The chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences has heaped high and unexpected praise on China, insisting that the atheistic communist regime has created the best model for living out Catholic social teaching today.
After visiting Beijing for the first time some months ago, Argentinean Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo reportedly returned to the Vatican full of enthusiasm for the Asian country, and this week he told a journalist that “at this moment, the Chinese are the ones implementing Catholic social teaching best.”
The Chinese “look for the common good and subordinate other things to the general welfare,” Bishop Sánchez insisted in a Spanish-language interview with the Vatican Insider, saying that the Italian economist Stefano Zamagni agrees with him.
In describing his visit, Sánchez said he “found an extraordinary China” with an exceptional work ethic. What many people don’t know, he said, “is that the central Chinese value is work, work, work. There’s no other way, basically it’s what Saint Paul said: whoever does not work should not eat.”
“You don’t have shantytowns, you don’t have drugs, young people do not take drugs. There is like a positive national consciousness, they want to show that they have changed, and now they accept private property,” he said. READ MORE
