The processes of globalization, suitably understood and directed, open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale ….

If you think that President Barack Obama is a socialist, wait’ll you hear what the pope had to say this week.

It’s safe to assume that most Americans rarely concern themselves with the fine points of moral theology. Few are likely to wade through all 30,467 words of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” (“Love in Truth”), published Tuesday on the eve of the G-8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

It may be the most radical call for social change from the Vatican since 1891, when Pope Leo XIII responded to the tumult of the industrial revolution by suggesting that states had the obligation to redistribute wealth to preserve social order.

Benedict draws from Leo’s “Rerum Novarum” (“On New Things”) as well as from Pope Paul VI’s “Populoram Progessio” (“On the Development of Peoples”), issued in 1967, another great period of social upheaval. Benedict’s encyclical states that church doctrine requires justice and the common good to be the cornerstones of economic and political activity in a globalized world.

Papal encyclicals are letters — this one was addressed to all of the church’s religious and laity as well as “all people of good will” — that state church doctrine on significant issues of the time. “Caritas in Veritate” is Benedict’s third since assuming the papacy in April 2005 and by far his most pointed.

The former Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, despite his many years in the church’s leadership and voluminous writings on moral theology, had not often directly addressed political and economic issues. He made up a lot of ground in a hurry:

• “The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development.”
• “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”
• “[E]very economic decision has a moral consequence.”
• “Many people today would claim that they owe nothing to anyone, except to themselves. They are concerned only with their rights, and they often have great difficulty in taking responsibility for their own and other people’s integral development … rights presuppose duties, if they are not to become mere license.”

Already some conservative voices are criticizing Benedict for ignoring the rights of property. Others say his call for giving “real teeth” to the United Nations and other world bodies is not realistic.

Critics from the left will find fault with his reassertion of the paramount importance of the institution of marriage “between a man and a woman”; his insistence that any means of population control denies the sanctity of life; his worries that a misplaced faith in technology will “foster a materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life” and his decrial of “the exclusion of religion from the public square.”

And, too, there will be those who say that the leader of the world’s 1 billion Catholics often is ignored even within his own flock, so his teachings can safely be ignored by those without it as well.

But his ideas deserve to be read and heard and debated, with respect, within and without the public square.