What is *this* doing on townhall.com?

A positive review of Amintore Fanfani's _Capitalism, Protestantism, and Catholicism_, examining the origins and impact of capitalism on Christian life. Fanfani, a student of economics, went on to become a leader in Italy's Christian Democrat party. (How many economists are in our parties' leadership?) According to the review, "his final thesis is that "[m]odern capitalism is not compatible with Catholic morality or any Christian, that is, Protestant sect."

I was wondering about what Michael Novak might say about this. A review from a schismatic traditionalist site reveals that he has indeed written the introduction to one edition of the work. Novak seems to have made a habit of writing belittling introductions to Catholic critiques of capitalism--his foreward to G.K. Chesterton's _The Outline of Sanity_ is notorious. Somebody once quipped that having him write the introduction to GKC's distributism was like Hugh Hefner writing a forward to a book on Christian marriage. Aren't introductions supposed to *encourage* the reader to read the work at hand?

Anyway, I hope to get to Fanfani's work eventually. American insularity and monolingualism both tend to isolate American Catholics from their brothers and sisters around the world, and I would like to learn just what kind of political reasoning a Christian Democrat uses. Too bad I made my library run hours before I learned of this book.(Current read: Claes G. Ryn's _America the Virtuous_).

Lo! Here's the IHS Press introduction to the book.