I’m Not Going to Rush Out There With a Verdict on the Encyclical Tomorrow.

I know, I know.

Everybody and his dog is going to jump right over the starting gate and make absolute pronouncements about the Encyclical tomorrow. Some folks are even promising to tweet their responses as they read; kind of like taking their own mental pulse every few minutes and tossing the numbers out there on the internet.

Not me.

I am not Everybody, much less his dog.

I’ll try to give you a smallish, first blush look at what I think, but it’s a long read and a longer ponder before I will be able to say with any intelligence what I believe the encyclical really means.

I expect that this will leave me in the corral still trying to saddle up when the wagon train pulls out of town and heads for Dodge. I also expect that a good number of you are going to be whipped to a frazzle by all the bizarro, politically-motivated sewage, both from the left and the right, that will be dumped on your little heads.

My advice — and I say this as someone who values and respects your thinking processes — is to hold onto yourself and not let the incoming tsunami of off-the-cuff verbiage drown your brain. For sure and for certain, don’t let it damage your faith.

Pope Francis is not going to come out with anything that contradicts 2,000 years of Church teaching, and he is not going to turn his back on the Church’s stand for the sanctity of human life and the value of every human being.

Far from it.

I fully expect that this encyclical will affirm the sanctity of human life and the value of human beings as they relate to the charge that God gave us to have dominion over creation. It may not go down well with our politics. I may have as much trouble accepting all of it as some of the rest of you.

But I can assure that I will accept it.

Pope Francis is the pope. I will try to understand his teachings, and I will seek to apply them in my life within the limits of my own experiences and abilities. Other faithful Catholics will do the same, and that will lead us into legitimate areas of discussion and disagreement. But we must — must — begin at the point of our common faith and our common acceptance of the teaching authority of the pope and our Church.

Thinking my way through the encyclical will not be done in a day. But I can promise you that I will do it prayerfully and with an understanding that I follow the Catholic Church and the pope.

Tomorrow is Encyclical Day.

Fasten your seatbelts. The nuts are going to be driving the commentary vehicle for a while.