But we're no defenders of 'unrestrained capitalism' either

PETER HEBBLETHWAITE'S
principle, that one ought not review a book with which one is out of sympathy, might well be enlarged: one ought not review a book which one clearly has not read. For charity requires me to conclude that Mr Hebblethwaite's nasty attack on Building the Free Society: Democracy, Capitalism and Catholic Social Teaching (Catholic Herald, 4 February) stems from his ignorance of the book's contents. The alternative is too unpleasant to contemplate, at least during Lent, when I am trying to put the best construction on everything.
Hebblethwaite charges me and sundry of my colleagues with the defence of "unrestrained capitalism". I could adduce dozens of passages from Building the Free Society in which the authors criticise various aspects of free economies, and commend the restraint of the market through laws, trade unions and a vibrant public moral culture: but your readers can see all that for themselves by having a look at the book. For
the record, though, would it be possible at some future date for Mr Hebblethwaite to vouchsafe us some illustration of this "unrestrained capitalism" he so constantly deplores? Where does it exist? Perhaps in some backwaters of the Third World. But in the United States? In Great Britain? In the European Community? Please. a As for the position of Centesimus Annus in modern Catholic social doctrine, I should have thought that someone so committed to the notion of the development of doctrine as Mr Hebblethwaite would have been less reluctant to see, in the 1991 encyclical, both the summing up of the great themes of the past and the outlines of a bold vision of the future: both of free societies and of the Church's social magisterium.
But perhaps Centesimus Annu.s was too critical of what the Holy Father terms "an impossible compromise between Marxism and Christianity" for Mr Hebblethwaite's taste.
Finally, and at the risk of violating the disciplines of a
penitential season, may I say that for Peter Hebblethwaite, one of the chief perpetrators of the distorted media caricature of Pope John Paul 11 as a Polish authoritarian, to suggest that I agree with the Holy Father only when he agrees with me, is rare chutzpah.
George Weigel President Ethics and Public Policy Centre Washington DC WHAT IS A Vaticanologist? According to your issue of 18 March, Peter Hebblethwaite is one, and in the subheading to his article on page 7, he "...profiles one of the most hated men in the Vatican, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger".
Now, largely due to a deprived upbringing, I am no Vaticanologist, but am a committed, practising Catholic Herald-ologist. I was thinking of writing an article for my local newspaper profiling Peter Hebblethwaite as "one of the most hated columnists in the Catholic " Larry Egar Co Cork