The Pope Shepherds Together What American Politics Sunders

There is great amusement in following the news when the pope is in town.

One example of this are (or “is”?) the two stories I shared consecutively on social media. The New York Times led with “Pope Francis, in Washington, Addresses Poverty and Climate,” because that’s apparently a left of center thing to say. The National Catholic Register led with, “Pope’s First Words in English: Defend Religious Liberty, Marriage and Family,” because I guess that’s a conservative and right of center thing to say. Only one person, who has asked to remain anonymous (well, not really), noticed the delicious dissonance between these two headlines.

Some synergy came much later in the day. Tobias Winright, a Catholic ethicist who teaches at St. Louis University, author of books on green discipleship and the Just War tradition, prefaced the following retweet with, “One (long) sentence covering nearly every course subject about which I and a lot of my friends teach in whole semesters….”

Pope Francis covered an awful lot in just one sentence today http://t.co/Nb9k4D71Oi #PopeInDC pic.twitter.com/XN6Or3zUof

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) September 23, 2015

Here you see the pope shepherding together all the issues the American political machine divorces. None of this is terribly surprising. It’s what we’ve all come to expect. American political parties resemble what Rene Girard calls a mimetic rivalry (the irrational inverse mirroring of your opponent’s desires) rather than anything rational. Francis, sanity is thy name.

What’s surprising is that a FOX anchor sanely (FOX is so difficult to parody, because even the Catholics among them are self-parodic) defended the vision of the Catholic Church’s shepherd:

OK, now you can say you’ve seen it all. But there’s more.

Here is a conversation I spied in a discussion group. The Francis Moment seems to be taking, if I may borrow from Richard Kearney, an anatheistic turn when the leader of the world’s largest religion evokes a zone of respectful hospitality, even agreement, from the non-religious:

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After that you might be more open to reading my interview with Anthony Annett (Earth Institute) on the pope’s integral ecology, an interview with Charles Camosy (Fordham) on what he calls the “anti-abortion supermajority,” Keith Michael Estrada’s (Students for a Fair Society) piece on Laudato Si’s and the fatal errors of capitalism, and the immigration manifesto I wrote with Sam Rocha (University of British Columbia).

You might, just might, also want to look at an extensive list of the best book-length critiques of modernity (and PoMo too).

I’m also much obliged if you drop some coins and bills through the PayPal donation button on my hompage.