Many other opinion makers  — including an editorialist of The Globe and Mail — appear to have a better, less intemperate and defensive grasp of the economic content of Caritas in Veritate. They understand at least that Benedict stands firmly within the organic tradition of Catholic social doctrine that stretches back not to Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum progressio (1967) but to Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891) and that he adds considerably to this tradition by providing an appropriate and critical — not faddish nor dated — analysis of the current moral challenges emanating from our contemporary economic reality.

James Carville, the attorney, political commentator, policy analyst and master strategist behind the Bill Clinton presidential campaign, observed on a hastily assembled CNN panel two rather reasonable and salient points. Carville noted that few had yet had the opportunity to carefully read and digest the text proper rather than respond to the flurry around its publication (he confessed that he had yet to read it himself prior to the CNN airing). He also said those conservative Catholics — Carville is a self-identified progressive Louisiana Catholic — who condemn the likes of him as “cafeteria Catholics” do precisely the same thing themselves when they accept papal teaching on ecclesiological matters but have no difficulty rejecting papal teaching on social matters.  Touche!

Caritas in Veritate is a demanding assignment but worth the effort. It is also the product of this most theological of popes and should be considered in the context of his previous encyclicals, scholarly writings and long history as a theologian engaged with the premier epistemological and metaphysical challenges of our day.

Tracey Rowland’s impressive study of the Pope’s thought — Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI — rightly states that “whereas John Paul II was concerned that a culture of death was being fostered through a range of practices which treat the human body as a commodity, and offered his theology of the body as a positive corrective for this, Ratzinger can be seen to be contributing to the critique of the culture of death with his positive work on the theology of culture.”

Central to this “theology of culture” is Benedict’s preoccupation with the rise of relativism, the appeal of syncretism, the dismissal by many intellectuals and opinion shapers of history, metaphysics and theology as at best marginal to contemporary thought, the anarchic qualities inherent in deconstructionist critical theory, the collapse of faith and the constricting and confining of reason to but a few categories, principally technological, and finally the need to reposition the church to the centre of humanity’s struggle to understand the role of the Transcendent in the making of a fully human world. Benedict believes in truth, the knowability  of truth and the incarnation of truth. He sees the true aligned to the good and both deeply connected to love: “Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like the present.”

Although Benedict addresses many particular areas of concern — climate change, energy depletion, international aid and development policies, the global ecological crisis and the high importance of the papal social theory of subsidiarity (dating back to Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo anno in 1931) — he never allows his readers to forget that in the end “that which is prior to us and constitutes us — subsistent Love and Truth — shows us what goodness is and in what our true happiness consists. It shows us the road to true development.”

Time for Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Reynolds to re-read — or read for the first time — the text.