Left-wing Pope acording to J. Babiuch and J. Luxmoore

During a meeting of the Archbishop of Lublin with representatives of the John Paul II Institute of KUL, on the 17th March 2006, various ways of reacting to opinions misrepresenting the teaching of John Paull II were discussed. As an example of suchopinions Archbishop Życiński presented articles by Dr Jolanata Babiuch and Jonathan Luxmoore that had recently been published in the British journal The Tablet (28 January 2006). The authors suggest that Fr Wojtyła demonstrated sympathy for Marxism in his lectures on Catholic social teaching at KUL, and developed a decided criticism of capitalism. In the opinion of the two authors, it is for this reasonthat the "Catholic Social Ethics" lectures have not been printed, being supposedly an expression of the left-wing sympathis of the youngKarol Wojtyłą. George Weigel, author of the monumental work Witness to Hope, dissented from this opinion. He showed, also in The Tablet, that the material from the first year of the lectures was in large part dependent on the teching presented in the lectures of the Rev. Jan Piwowarczyk, and it was for this reason that they were not printed. There is no reason, however, to consider the views of Piwowarczyk as characteristic of the Left; for this same reason the arguments of Babiuch and Luxmoore are without foundation. The Lublin participants of the meeting, among whom were Rev. Dr. Andrzej Szostek, Rev. Prof. Tadeusz Styczeń and Rev. Dr. Alfred Wierzbicki, expressed their support for the views of Weigel and stated that:

1)The social sensitivity of Rev. Dr. Karol Wojtyła may not be identified with the position of the Left, since the sensitivity shown byCardinal Wojtyła we find earlier in the encyclicals of Leo XIII.

2)The vision of the alienation of the person shared by Cardinal Wojtyła has nothing in common with the marxist conception of alienation,* since at its foundation lies the conviction that without reference to Christ human existence remains alienated and distanced from the models of humanism exhibited in the Christian tradition.

3)Suggestions that the supposed left-wing sympathies of Rev Dr. Wojtyła were the reason for his early lectures on social ethics not having been printed are completely groundless. To demonstrate the lack of foundation for such insinuations, it was decided that the 1954 lecutre course on Catholic social ethics should be prepared for publishing in the immediate future.

4)To counter false interpretations of the views of John Paul II from various periods of his life it was decided to introduce a "Debates" section on the internet portal http://www.jan-pawel-2.pl/, in which views as important and groundless as the views of Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch will betaken into consideration.

*watch this blog for a quote on this by Benedict XVI in his about-to-be-published book, extracts from which I read yesterday but left in the penthouse.