By the way

A follow up point from my earlier post:

What we are doing is assuming a simple causal relationship between doing good and a better world. It's as if we believe that if Christians generally, or Catholic Christians specifically, behave the way we are supposed to then all the evil in the world will dissolve.

In clinical psychology there is a name for that kind of thinking: narcissism.

Go back and reread the Joe Carter quote I started with and you'll see the point:

The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work.

It's really all about him. It's a fantasy projection of personal feelings onto the whole world. What looks like morality is really a kind of megalomania. Think about it: we look out the window and see poverty and suddenly that is a sign of something about us? That is megalomania pure and simple.

It's an impulse we are all prone to but we really do need to control it. Dressing up a political morality and calling it Christian morality doesn't help.