To Give a Defense
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Congressman Paul Gosar (he’s from Arizona; drop him a friendly line) wants us to know why he’s boycotting the pope’s speech to the U.S. Congress. He writes all this at Townhall:
It is difficult to convey the excitement I first felt when it was revealed that His Holiness Pope Francis was invited to Washington D.C. to address the world from the floor of the House of Representatives. Many believed, like I did, that this was an opportunity for the Pope to be one of the world’s great religious advocates and address the current intolerance of religious freedom. An opportunity to urgently challenge governments to properly address the persecution and execution of Christians and religious minorities; to address the heinous and senseless murders committed by ISIS and other terrorist organizations. An opportunity to address the enslavement, belittlement, rape and desecration of Christian women and children; to address the condoned, subsidized, intentionally planned genocide of unborn children by Planned Parenthood and society; and finally, an opportunity for His Holiness to refocus our priorities on right from wrong.
That is to say, it would be a great opportunity for the pope to say what Mr. Gosar would say if he were pope. He wants to choose the pope’s topics for him. Mr. Gosar seems to think he is the pope’s composition teacher. Write me five paragraphs on the evil of ISIS.
Of course, the pope has spoken about all these things. (Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. I could go on. I won’t.) But unless he says it in front of the U.S. Congress, with Mr. Gosar in attendance to clap his hands and shout “Huzzah!” the pope has been silent.
What’s That Gun You’re Totin’?
There is a pattern to this kind of thing: The pope should speak of that part of the moral law I agree with, not that part I would rather avoid. So Mr. Gosar is deeply offended that the pope might speak about our duty to care for the creation. The pope, he says, wants “to guilt people into leftist policies” through “false science.” Never mind that in Laudato Si, the pope said, “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.” The pope’s real concern is “that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.” Mr. Gosar does not mention any of this.
Nor does he mention that Pope Benedict XVI also spoke about the need to address climate change. Climate change, said the last pope, is a “grave concern.”
Nor does Mr. Gosar mention that the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §461-487, speaks of our moral duty to care for the creation. In that section, it cites to its support both Vatican II and the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II.
Mr. Gosar mentions none of these things. It is possible he does not know them. Now, he is a “proud Catholic”; he makes sure to tell us that. He attended a Jesuit college; he “received an excellent education”; he was “taught to think critically.” He is at great pains to point all these things out to us. But in spite of it all, he thinks that Laudato Si—though it cites the Bible, the Doctors of the Church, councils, and popes; and though Benedict XVI, John Paul II, Vatican II, and the Compendium also tell us that care for the planet is a moral duty—is somehow not “standard Christian theology.
That is false. I don’t care what college Mr. Gosar went to, and I don’t care how proud he is; that is false. The duty to care for the Creation is the very reason God made man in the first place (Gen. 1:26). Why God made us is not part of Christian theology? I’m supposed to believe that?
Don’t be fooled when Mr. Gosar says that this is a dispute over climate change science. He knows, since he’s read Laudato Si (after all, he was taught to think critically), that the pope accepts there will be disagreement on that point. Mr. Gosar’s real fear is that any talk of this moral obligation will encourage “leftist policies.” His real fear is that the pope will come off as a friend to Democrats. His real fear is any hint of a suggestion that there is a moral limit to how much resources should be used for plunder and profit. He wants to protect the sins he likes by demanding that the pope talk about something else instead—something that will make Republicans look good; something that will make them smile and say, “See, I told you so. The Lord is on our side. The Lord is proud to be an American.”
That’s the gun he’s totin’.
No One to Save With the World in a Grave
Mr. Gosar says:
If the Pope spoke out with moral authority against violent Islam [But he has.] I would be there cheering him on. [Oh goody.]
If the Pope urged the Western nations to rescue persecuted Christians in the Middle East [But he has.] I would back him wholeheartedly. [Goody again.]
But when the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one.
So what does that mean? The right treatment for a “leftist politician” is to walk out when they speak? Did your Jesuit education, Mr. Gosar, teach you that form of statesmanship? Did you learn that from your Mama? That concerns me even if the pope is a “leftist politician” rather than, say, someone who’s telling us what the Church has always told us. Does a “proud Catholic” boycott the Holy Father and smear him as a “leftist” because he’s in a snit about what he might say? That concerns me.
This too concerns me:
If the pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change, then he can do so in his personal time. [The pope has “personal time”? Who knew?] But to promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous.
No, the pope is doing no such thing. (Mr. Gosar, with his great Jesuit education, does not seem to know what “dogma” is.) “The Church does not presume to settle scientific questions”: That is what the pope really said, and if Mr. Gosar had read Laudato Si, he would know that. But that we have a moral duty to care for the Creation is Catholic teaching, has always been, and Mr. Gosar can not—though he tries hard to do so—use the scientific dispute in order to avoid the moral duty and go on getting and wasting as we wish. The dispute is a cover.
To say, “Talk about something else or I’ll be a brat and leave the room” is not how a “proud Catholic” acts before the Holy Father. A “proud Catholic” does not posture as holier than the pope. But that’s just what Mr. Gosar does:
I have both a moral obligation and leadership responsibility to call out leaders, regardless of their titles, who ignore Christian persecution and fail to embrace opportunities to advocate for religious freedom and the sanctity of human life.
Well, aren’t you something! The pope—follow the links above, Mr. Gosar—has spoken about all these things. He spoke about the sanctity of human life in Laudato Si. Here is §120, Mr. Gosar:
Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?
And here is §136, Mr. Gosar:
On the other hand, it is troubling that, when some ecological movements defend the integrity of the environment, rightly demanding that certain limits be imposed on scientific research, they sometimes fail to apply those same principles to human life. There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos. We forget that the inalienable worth of a human being transcends his or her degree of development.
So the pope does speak, and often, about the very things Mr. Gosar, in his ignorance, blames him for not speaking about. But the fact is that a concern for “the sanctity of human life” also means concern for the quality of the life they have once they are here.
No one to save with the world in a grave.
For reasons he will not explain to us, Mr. Gosar finds that concern too much to sit and listen to.
I Can’t Twist the Truth
But then, over on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade had a small little nutty of his own. For Mr. Kilmeade, it is not enough just to walk out on the pope. No. He says that the pope should stay out of the country altogether. He’s “tired of the pope.” I’m tired of Fox News.
Chris Wallace starts the conversation with Mr. Kilmeade:
With most popes, it’s just a religious visit, but with this pope, he’s political and quite open in his political views on climate change and migration and refugees and capitalism.
Here’s that “Pope Francis is so different from all the other popes” myth again. You knew it had to come, dear reader. The popes before him, they stuck to religion! But this pope, he talks about the climate! This pope talks about refugees! This pope talks about capitalism!
I fear I am beating a dead horse, or a dumb pundit, when I keep pointing out that the Church has talked about these things for two thousand years. Pope Francis is not telling us something new; he’s telling us something old. We only think it’s new because we have not ears to hear.
But I can’t twist the truth.
This is nothing new, Mr. Wallace. St. John Paul II, the last pope to visit the United States—touted by Rush Limbaugh, the very man himself, as a great defender of capitalism (just like Mr. Reagan!)—not only spoke about capitalism but warned us of its excesses. You read that right, Mr. Wallace: St. John Paul II warned us against the excesses of capitalism.
Here he is in Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) 21:
[T]he Church’s social doctrine adopts a critical attitude towards both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism.
Sounds like he’s talking about standard Church teaching. And so he is.
And here he is in Centesimus Annus (1991), after quoting pope Leo XIII concerning the right to a just wage:
Would that these words, written at a time when what has been called “unbridled capitalism” was pressing forward, should not have to be repeated today with the same severity. Unfortunately, even today one finds instances of contracts between employers and employees which lack reference to the most elementary justice. (8)
And this:
Many other people, while not completely marginalized, live in situations in which the struggle for a bare minimum is uppermost. These are situations in which the rules of the earliest period of capitalism still flourish in conditions of ‘ruthlessness’ in no way inferior to the darkest moments of the first phase of industrialization. (33)
And this:
It is the task of the State to provide for the defence and preservation of common goods such as the natural and human environments, which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces. Just as in the time of primitive capitalism the State had the duty of defending the basic rights of workers, so now, with the new capitalism, the State and all of society have the duty of defending those collective goods which, among others, constitute the essential framework for the legitimate pursuit of personal goals on the part of each individual. (40)
And this:
Can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? … If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative. … But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (42)
Ven. Fulton J. Sheen said the same thing all the way back in 1943. “The Christian solution,” he said,
is to get behind neither Capital nor Labor exclusively, but to be behind capital when Marxian Socialism would destroy private property, and to be behind Labor when Monopolistic Capitalism would claim the priority of profits over the right to a just wage.
And if Mr. Wallace thinks that concern about “just wage” is just a political concern, not religious at all, I invite him to read James 5:4. If he thinks concern for migrants and refugees is just a political concern, not religious at all, I invite him to read Lev. 19:34. (Leviticus does not just talk about homosexuals.)
These are political questions, but the notion that there is some corner of life, called the “political,” which need not answer to the moral law, is not Christianity. It is secularism.
The Left wants to call abortion “political” and tell the Church to be quiet about that. The Right wants to call capitalism “political” and tell the Church to be quiet about that.
Pope Francis shouts plenty at both right and left. Some people seem to think he should only be shouting at the left.
Pope Benedict XVI tells us what the moral law is at the back of all this talk about economics. He says it in Caritatis in Veritate 25. “The primary capital,” he says, “to be safeguarded and valued, is man, the human person in his or her integrity.” Politics and economics do not operate apart from the moral law about the dignity of the human person. That’s the point.
But here Mr. Kilmeade has a meltdown.
“I’m a Catholic!” he says. (Why do I feel a “but” coming?)
But he can stay home. Some of his comments just have no place. He’s in the wrong country. … He doesn’t like capitalism, he blames us and money for what’s going on in the Middle East.
He does? Where?
“Take on Islam!” cries Mr. Kilmeade. “Then talk to me!”
I see. The pope can stay home. There ain’t room in this country for the two of us, pardner. So unless the pope attacks radical Islam first (which he has), Mr. Kilmeade won’t stand for him speaking about capitalism. Shut up about that.
One wonders what Mr. Kilmeade would have to say about Benedict XVI. Or John Paul II. Or Leo XIII. Or St. James. I’m Catholic, but that St. James guy, he really should have taken on those Roman persecutors first, then talked about a just wage.
But what lies behind Mr. Kilmeade’s comments here is the idea of America’s moral superiority to the rest of the world. “He’s in the wrong country!” Let him talk to Syria or Iran, not us! Hold those other people to the moral law, but not us! We are without spot or blemish!
This tells me that the pope needs to come here. He needs to shake us out of our padded armchairs.
That’s the pope’s job: to make people uncomfortable. To make us all uncomfortable. Including Mr. Gosar and Mr. Kilmeade, no matter how much they may scream about it.
Take a Look Around to Selma, Alabama
George Will has heft and caliber and is rarely apt to have nutties. But he’s had a nutty this weekend—a full-blown fever of Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome descended upon the great man. Mr. Will, writing in the Washington Post is upset about the “sanctimony” and “indiscriminate zeal” of the pope. That sounds fair of him. I can see the balance in that. I just wish that Mr. Will had taken greater care with his facts. For example, he quotes the pope as having said, “People occasionally forgive, but nature never does.”
Now, the source Mr. Will cites for these words is a lay Catholic advocacy group, with no special standing in the Church, called Catholic Climate Covenant. CCC tells us that the pope spoke those words on April 22, 2013, at a meeting with the president of Ecuador. In my effort at due diligence—not to be confused with Mr. Will’s effort—I traced this all back to a Vatican Insider story. But it turns out these aren’t the pope’s words at all. It’s just a “saying” he admires. How sloppy of Mr. Will.
Mr. Will finds those words, the pope’s or not, “vacuous.” “Is Francis intimating,” he ponders, “that environmental damage is irreversible?” Oh. So it doesn’t matter if we do environmental damage; it doesn’t matter if human lives are blighted along the way; the earth will repair itself. See, the earth forgives. Let us sin, for the earth will forgive us, some day, in the natural course of things. Is that what Mr. Will is intimating?
That question aside, Mr. Will goes on with his theme, which seems to be that the pope is “sanctimonious.” He’s telling Mr. Will about sins Mr. Will would rather be at peace with.
“In his June encyclical and elsewhere,” writes Mr. Will,
Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be. This man who says ‘the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions’ proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanity’s ‘harmful habits.’ The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence.
Well, yes, the pope does talk about plankton. It’s in § 40. Mr. Will makes it sound as though this is a trivial concern, about which the pope is wagging his finger at us. But let’s look at what the pope says. Let’s go to the original source to hear the pope, not to an advocacy Web site that claims the title “Catholic.” The context of the discussion is biodiversity.
“Particularly threatened,” says the pope,
are marine organisms which we tend to overlook, like some forms of plankton; they represent a significant element in the ocean food chain, and species used for our food ultimately depend on them.
So the pope is not concerned with plankton for their own sake, but with the integrity of our own food supply. He’s concerned about famine and starvation in areas where fish is a main source of food. Is that trivial? Of course one should take care to have the facts right on this point. But one can also scratch his chin before the TV camera and say, “Well, we don’t really know, you know, who is this pope guy?” and thus avoid the moral issue at the root of the discussion: There is a limit to our incessant habit of using and disposing, using and disposing. We are not the Lord of all the things we can get.
(Mr. Will also gets the history of Galileo wrong, but so does everyone else. People who simply repeat the myths they once heard said tire me.)
Mr. Will goes on:
Francis deplores “compulsive consumerism,” a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire.
Really? That strikes me as a rather mean view of the aspirations of human beings. Human beings who want aspire to be human beings who get and get more and get still more? And once what they’ve got is of no more use to them they discard and then get the next thing? That’s Mr. Will’s view of human desire? I think the pope’s point is that those who live that way suffer from another poverty. Human beings in want aspire to human dignity, not the endless getting and throwing away of things. Here is the pope in Evangelii Gaudium 2:
The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience.
The longings of people’s souls aren’t satisfied by turning them into consumers. That’s just exchanging one poverty for another.
Mr. Will goes on to engage in a long lecture about how fossil fuels and energy have helped to eliminate poverty, a point which the pope hardly disputes in its own right. He actually says that very thing in Laudato Si. (If only Mr. Will had read it.) The pope also says that economic systems and the world’s resources can not be put into use apart from the moral law.
Mr. Will ends on this note:
[The pope] stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.
And what are “the nations premises” to which Mr. Will makes reference here? A belief in fossil fuels? Am I to believe I can’t be a patriotic American and still accept the pope’s teaching? I must believe that America has no faults to be called out for? We’re all goodness because we’re all wealth and things, things, things; and the rest of the world can only aspire to be us? Choose you this day whom ye will serve; as for me and my house, we will serve Mammon? No. I reject all that. That’s an attitude that the pope desperately needs to call out—our own arrogance, our belief that we are the lords of our own wealth and our own stuff with no moral duty to other human beings and the world God gave us. We must look at our own sins, not just point the finger at another man’s.
Think of all the hate there is in Red China. Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.
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