TRIGGER WARNING: This column will speak well of Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and compare him favorably to two liberal icons.

Over forty years of teaching and writing about Catholic social doctrine, I’ve gotten to know three men who had the opportunity to embody the Church’s social teaching for a national audience. Two of them couldn’t pull it off, for different reasons.

The first was R. Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, later head of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, still later ambassador to France and 1972 Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Sarge was a wonderful man who struck me as an instinctive Catholic social doctrine guy. He was far better-educated as a Catholic than his Kennedy in-laws. But he “got” the Church’s social doctrine, not as an intellectual exercise, but through his innate decency and his general approach to politics as a matter of “oughts” as well as a matter of power.

Read the article “The Speaker and the Social Doctrine” on firstthings.com.