jfxgillis picks apart National Review Online (and other right wing) attempts to rationalize away the decidedly left-wing aspects of the Pope’s new encyclical.  The whole article is excellent and worth reading.  Here is his reply to attempts to claim the encyclical is not meant to be political:

Pope Benedict says himself it’s a political in part. Glory Be, in the most-quoted passage of the encyclical, Benedict calls for a new global political institution, in effect, a regime of global capital controls. You can say a lot of things about that, argue for or against or whatever, but the one thing you cannot say is that it’s not “political.” Of course it’s political. The problem the House Republicans face, though, is that it’s not House Republican politics.