Pope John was the Pope of Social Justice

I think the stupidity of this comment is clear from the series we’ve had on Social Justice and the free market. At least, I hope it is. John XXIII wrote stuff about social justice. Good for him. Let’s ignore the fact that he was standing on the shoulders of Pius XI, Leo XIII, and a tradition going all the way back to the Fathers, though. The real issue here is that there are a bunch of jerks that have portraying the pre-conciliar Church as dead, corrupt, broken, whatever as their driving mission in life. Wills is a good example of this phenomenon. It doesn’t have anything to do with John XXIII. It has to do with trying to make his predecessors look bad. The message is that nobody cared about the poor or working classes until VII, when Pope John was the light that showed us the way. Pay no attention to the rest of that 2000 years.