Pope Leo: Between Gospel Witness and Humanitarian Illusions

For a long time, progressive Christians have tended to equate the faith with humanitarian illusions—with utopian sentimentality rather than a morally demanding politics of prudence rooted in right reason and natural law. Divine caritas has been displaced by a selective, highly politicized compassion, and the Christian affirmation of moral equality has transformed into a doctrinaire egalitarianism, at once naive and aggressive. Inequality per se is now treated as a grave moral fault, as if the comprehensive leveling of the social order were either possible or desirable.