I'l match my personal and book learnin' understanding of Catholicism to anyone's anyday, and your critique of Glenn's post is wrong. From an article by Robert Bork, my emphasis:

Justice Scalia’s argument about the death penalty has two aspects. The first concerns the duty of the judge; the second has to do with the respect owed by Catholics to the Pope’s call for the virtual abolition of the penalty in Evangelium Vitae....

What, then, is a Catholic judge to do if the Church now, for the first time in two thousand years, makes the condemnation of capital punishment binding on Catholics? Justice Scalia is absolutely right. He must either violate his duty as a Catholic or his duty as a judge. If neither of those choices is acceptable, and neither should be, his only alternative is to resign. A halfway measure, disqualifying himself in capital cases, would be an unacceptable evasion of responsibility, for that might often mean that the death penalty would be overthrown by other judges. Recusal would then enable an unconstitutional action by a court.

Justice Scalia’s position has been subjected to a vigorous attack by Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput. Arguing that “if we say we’re Catholic, we need to act like it,” the Archbishop goes on to say that “when Catholic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia publicly disputes Church teaching on the death penalty, the message he sends is not all that different from Frances Kissling disputing what the Church teaches about abortion. Obviously, I don’t mean that abortion and the death penalty are identical issues. They’re not, and they don’t have equivalent moral gravity. But the impulse to pick and choose what we’re going to accept is exactly the same kind of ‘cafeteria Catholicism’ in both cases.”

And as Bork correctly goes on to note, decades ago Wm Buckley was taking issue with the Vatican on economic issues:

Archbishop Chaput would place the Church’s prudential judgments, influenced less by traditional Christian thought than by current social nostrums, on the same level as pronouncements about faith and morals. He notes that William Buckley did not admire the economics in Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra and wrote a famous column, “Mater si, Magistra no!” The Archbishop asserted that Buckley was, for that reason, a “cafeteria Catholic.”

This comes close to being intolerable. If the Church does not understand basic economics, it is worse than folly to insist that Catholics must believe what they know to be wrong and which no spiritual authority can make right. The American bishops have held forth in an uninformed manner not only about economics but about nuclear weaponry.

http://www.geocities.com/a_christian_conservative//bork-cp.html

Both liberal and conservative Catholics are "cafeteria Catholics"

Which is part of why I left the Church decades ago, in early adulthood. I'm not a "liberation theology" advocate, but I also find the teaching on contraception and gays intolerable. And then there is that slight impediment of not believing in a personal deity who intervenes in the affairs of man. But either way, to expect people claiming adherence to a religion or political view to advocate in accordance with the essential premises of the particular belief system. It bothers me more when they fail to do that, than when I simply disagree with the principles they claim to uphold, but from whihc they clearly deviate.

There are many teaching of the Church I simply reject, so I left.

If you haven't read Glenn's post at Open Left I suggest you go read it. Truly one of the more insightful posts Glenn has produced.

I strongly second that. It should not be missed.

Decades ago?

And all this time, I've been convinced that you were in your early Twenties!

So my pal, you thought you were dialoguing with a ten-year-old at CompuServe? ;)

But actually, I am in my early twenties, in my mind, and eternally. It is one of my mental pathologies, but one I choose not to give up. :) Now, if the inability to read fine print, increasing issues with arthritis, and those damned hot flashes would just stop, I might be able to maintain the illusion.

Greenwald is anything but "neutral."

OMG! Stop the presses! You mean, Greenwald is critical of the current GOP! Say it ain't so, saintlucid.

That does not, however make him a Democrat, Communist, Naderite, Libertarian Party member, or anything else -- he was merely (correctly) exposing that Rudy Giuliani does not conform in innumerable crucial respects to modern (and classical) Catholic teaching. Yet, some Catholics who rant about Democrats who also deviate from that body of doctrine, give Rudy a pass. Why do you suppose that is?

That is the question Glenn asks, and you seem uninterested (and unqualified) to answer.

Rerum Novarum as you quote it has little to do with Glenn's point (Glenn never claimed that Catholics are called to be socialists); as I've already pointed out in my comment discussing Bork's sympathy for Buckley's rejection of John XXIII on economics, however, the GOP ain't in accord with the actual teaching of Rome in matters fiscal, or with the jurisprudential box Scalia and other Catholic judges have been put in by Rome's recent teaching on the death penalty. Glenn's post is accurate, and one need not be a member of the Notre Dame theology Department to correctly make the claims he did.

You can fool those who really know little about Catholicism, but you can't kid me, Holly, or many others here.

Greenwald writes, mistakenly, that the GOP's nominal aversion to conventional welfare-statist redistribution schemes is "decisively un-Catholic." Rerum Novarum suggests otherwise in its cogently articulated opposition to the political appropriation and redistribution of productive capital.

Of course, that isn't what Greenwald wrote. And that the best you can do is say Rerum Novarum "suggests" he is wrong, is all that need be said any further about your "criticism."