We can only speculate about what our Church might now look like, if the neuralgic issue placed under the gaze of the world’s spotlight in 1968 had been the so-called ‘social question’, and not reproductive ethics. But it is the latter that, for good or ill, has dominated post- Conciliar life and thought. To this extent the more explicitly social dimension of the gospel, testified to by both Catholic Social Teaching and by the Theology of Liberation, indeed remains our ‘best-kept secret’, perhaps better described as our ‘best-buried secret’. In terms of the radical edge to this discourse – the ‘universal destination of earthly goods’ asserted in Gaudium et Spes 69 – we have not so much a buried treasure, as an elephant in the room. Both Catholic Social Teaching and Liberation Theology articulate – one implicitly, the other more explicitly – a fundamental incompatibility between the priorities of a capitalist economy and the imperatives of the Christian gospel. In extremis, the needs of the poor have priority over the appropriative desires of the wealthy.