A trinity of questions about Pope Francis starts with a question Breitbart asks:
He is the self-declared foe of unbridled capitalism, rabid consumerism and have-it-all lifestyles — but are conservatives right in fearing Pope Francis is anti-American at heart?
The pontiff’s attacks on those who worship the “God of money”, appeals for an ecological revolution and criticisms of an unjust global economic system that excludes the poor have all wound up economic ultra-liberals.
From Wall Street to the Tea Party, critics have slammed Argentine Francis as a poorly camouflaged Marxist and the debate is intensifying ahead of his arrival in the United States next week.
The 78-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church certainly believes the superpower should do more, and fast, to live up to its responsibilities, and is unlikely to skip the chance to urge Americans to change their decadent ways.
Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli told AFP he didn’t believe Francis was anti-American.
“What he has said about a savage financial system, an economy that kills, an idolatry of money, is part of the Church’s social doctrine,” Tornielli said.
It is, however, “a doctrine in many aspects forgotten by those who, even in Catholic circles, glorify the current system as the best of all possible worlds, and who continue to say that the markets should be even freer because it’s the only solution to end poverty and hunger”.
Asked in July how it felt to have been termed by one American television presenter “the most dangerous man on the planet”, Francis said he would study the criticisms made against him, after which “dialogue must ensue” — suggesting he may be gearing up to challenge his detractors on their home turf.
He will also have his work cut out in wooing disaffected US bishops, many of whom complain he has not given them enough support against the Obama administration over abortion, contraception and gay marriage.
His superstar status has led to a boom in papal tourist souvenirs on sale ahead of the trip, but there are grumbles too: critics complain the country has been left off the pope’s radar too long.
Francis hardly mentions the United States in his writings, and chose to visit ‘far-flung’ places such as Albania, Bolivia and Sri Lanka before Washington.
Austen Ivereigh, author of a biography on the pope, says “for him, the United States is not the centre of the world”.
Experts say the pontiff will undoubtedly praise the Stars and Stripes for its history as a land of freedom — but will not hesitate to confront the current ultra-conservative, xenophobic and often religious right wing.
“The Pope vs. The Donald: The anti-Donald Trump is coming to town. And he speaks Spanish too,” said an editorial in the American news outlet Politico, in an allusion to the Republican presidential candidate’s attacks on Hispanics.
Religious expert John Allen, who writes for the Crux website, said of Francis that “there are unmistakable signals that he sees the United States as part of the problem as much as the solution.
“He feels some of the same ambivalence about the United States many Latin American bishops do,” Allen told AFP.
“It’s a mix of awe about the economic and military power of the country, and respect for the generosity of Americans in times of need, combined with resentment over the checkered history of the US in Latin America and doubts about the fundamental justice of the global economic system the US represents,” he said. …
Marco Politi, papal biographer, said Francis’s main aim is for “America to reflect on the growing gulf between billions of poor people and a small group of super-rich”.
Fellow Vatican expert Iacopo Scaramuzzi believes Francis will be firm but not combative, insisting on man’s culpability for global warming, but keeping “an open attitude to North American culture” as the US’s guest and possible friend.
The “North American culture” Scaramuzzi refers to, at least south of the U.S.–Canada border, is only the country that has done more to protect religious freedom than any other developed country in the world. You’d think Francis would be more appreciative of that, but the Roman Catholic Church is not now, has never been, and is unlikely to be a democracy and to appreciate democracy. (The church, of course, grew up in the Holy Roman Empire and in countries where democracy is younger than American democracy.)
Rod Dreher adds thoughts from Francis’ selection as pope in 2013:
First, my first visceral reaction, as many of my friends know, was unvarnished anger. And there is still something in me that finds this situation galling, but in many ways I do not think what angers me is in any way the Pope’s fault, nor should it be. The biggest issue I have with the interview is not with what the Pope said but with the reaction of the Left in America to that interview. I am an orthodox Catholic theologian in an American cultural setting. That colors my analysis, but I need to be aware that the cultural background of Pope Francis is different from mine. More on that in a bit. But I loathe and despise liberal American Catholicism of the James Martin/Nancy Pelosi type and I think I have good reasons for feeling that way. Quite frankly, I find that kind of “Catholicism” vapid, unintelligent, manipulative, and often vicious. And so the fact that the Pope’s words have emboldened those types and, in their eyes and in the eyes of the Western press, vindicated them, makes me want to wretch. As I have said, it now puts orthodox Catholics involved in the fight for our culture on the defensive. It makes them seem now that they are “disobeying the Pope”, and that Benedict and JPII were awful, and all that bunk. The fact of the matter is this: culture is freaking important damn it. So all of this talk about how the Pope is asking us to move beyond the “culture wars” plays right into the hands of the liberal narrative that “hot button” culture war issues are merely “political” grabs for power lacking in substance or rootedness in a truly Gospel-based and evangelical witness. It plays into the narrative that the Church should either change its teaching on those issues or just drop them and focus instead on philanthropic gestures. This is patent nonsense. The American bishops must now step up to the plate and not just cave-in to that narrative. They must now act as true shepherds and teachers and take the Pope’s call for a change in tone and translate that intelligently for American Catholics in a way that does not throw good people like Robert George under the bus.
But on second thought, Chapp says that the key to understanding Francis is that he is a Latin American, not a European or North American. The issues Latin American Catholicism faces are different from what European and North American Catholicism faces. The greatest challenge Catholicism in Latin America faces is competition from Protestant churches. Chapp:
And the allure of those sects to many southern hemisphere Catholics is precisely their simplicity of message (very non-doctrinal), their emphasis on faith, Christ, the Bible, prayer and communal fellowship. They also do not foreground issues like contraception and divorce. They are also non-clericalistic and very informal, offering to many Catholics what seems to be a kind of liberation from the very juridical and hierarchical and morality-focused Catholic Church of Latin America. And many Catholics in the southern hemisphere are poor, or at least are surrounded by a culture filled with the poor. And let’s face it, historically, the Catholic Church in Latin America was an “established Church” with close ties to the State, the rich, the ruling classes. Liberation theology started to shift that, but its defects, which even Francis opposed, scuttled their effectiveness.
Maybe, says Chapp, this pope is doing what we’ve all known that some future pope was bound to do one of these days: shift the papacy’s focus away from a rapidly secularizing Europe and Latin America, towards the Global South, where Christianity’s future lies. If conservative/orthodox Catholics in the US feel abandoned, Chapp says, well, that might just be how it’s going to be. Read the whole thing on Chapp’s Facebook feed. I appreciated his insights so much. I think the Pope’s interview really does reinvigorate the Catholic Left in the US, alas, but then again, Francis is the pope of the whole world, not just North America.
UPDATE: Or maybe not. From the combox:
Mr. Dreher, I’m Latin American (Brazilian) and, let me tell you, this explanation is bunk.
The “very juridical and hierarchical and morality-focused Catholic Church of Latin America” has not existed for fifty years. It was replaced by exactly the Church that Pope Francis seems to want. The results have not been impressive, to say the least. There’s no reason to think that more of the same will give different results.
The section that describes the new Evangelical Protestants as not putting the culture war agenda in the foreground is, again, precisely backwards. They do precisely that which Mr Chapp says they don’t. They are very, very morally strict, which is why they grow so fast in the poorest areas: they give order to the disordered lives of the very poor, who come from generations of poverty and broken homes and have never known anything better. They take a huge portion of the poor’s meagre income in tithes and “gifts”… and even then the poor are better off in these churches, because the order the church gives, much like a military boot camp, helps them to plan for the future, educate themselves, not fall into drugs, not have multiple children out of wedlock, etc.
And this is not just inwards. The politicians elected by the Evangelicals are at the forefront of the resistance to homosexual “marriage”, to abortion, and most of the left’s culture war agenda. In my own country, abortion would have been legalized a few years ago if not for the resistance organized by the Evangelical politician-preachers across almost all parties – a fight in which, by the way, the Catholic hierarchy was entirely silent. If the Church retreats from these issues, the pull of the Evangelical Protestant churches will only INCREASE throughout Latin America.
To sum up, as we say here, when “the Church chose the poor, the poor chose the Protestants”.
UPDATE.2: First Things editor Rusty Reno has some mild praise for Pope Francis and his interview, but doesn’t blame the secular media for emphasizing all the progressivist-friendly stuff in the interview. Reno, who taught at a Jesuit university, says this is more or less how Jesuits talk, and one isn’t necessarily biased to read an agenda into the pope’s words, even those that sound relatively anodyne. Excerpts:
Such comments by Francis do not challenge but instead reinforce America’s dominant ideological frame. It’s one in which Catholics loyal to the magisterium are “juridical” and “small-minded.” They fear change, lacking the courage to live “on the margins.” I heard these and other dismissive characterizations again and again during my twenty years teaching at a Jesuit university. One of my colleagues insisted again and again that the greatest challenge we face in the classroom is “Catholic fundamentalism,” when in fact very few students today even know the Church’s teachings, much less hold them with an undue ardency.
More:
But Pope Francis has been undisciplined in his rhetoric, casually using standard modern formulations, ones that are used to beat up on faithful Catholics—“audacity and courage” means those who question Church teachings, the juxtaposition of the “small-minded” traditionalists to the brave and open liberals who are “in dialogue”, and so forth. This gives everything he says progressive connotations. As a consequence, American readers, and perhaps European ones as well, intuitively read a progressivism into Pope Francis’ statements about abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. Thus the headlines.
This is not helpful, at least not in the field hospital of the American Church. We face a secular culture that has a doctrine of Unconditional Surrender. It will not accept “talking less” about abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. The only acceptable outcome is agreement—or silence. Dialogue? Catholic higher education has been doing that for fifty years, and the result has been the secularization of the vast majority of colleges and universities. Today at Fordham or Georgetown, the only people talking about contraception, gay rights, or gay marriage are the advocates.
The most shocking thing here is something from Slate that provides insight and not left-wing claptrap:
Pope Francis is coming to the United States, and liberal Catholics arethrilled. Vice President Joe Biden is praising the pope’s moral leadership. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a leading abortion rights advocate, has sent the pope alist of topics to address. For many Catholics, the euphoria extends to family and sexual issues on which Francis has signaled new tolerance. A majority of American Catholics, according to a Pew survey, predicts that within the next 35 years, the church will approve contraception and married priests. Thirty-six percent expect the church to recognize same-sex marriages.
Some of these people think the pope shares their respect for moral diversity and individual rights. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, claims that Francis disagrees with opponents of same-sex marriage and that he believes the church “should not interfere spiritually in the lives of gays.” Bill de Blasio, the Catholic mayor of New York, says his fondness for the church has been rekindled by Francis’ outreach, particularly a “seismic moment” two years ago, in which the pope, responding to a question about gay Catholics, asked: “Who am I to judge?”
These liberals misunderstand the pope, because they don’t understand a tension in their own thinking. Politically, Francis isn’t liberal. He’s progressive. We use these terms interchangeably, but they’re different. Liberalism is fundamentally about doubt: You have your view, I have mine, and we agree to disagree. Progressivism is about confidence: Your view is wrong, mine is right, and I’m going to change the world accordingly. Francis is confident, and he’s not afraid to use political power to achieve his aims. As he puts it, “A good Catholic meddles in politics.”
Temperamentally, Francis does have liberal tendencies. He regrets the authoritarian way he governed as a young Jesuit leader. He wants to be open and collegial. He accepts criticism, seeks dialogue, and tries to learn from it. When Catholics disagree, he tries to focus them on respect, love, and mercy.
But if you look at his record, you’ll see limits to his openness. Take homosexuality. The quote that endeared Francis to liberals was: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis later explained his questionthis way: “When God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We must always consider the person.” The key word here is existence. Francis was forswearing condemnation of the whole person, not judgment of homosexual behavior. He was repackaging what conservative Christians have always said: love the sinner, not the sin.
Francis has never called into question the church’s fundamental teaching: that while people “who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies … must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” they are “called to chastity” because “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” In fact, Francis has affirmed that “children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother,” and he has condemned efforts to “redefine the very institution of marriage.”
The Catholic catechism also forbids divorce. It says that if you get divorced and remarry, you’re “in a situation of public and permanent adultery.” In some congregations, that means you can’t take communion. Last month, to ease the pressure on these parishioners, Francis delivered new instructions to priests: “People who started a new union after the defeat of their sacramental marriage are not at all excommunicated, and they absolutely must not be treated that way.” This month, he made it easier for couples to get their marriages annulled by the churchso they can get remarried without being treated as adulterers. But they still have to go through a church trial. If they don’t, the pope says, their new unions “are contrary to the sacrament of marriage.”
Under Catholic law, abortion warrants instant excommunication. It’s considered so evil that in many countries, only a bishop can forgive it. Three weeks ago, Francismade an exception: Beginning in December, women who have had abortions can be absolved by priests. But the offer is valid only for a year, and only if you confess and repent. In addition, the deal isn’t new: Fifteen years ago, Pope John Paul II offered women the same terms. And Francis’ bottom line is the same as John Paul’s: Abortion violates “the right to life from conception.”
Francis’ concessions on these three issues aren’t meaningless. They’ll make life easier for some women, gay people, and divorced couples. But in each case, he has avoided challenging the catechism. He’s offering just enough, procedurally or rhetorically, to lure wayward sheep back into the church, where their errors can be corrected. That’s his goal. Communion, he explains, “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” …
Social justice is a long Catholic tradition. Popes have talked about welfare, labor conditions, and the moral boundaries of capitalism for more than a century. Many people on the secular left don’t know about this tradition. They associate the church with the political right because John Paul stood with President Reagan against communism, and later, Benedict XVI stood with President George W. Bush against social liberalism. The average American liberal has probably heard that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is fighting to block contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act. But that same liberal has forgotten—or never knew—that for decades, the bishops have supported national health insurance.
Today, all over the world, the acceleration of economic inequality and insecurity is reviving the political left. Francis is part of the change. He’s the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere. He studied with liberation theologians. He has appointed cardinals from poor countries. Two years ago, at his installation Mass, he promised to serve “the poorest, the weakest, the least important.” In speeches and interviews, he decries rampant capitalism. He talks about trade agreements,financial speculation, trickle-down economics, austerity, and youth unemployment. A quarter-century after John Paul lectured the European Parliament about secularism, Francis returned to the same venue with a very different lecture, focused on poverty and unemployment.
Francis doesn’t just raise these issues. He soaks them in Christian language and imagery. He describes the unbridled free market as a “cult of money,” “new idols,” “the golden calf,” and “the dung of the devil.” He speaks of a twisted mentality that “sacrifices human lives at the altar of money.” He tells Christians that poor people are “at the heart of the Gospel,” that working toward economic fairness is “a commandment,” and that “our faith challenges the tyranny of Mammon.”
His crusade against profit, in turn, has broadened into a crusade against environmental destruction. Three months ago, Francis combined the two issues in his first encyclical, “Laudato Si.” He covered several topics—climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, pollution, water—but his message was relentlessly moral. By and large, he argued, wealthy countries cause the destruction, and poor countries suffer the consequences. He advocated “integral ecology,” a Catholic philosophy that would manage economic development to serve human needs. In speeches and interviews, he implored world leaders to “be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.” He declared a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. He summoned politicians to a Vatican conference to enlist their aid against climate change.
Francis has elevated other issues, too. Long before this summer’s migrant crisis, hepressed European and American leaders to aid immigrants and refugees. He ordered the church to house migrants in vacant convents and monasteries, explaining that these buildings “are for the flesh of Christ, which is what the refugees are.” He has campaigned not just against capital punishment, but also against solitary confinement, pretrial detention, and the “hidden death penalty”—life imprisonment without parole. He has even castigated businessmen who “call themselves Christian” but manufacture guns.
These expansions of the Vatican agenda are progressive, not liberal. They’re clear, confident, and heavy on government action. Francis isn’t interested in your alternative theology or your putative right to bear arms. …
If your politics incline to the left, you probably like Francis’s economic agenda better than Benedict’s family-values agenda. Right-wing attempts to impose values through law are notoriously clumsy and counterproductive. But Francis’ left-wing ideas can be just as crude. By his own admission, he doesn’t understand economics and has no clear solutions. He rejects cap-and-trade environmental remedies as too technical, too capitalistic, and insufficiently “radical” and redistributive. He scorns scientific fixes, saying they divert us from “ethical considerations” and “deep change.” Progressive moralists turn out to be a lot like conservative moralists: Their piety clouds their practicality.
On that score, let’s cut Francis some slack. He was elected to be the pope, not the world’s chief economist or engineer. He might not be the best judge, technically, of how to approach all the issues on his agenda. But he has chosen those issues well. Poverty and environmental destruction cause far more harm to far more people than the church’s policies on abortion, divorce, and homosexuality do. That may sound callous, but it’s true. And the pope is arguably the last guy from whom you should expect liberalism. What popes can do, better than almost anyone else, is focus the world’s attention on certain issues. If you have to choose between a progressive pope and a liberal pope, take the progressive one.
Or not. Freedom of religion means the freedom to not belong to a specific religion. (If the Slate writer’s definition of the difference between “liberal” and “progressive” is correct, than Francis really is anti-American, as are all “progressives.”) I was raised Catholic, but now am not. I am reminded often why I am not Catholic anymore, though it has little to do with Francis’ bad economics. (And it’s not as if the Episcopal Church, to which I now belong, isn’t, if anything, even more liberal, or progressive, and not welcoming of conservatives than the Catholic Church is.)
I am also not a theologian, but Jesus Christ’s admonition to care for the poor is an individual mandate, not a mandate for governments or even organizations. It is your mandate as a Christian, not anyone else’s.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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