>This is a subset of the broader issue of left-religious links, but the
>Catholic Church is a particularly interesing institution for that analysis.
Almost everything I know about Catholic social teaching I learned from a lecture I heard earlier this year by a Marxist Jesuit. He said that the Church philosophy was fundamentally corporatist - not socialist and not anticapitalist - and based on notions of fair shares (a fair wage, a fair profit, etc.). While it's certainly nice to hear the Pope denouncing neoliberalism, promoting debt relief, and talking about common access to property, he'll only go so far.
Anything involving the Church is going to be full of contradictions - there's liberation theology, but there's Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta too, not to mention a fundamentally patriarchal philosophy.
Doug