The team the worked on the original Macintosh computer claimed that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had a “reality-distortion field.” As Andy Hertzfeld explains, the “reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”
Some countries have this same ability that Jobs had. The Soviet Union, for example, used to be able to convince American leftists that Russia was becoming a utopia rather than a land of authoritarianism and starvation. Similarly, China seems to have engaged it’s reality-distortion field for some members of the Vatican. As Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg says,
[Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo] is the Argentine-born and Vatican-based long-time Chancellor of what are called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Having recently visited China, the bishop described the one-party communist state as “extraordinary.”
Why extraordinary, you might ask? Well, according to Bishop Sanchez, China has “no shanty-towns” and “young people don’t take drugs.” Moreover, he said, China takes climate change so much more seriously than most other nations. That’s hard to square with China’s relentless emphasis on economic growth. But, above all, the bishop exclaimed, “those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.”
At this point, I started to wonder how the Argentine bishop reconciled some well-known facts about the Chinese communist regime—its policy of forced-abortions in the name of population-control; its use of mass labor camps; its ongoing problems with rampant corruption; the growing cult of personality surrounding President Xi Jinping; its absence of democracy; its bellicose and militaristic stance in the South China Sea; the surveillance and censoring of anyone deemed a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power by the Ministry of State Security; its appalling treatment of the Nobel Peace Prize activist, the late Liu Xiaobo; its oppression of the people of Tibet and other ethnic minorities; its demolition of Evangelical and Catholic churches; and its relentless harassment of Catholic clergy and laypeople who won’t support regime-puppets like the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association—with Catholic social teaching.
