The Archbishop and the Pope
St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City (TTStudio/Shutterstock.com).The Peronist Pope Francis: A Conversation with Daniel Mahoney
A View of Pope Francis and the Death Penalty, with Something to Offend Everybody
Pope Francis lights the uniflamma lamp at the tomb of Saint Nicholas in Bari, Italy, July 7, 2018. (Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP/ Getty Images)Equality versus Feeding the Hungry
People walking along an open sewer in an unidentified African town (John Wollworth/Shutterstock.com).Pope Francis’s Mess
SAINT PETER'S SQUARE, VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - 2018/04/04: Pope Francis delivers his homily as he celebrates his Weekly General Audience in St. Peter's Square. (Giuseppe Ciccia/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)Spadaro and Figueroa’s “Ecumenism of Hate”
Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa’s article, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism: A Surprising Ecumenism,” in La Civiltà Cattolica (described by Spadaro as a “peer-reviewed magazine” whose “articles are always read and approved by the [Vatican’s] Secretariat of State”) is a bungled opportunity. The stark Manichean colors with which they paint their subject, and the apocalyptic tones they sound, combined with a muddled understanding of different currents in American evangelicalism, obscures rather than illuminates their argument.
A Bien Pensant Pope
Pope Francis waves from the Speakers Balcony at the U.S. Capitol building following his speech to a joint meeting of Congress (Photo By Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call).The Pope’s recent address to a joint session of Congress was greeted ecstatically, though (or perhaps because) it was notable mainly for its secular rather than for its religious pieties. It was the speech of a politician seeking re-election rather than that of the spiritual leader of a considerable part of mankind; as such, it seemed like the work not of a man intent upon telling the truth, however painful or unpopular, but that of a committee of speech-writers who sifted every word for its likely effect upon a constituency or audience, appealing to some without being too alienating of others.
A Libertarian View of Francis’ Laudato Si
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si (“Be Praised”) has been acclaimed by the international media as a call to action on global warming, to combat its threat to world survival. It has been praised in New York Times editorials and by Progressive Catholic intellectuals like E.J. Dionne on the Left while garnering scathing or dismissive responses from libertarian, free-market types on the Right. The papal document, however, is not fundamentally about climate change (who questions that weather changes?) or even global warming. (The Pope merely follows the scientific “consensus” and even qualifies it as a trend that “would appear” to “indicate” that…
Show Me the Way to Poverty
Pope Francis (L) speaks with Bolivian President Evo Morales during the Second World Meeting of the Popular Movements at the Expo Feria Exhibition Centre, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on July 9, 2015. Pope Francis called on a million faithful to reject today's consumer society, at an open-air mass in Bolivia, South America's poorest nation. (CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images)In a recent speech in Bolivia, Pope Francis voiced his indictment of what he calls “the globalization of exclusion and indifference.” Speaking of what he believes to be problems universal to Latin America, he wishes, “May the cry of the excluded be heard in Latin America and throughout the world.” But who, I wonder, are they listening to?
Miraculous Marriage
Many worry that marriage is in its death throes these days, at least here in the prosperous West. Even Pope Francis commented at his recent conference on the family in Rome that “We now live in a culture of the temporary in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.”
Many today see liberation from the commitment to marriage as a positive social gain. Francis responded that this “revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom but in fact has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.”
Isabel Sawhill’s new book Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage reports the numbers for the United States. They suggest that the word “revolution” is not an exaggeration.
