many cases doctrinaire socialists?”
Read Damian Thompson’s Blog Posts: