If by "challenge" you mean "pose a serious threat to,"
> capitalism is perfectly happy with religion, as the current rather
> depressing state of American culture proves. No one can deny that it is
> drenched with capitalism and religion simultaneously.
I'd hazard a guess that 5/6 of the thousands that do CD every yr. at the death squadistra training camp of the US Army, the School of the Americas aka Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, Fort Benning, Georgia http://www.ciponline.org/facts/soa.htm , are religious leftists.
> Not in this man's country, pardner. If the Pope says anything against
> capitalism, U.S. Catholics simply ignore it. No problemo.
Carl Marzani, one of the OSS marxists along w/ Sweezy and Marcuse http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9706/msg00061.html during WWII, wrote a long piece in the early 80's for Monthly Review for one of their yearly, jumbo summer double issues on the Pope as an anti- capitalist.
And, another cite (of coarse!) to counter-balance the Penny Lernoux I cut and paste the other day on fascist repression and Liberation Theology, http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.asp?control=80&sortorder=authorlast "CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS AND CONSERVATIVE POLITICS IN AMERICA Patrick Allitt Cornell University Press, 1993
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm