By selecting Paul Ryan for his running mate, Romney has cast Joe Biden into the outer darkness of political obsolescence. The mere contrast between Paul Ryan's biological youth, matched by his intellectual vigor and depth, makes Joe Biden appear to the political world what bell-bottoms and polyester appear to today's fashion world.

Try:  "Out of it, man, like, way out!"

But the story doesn't end with the youth contrast alone. Biden's Novus Ordo, liberal "Catholicism," radically accuses its own age. Biden reeks of the must and dust of creepy old Paul VI, the ugly New "Mass" of 1969, and various forms of communist-impregnated Liberation Theology which the anti-Catholic Second Vatican Council adopted to fundamentally transform the Church into everything it isn't.

Responding to Sister Simone Campbell's recent "Nuns on the Bus" tour designed to agitate social justice groups against Paul Ryan's famous budget, the "man with a plan" and "America's accountant" retorted that his magnum opus was perfectly in line with Catholic social teaching. From the perspective of the Church's magisterium, he is absolutely correct. From the perspective of Vatican II and the 1960s-style, secular-liberal religion it created, he is absolutely wrong. Whether he is right or wrong, in other words, depends on the age and ignorance of the viewer. Biden notoriously unites both.

And this explains everything. Since Vatican II, by its own innumerable admissions, represents the overturning of all prior Catholic history under the guise of a "hermeneutic of continuity," it is no wonder that Novus Ordo social doctrine should have created two generations of atheist-materialist "Catholics" like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

From the moment one understands that Obama was elected by "Catholics" in quotation marks who share Biden's pro-abortion, pro-contraception, UN-headquartered religion, and that this voting block is a pure creation of 50 years of Vatican II, then the controversy over Ryan's budget becomes perfectly logical. One has only to read the encyclical of social doctrine, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, to see that truly Catholic social teaching has nothing at all to do with socialism. Indeed, the Roman Church was the very first to argue against communism even as it emerged in the middle of the 19^th century.

The doctrines of communist utopianism cannot change, as long as there are families and human souls to be destroyed. The doctrines of Christ's  Church cannot change, as long as there are families and human souls to be saved. What has changed is the swing among American Catholics away from Vatican II, a sign of collective awakening to the Council's myriad doctrinal errors continued by its Popes of personality (many would say anti-popes) since 1962.

Paul Ryan represents the counter-revolution of an entire generation possessing higher ideals than mere slavery to one's own impulses and crass materialism -- a generation Romney has done very well indeed to recognize.

The author is a traditional Catholic.