Eh.
I dunno.
I’m just not all that excited about it.
I don’t want to be a George Will-type or the others that pass through my twitter feed saying that the Pope is a Peronist and if he had his way, the entire world would have as cruddy an economy as Peron brought Argentina. I think that read in a favorable light, the Pope is simply pointing out the other half of the story: it is true that greed, a.k.a., the profit motive behind the desire to build a better mousetrap has led to, well, lots of better mousetraps; on the other hand, as Christians, we are called to share with others. Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s founder, struggled with this tension, for instance.
And I’ve been told that if I read Laudate Si, I’d find that it’s not at all the irrational environmentalist screed that opponents characterize it as.
So fine.
But it’s like this. We’ve got a new archbishop in Chicago. He’s fine, I suppose, doing his archbishopy things. But from day one, he announced that his priority was politics, specifically promoting amnesty for illegal immigrants and opened borders for future arrivals, which made me skeptical of his interest in solving the problems that the Archdiocese of Chicago faces, such as perennial school closings, and the broader challenge of the loss of faith of so many American Catholics, and the need to evangelize. It feels as if welcoming in Mexicans and other Latin Americans, then advocating for them politically, is an easy way out, and much the same as Democrats aiming at boosting the numbers of Hispanics as sure-fire boosts to their constituency. Never mind the native-born Catholics leaving the church; it’s too hard to try to re-convert them or to improve catechesis and parish life so the next generation stays, at least, so let’s bring in some replacements.
And now the media is full of “never mind that the Pope is mostly speaking Spanish; a large and ever-growing portion of his flock is Spanish-speaking, anyway,” and predictions that “the Pope will use his time here to promote ‘immigration reform.'” And there are so many reports gleeful in anticipation that the Pope is going to give Republicans their comeuppance at his speech in Congress. Not to mention all the times the media reports one outlandish thing he says after the next, even if, considering the full context, they’re not that outlandish after all, and besides that, all the times that people are convinced that the Pope is going to up and change Catholic doctrine into, well, Episcopalianism.
Now, I know that the Pope’s message is more complex than the media portrays. I know it’s unfair. But I’m not a part of the Francis Fan Club. As much as others swoon over him, I just can’t get excited. It takes a lot of work to get past the media narrative, and even then, there’s just not an emotional draw, as with John Paul II, whom we saw when we had “newlywed” seating at a Papal Audience (the only ones closer were the disabled and the newlyweds in wedding gowns), and whose funeral generated wall-to-wall coverage in Germany. Heck, Benedict XVI even visited Munich when we were living there, and I could have asked for tickets to the open-air mass, as they were being made available through all the parishes, but I chickened out as it seemed too chaotic an event, and watched it on TV instead.
So there it is. To those of you overflowing with Popemania, sorry to be such a wet blanket. But: meh.
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