The Vatican vs the heresy of “Americanism”

Roman Catholic “Social Teaching” today seems to be the one bright light among the darkness of the sex abuse scandals for contemporary Roman Catholics, but in reality, according to Paul Bassett, it is a very recent invention, learned, it seems from Roman interactions in the good old US of A:

On Faith, Freedom and Roman Catholic History

[The] “mystical equality of all people” [written of by the Roman Catholic writer Joseph Pearce] is an innovation in 20th century Catholic anthropology. The Roman Church has historically been built on a caste system. So it was the Protestants who had to call Rome back to the doctrine which Mr. Pearce finds so dear.

The most blatant evidence for this caste system is the ruthless treatment that Jews received at the hands of the Roman Church. Professor David Kertzer describes the extent of this abomination:

Where the popes acted as temporal rulers, as they did in the Papal States until the States’ absorption into a unified Italy over the period 1859-70, discrimination against Jews was public policy…The popes and the Vatican worked hard to keep Jews in their subservient place…and they did all this according to canon law and the centuries-old belief that in doing so they were upholding the most basic tenets of Christianity.

So Pearce’s “mystical equality of all people” is historical amnesia within the context of the Roman Church.