Generally we assume . . .--because pride is more apt to be the vice of the intellectual--that it is more difficult to save one's soul if he is an intellectual than if he is, say, a peasant or even business executive. Compared to pride, greed and self-indulgence are relatively mild, though still potentially lethal, forms of vice.
That needed saying. What also needs saying is that there is a certain wing of North American Catholic culture that has unwittingly been taken over almost wholly not by John Paul the Great's "personalism," as it thinks, but by Rousseau. You find it in the cult of child-centeredness that emphasizes nurture at the expense of character formation. You find it in an uncritical acceptance of all things "natural," and irrational fear of medicine, technology and businessmen. And you especially see it in the tendency of many Christians to assume that material poverty is a de facto sign of virtue (the problem lies in confusing material with materialism):
The danger of recent rhetoric about "options for the poor" is that it tends to deprive the impoverished of their intrinsic human dignity by implying that no wrong perpetrated by them is caused by themselves. Rather, all faults are said to be caused by environment or "structures" of society, whatever they might be. This dangerous theoretical position is a hold over--an intellectual hold over--from the influence of Rousseau in modern thought. To put the issue more positively, we can have saints who are poor, saints who are rich, and saints who are everywhere in-between. The same obviously holds true for sinners. What we cannot have is a saint or a sinner who is automatically made so by his external social condition alone.
Neither of these pertains to his main point, but that's enough pull quotes for you. RTWT. And if that whets your appetite, here's an essay on Chesterton and the recovery of common sense.
