Liberation theology redux?

[Carl Remick]

Journalists are expecting the Pope to make some pretty blunt
anti-free-market remarks in his current trip to Mexico.  We'll see just
*how* pointed his criticism is, but there are a couple of encouraging
quotes in today's NY Times article on the Pope's trip, viz.:
"After all the promises, suddenly nobody seems to care about the poor
anymore," said Rev. Lorenzo Albacete, a theology professor at St.
Joseph's seminary in Yonkers, who accompanied the pope to Cuba last
year. "Neo-liberalism has made the poor invisible, and the church down
there is the only one, badly or not, that is holding up their cause. In
Latin America, it's not liberation theology, but it may be
post-liberation theology."
"When Marxism fell, we thought everything would be resolved, but
instead, no," said Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, a
Vatican official who attended the Puebla meeting [of bishops in 1979,
when the Pope warned against liberation theology]. "Now we have a
neo-liberalism on which the poor get poorer and the hungry are
marginalized. There has to be something besides the free market."
As usual, I'm grasping at straws -- seeking some positive outcome from
the Pontiff's latest walkabout.  Seems to me the Catholic Church's basic
stance has remained unchanged since Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum a
century ago -- netting out basically to "a pox on both your houses,
capitalists and labor."  What the Church really wants, IMO, is a return
to the Middle Ages, when *it* ran the show.
Carl Remick