Most of the debate in Catholic circles about Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan has taken place in the arenas of philosophy (e.g., can Ryan claim both Ayn Rand and Catholic social teaching as major influences on his thinking?) and policy (e.g., are Ryan’s plans to “end Medicare as we know it” by turning it into a voucher program, and his plans to slash Medicaid funding proper exercises of his “prudential judgment” in applying the Church’s teachings to public policy?).

Last Saturday the debate shifted to a practical incarnation of Catholic social teaching—the Front Street soup kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio where the Mahoning County St. Vincent de Paul Society serves nearly 100,000 meals a year to the poor of their community.

“The president of Mahoning County’s St. Vincent de Paul Society is “shocked” and “angry” that Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan used the soup kitchen for a “publicity stunt.”

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Well, that was quick. Forty-eight hours after the release of “On All of Our Shoulders” — a critique of Paul Ryan’s libertarian tendencies signed by about one hundred fifty Catholic scholars and ministers — Robert P. George took to the First Things website to denounce it as a partisan “attack” on the congressman from Wisconsin, whose running mate, you may recall, George has endorsed and is advising. So he knows from partisanship. George also knows from courageously defending one’s political opponents when they’re unfairly criticized. Just ask him:

When my fellow conservatives and Republicans were beating up on President Obama for his “you didn’t build that” remark, representing him as having claimed that business owners didn’t build their own businesses, the government did it, I spoke out in defense of the President…. It is both wrong in itself and damaging to the spirit of democracy to misrepresent one’s political opponents or interpret their words tendentiously to depict them in the most unfavorable possible light.

Do read his defense of Obama. Keep reading. Did you get to the third paragraph yet? You’re looking for the sentence that follows the one with “Obama has a dangerously inflated view of the proper role of government.” Find it yet? If you hit “this comment of mine is not intended as a defense of what Obama said, much less of his economic and regulatory policies generally,” you’ve gone too far. Here’s what it looks like: “I don’t think it is correct to interpret the ‘that’ in ‘you didn’t build that’ as referring to businesses.” Thank goodness George managed to emerge from the avalanche of criticism he doubtless received for that stirring defense, so we could be reminded that the spirit of democracy is besmirched when we misrepresent our political opponent’s views or interpret them tendentiously in order to cast them in the worst light. We would all do well to heed that advice. Too bad George doesn’t.

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It’s been a rough year for Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan in his dealings with the Jesuits.  (Esquire’s Charlie Pierce puts it better—and more colorfully—here.)

The latest episode comes courtesy of Vincent Miller in America’s fine group blog, “In All Things”.  Miller listened to the available audio of Paul Ryan’s 2005 speech at the Atlas Society’s “Celebration of Ayn Rand”, and made his own partial transcription of portions of the speech that had not previously been transcribed.

After listening closely to Ryan’s speech, Miller concludes “This philosophy leaves no room for Catholic notions of Government in service to the common good, there is no room for a social conception of the human person.  Rejection of Rand’s atheism notwithstanding, Ryan’s policies are based on a political philosophy completely at odds with the principles of Catholic Social Doctrine.  “Prudence” is an insufficient measure of his proposals and the threat this philosophy poses to the Catholic faithful.”

It’s far too early for retrospectives about this election season, but it does seem that one small positive outcome is likely to be a growing recognition of the extent to which Chairman Ryan and many Republicans have distanced themselves from the mainstream of Catholic teaching.

But, as Miller himself writes, “Don’t trust my bullets.  Read the transcript.  Don’t trust my transcript, listen to the audio on the Atlas Society site.“

With the calm, understated, diplomatic tone for which he is so widely known (I kid), Esquire’s Charlie Pierce picks up on an Eli Lake story in The Daily Beast about how Elliott Abrams is one of Paul Ryan’s foreign policy tutors, and observes:

“Maybe, during a break at his next foreign-policy briefing, Paul Ryan, devout Catholic, can ask his primary foreign-policy mentor whether the guy’s feelings about gunning down archbishops in the middle of mass have evolved over the years.”

Pierce refers to Abrams’ role in the Reagan administration’s (criminal) Central American policy—a policy that abetted not only the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, but also the killing of American nuns and lay missonaries, as well as Jesuit priests and their housekeepers.

At the very least, it’s a reminder that there were, and still are, parts of the world where the Catholic Church is one of the few institutions whose leaders speak and act for justice at the risk of their own lives.  (And that there were, and still are, parts of the world where those lives are considered “collateral damage” by American neoconservatives.)