"Why Is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?"

There's a click-bait headline that seduced me. It's an op-ed at Bloomberg.com.

By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. The Catholic Church, I had always understood, disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the seven deadly sins. I would have expected Francis to urge people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.

Obviously, one can say the Pope is promoting virtue, notably charity. But the pitch comes from a Harvard professor, Lant Pritchett, whose expertise is in alleviating poverty, but hear him out. This next part may win over even the Pope fans:

While Jesus repeatedly preached against the love of riches, he was urging people to respond to a call to God and to become “rich to God.” It was not an appeal for people to resent the riches of others and obsess about material inequality. Jesus, when asked to remedy inequality, turned the focus back on envy and greed.

“Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.’ He replied to him, ‘Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?’ Then he said to the crowd, ‘Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.’” (Luke 12:13-15)

I am all for reducing poverty... What I’m against is talking about “inequality” as if that term denoted any of those concerns. Poverty matters; injustice matters. Mere inequality is beside the point.

Mere inequality is beside the point.

"Pope Francis, The People’s Pope" is Time's Person of the Year.

"He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century."

Here's the post where I analyzed Time's 10 finalist and concluded that the person would be Edith Windsor. My runner-up was Edward Snowden.

But my rejection of the Pope had an "unless" clause: "Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no."

A number of commenters here thought the Pope would win, and I want to single out Pat:

I think it goes to the Pope and not because he's said some "leftist" things. In a very short term, he has sparked new life into a very large religion. I am a crotchety grumpy conservative, and I love everything about the guy.

I haven't read the whole article yet and probably never will. Here's a key passage that connects to American political themes:

[B]ehind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny operator. He makes masterly use of 21st century tools to perform his 1st century office. He is photographed washing the feet of female convicts, posing for selfies with young visitors to the Vatican, embracing a man with a deformed face. He is quoted saying of women who consider abortion because of poverty or rape, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” Of gay people: “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” To divorced and remarried Catholics who are, by rule, forbidden from taking Communion, he says that this crucial rite “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

And:

He can barely contain his outrage when he writes, “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Elsewhere in his exhortation, he goes directly after capitalism and globalization: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This ­opinion … has never been confirmed by the facts.” He says the church must work “to eliminate the structural causes of poverty” and adds that while “the Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike … he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”

ADDED: Is that last sentence miswritten or does the Pope talk about himself in the third person like that? I looked it up. The answer is the latter, or really neither. It's more of an opinion about the role of whoever occupies the position of Pope.

The 10 finalists for Time's Person of the Year.

I know. I hate getting suckered into this annual nonsense, but the list presents some interesting options"

Bashar Assad, President of Syria
Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder
Ted Cruz, Texas Senator
Miley Cyrus, Singer
Pope Francis, Leader of the Catholic Church
Barack Obama, President of the United States
Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Edward Snowden, N.S.A. Leaker
Edith Windsor, Gay rights activist

It's not going to be Assad. If we were going to do Bad Guy persons of the year, somebody more dramatically bad would have won recently, like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. It would be pathetic to reward Assad with that kind of attention. What about Vladimir Putin? He's not even on the list of finalists, probably because he's already won, back in 2007.

Scratch Hassan Rouhani. He hassan done enough yet.

It's not going to be Barack Obama. He's already won — repeatedly — right? And he was barely there this year, never around when anything was happening. I might accept a jocular nod to The Absence of Barack Obama, because that metaphysical being has been everywhere, involved in everything.

As for Kathleen Sebelius, that's ridiculous. If they were at all thinking of giving it to her, they should have switched to one of those nameless, faceless type of "persons" like The Endangered Earth (1988) or You (2006) or The Whistleblowers (2002) and give it to The Uninsured, The Young Invincibles, The Coders, or The Bugs or something.

It's not going to be Jeff Bezos, because he already won, even if that's hard to remember because it was so last century. 1999.

An entertainer has never won, so there's zero chance that the first one will be Miley Cyrus. Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no.

That leaves Edith Windsor, Ted Cruz, and Edward Snowden. I think Edith Windsor is most likely, because: 1. She gives Time a chance to pick an individual woman, something they've done — embarrassing! — only once before. (It was Corazon C. Aquino, in 1986.) 2. She's a good figurehead for same-sex marriage and gay rights, which were very big this year. 3. It lets Time vary the usual focus on politics, economics, and foreign affairs.

There's Ted. Dear sweet, crazy, everyone-hates-him Ted. If Time is smelling blood and wants to punch around a conservative, the man to pick on is definitely Ted Cruz.

Edward Snowden is an interesting choice, but I don't think it helps Obama to create an occasion for everyone to focus on the NSA problem. Yeah, it's a distraction from healthcare.gov, but does Obama want help in that form? This is a 4th reason to go with Edith Windsor: Gay marriage is a subject that casts a flattering light on Obama.

So we have a winner, don't you think? Edith Windsor.

"Twice today I have been very moved to come across gloriously beautiful — dare I say transcendent — images..."

"... where the poignancy of the moment was movingly emphasized by the small unconscious movement of a single hand."

"With less than a year left in his final term, President Hamid Karzai insists that he is eager to leave the presidential palace and lead a quieter life."

"It turns out, though, he may just be moving next door, to a lavish new home yards from the complex that has been the seat of his power for more than a decade."

It could work. It's a little like Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. Listening in on one of the new Pope's famous phone calls to ordinary people:

“Hi, it’s me again. I know I’m being Pope Pushy, but I’d like your advice. I’m having problems with Pope Benedict. Well, he’s not really the Pope anymore, but he sits there, in that mother-in-law apartment, and he criticizes. He’s always, like, ‘When I was the Pope . . . ,’ and, ‘I’m fine, don’t listen to me, just go Skype with all your new gay buddies. . . .’ So I just need to hear you say that I’m doing O.K.”

"I am wary of a solution that can be reduced to a kind of 'female machismo,' because a woman has a different make-up than a man."

"But what I hear about the role of women is often inspired by an ideology of machismo," said Pope Francis.

Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops. I say this because we must not confuse the function with the dignity. We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church. We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman. Only by making this step will it be possible to better reflect on their function within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.

This is guarded and abstruse. The key word seems to be "function," as if it's all about the usefulness of women. Obviously, he's not talking about formal equality. If he's a feminist, he's a difference feminist. A lot of deep thinking is needed about what women are for.

What is woman's place, her specific place in those places of the various areas?

"The Calling of St. Matthew" — the Caravaggio painting often contemplated by Pope Francis.

"That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew."

"It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff." Then the pope whispers in Latin: "I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance."

"The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."

Said Pope Francis.

The new pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United States, often appeared to make combating abortion, gay marriage and contraception their top public policy priorities. These teachings are “clear” to him as “a son of the church,” he said, but they have to be taught in a larger context. “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives."...

In contrast to Benedict, who sometimes envisioned a smaller but purer church — a “faithful fragment” — Francis envisions the church as a big tent.

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

Interesting to picture the smallness as protecting not purity but mediocrity.

We also learn that the Pope's favorite movie is “La Strada.”

"Ciao Michele, it's Pope Francis."

The new Pope makes personal phone calls.

Last month he reportedly rang an Italian man, Michele Ferri, who had written to him after his brother was murdered....

"He told me he had cried when he read the letter I had written him," Ferri said.

More recently he called a woman who'd written a letter saying "she feared no priest would baptise her illegitimate child," and "the Pope told her that if she had any trouble he would personally hold the baptism."

"The Pope told me I was very brave and strong to decide to keep my baby," she said.

Nice. Really nice. But what a foundation for prank calls.

"My mobile phone rang and when I asked who it was, he responded, 'The Pope.'"

"I just froze."

"I didn't want to be pope."

Said Pope Francis after a little girl asked him if he wanted to be pope. He also said — speaking with a bunch of children — that "he's living in the Vatican hotel for his 'psychiatric' health."

IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss said:

"...he's living in the Vatican hotel for his 'psychiatric' health."

The name's Francis..., but everybody calls me Psycho. Any of you guys call me Francis, and I'll kill you.

Vatican walks back Pope on atheists?

"Just one day after the pope's now famous words in Rome on May 22, a Vatican spokesman the Rev. Thomas Rosica released a statement...."

"All salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body," Rosica wrote. "Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her."

Here's what the Pope had said:

"If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter," Francis said. "We must meet one another doing good. 'But I don't believe, Father, I am an atheist!' But do good: we will meet one another there."

God "has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! Even the atheists.... Everyone!"

So says Pope Francis.

"(T)his ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God...
And that, simply, is blasphemy."...

To both atheists and believers, he said that “if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good.”

ADDED:

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"When the church is self-referential... inadvertently, she believes she has her own light..."

"...he ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness," said Cardinal Bergoglio in the 4-minute speech addressing the Cardinals and — as the WSJ reports — leading them to pick him as the new Pope.

The new pope "must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing."

The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into "the periphery" or "the edge." But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn't self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice....

"He's not relating this to ideology, to let's say, rich against poor," Cardinal Cipriani Thorne said. "No, no, nothing like that. He's saying that Jesus himself brought us to this world to be poor — to not have this excessive consumerism, this great difference between rich and poor."

"America 'Can Do Better'..."

A Drudgtaposition.

Driscoll is talking about the photo of Obama that happens to have a portrait of George Washington in the background, but that Drudge page he links to begins with a very striking picture of the new Pope, lying prone — with the quote "Respond to evil with good"— and a big closeup of a cute baby getting a spoonful of mush — with the headline "Putin Orders Ban on Adoptions By Foreign Gay Couples."

Graphically, the horizontality of the Pope corresponds to the spoon, but if that's expressing an analogy, it could be: 1. The Pope's advice is pap, 2. The Pope's advice is the simple nourishment that Putin would take from helpless babies, or 3. Sexual perversion (is the Pope humping the rug and what does Putin think gay people put in a baby's mouth?!!!).

ADDED: Sorry that #3 is inflammatory, but I'm just being honest about the alternative interpretations of the imagery. #3 is especially justified by the phallic imagery on either side of the Obama photo. Atop the left column, there's an upright microphone (representing the newly dead record producer Phil Ramone), and atop the right column there's Kim Jong-un (and another N. Korean) aggressively pointing fingers or guns or some sort of metal cylinders.

The "simple Pope" narrative.

The new Pope, Francis, eats "[b]aked skinless chicken, salad, fruit and a glass of simple wine," and this is supposedly terribly different from Pope Benedict who ate "fettuccine with shrimp, zucchini and saffron," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who once "hosted an elaborate vegetarian dinner to celebrate Benedict’s 60th anniversary as a priest in 2011, featuring fresh-picked fare from the area near Venice, including chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries," and NY's Cardinal Timothy Dolan who likes "fettuccine Bolognese, lamb cutlet, spinach and peppers, with Sicilian cannoli and homemade tiramisu."

Where is the stark contrast? Fettucine is just noodles. What's elaborate about putting some shrimp on it or some meat sauce (which is all "Bolognese" means)? Then there's lamb and a bunch of vegetables. Why is "chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries" elaborate compared to "salad" and "fruit"? What's in the salad? Maybe chicory. What's the fruit? Maybe cherries. And cannoli and tiramisu are just routine desserts in Italy (and NYC). There's nothing fancy about eating cannoli!

I don't really mind if WaPo does a puff piece on the new Pope. But it's just such a dumb way to talk about food. They're mindlessly impressing the "simple Pope" narrative onto random facts.

"On Gay Unions, a Pragmatist Before He Was a Pope."

NYT headline. You may think this sounds absurd, just a figment of the imagination of American liberals who somehow suddenly see this once-unknown issue as the centerpiece of civil rights, but:

Argentina was on the verge of approving gay marriage, and the Roman Catholic Church was desperate to stop that from happening. It would lead tens of thousands of its followers in protest on the streets of Buenos Aires and publicly condemn the proposed law, a direct threat to church teaching, as the work of the devil.

But behind the scenes, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who led the public charge against the measure, spoke out in a heated meeting of bishops in 2010 and advocated a highly unorthodox solution: that the church in Argentina support the idea of civil unions for gay couples....

Bergoglio revealed himself as "a deal maker willing to compromise and court opposing sides in the debate, detractors included." Where opposition wasn't going to stop gay marriage, the compromise of civil unions might. That was the thinking. Bergoglio "acted as both the public face of the opposition to the law and as a bridge-builder."

“He didn’t want the church to take a position of condemning people but rather of respect for their rights like any vulnerable person,” said [Roxana Alfieri, a social worker in the communications department of the bishops’ central office here] who sat in on the bishops’ 2010 meeting.

"Estonia remained one of the last corners of medieval Europe to be Christianized."

"In 1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against pagans in Northern Europe. The Northern Crusades from Northern Germany established the stronghold of Riga (in modern Latvia). With the help of the newly converted local tribes of Livs and Letts, the crusaders initiated raids into part of what is present-day Estonia in 1208. Estonian tribes fiercely resisted the attacks from Riga and occasionally themselves sacked territories controlled by the crusaders. In 1217 the German crusading order the Sword Brethren and their recently converted allies won a major battle in which the Estonian commander Lembitu was killed. The period of the several Northern Crusade battles in Estonia between 1208 and 1227 is also known as the period of the ancient Estonian fight for independence."

In Estonia, today's "History of" country, which looked like this before September 21, 1217:

The media see the Pope as "a Supreme Court justice that they can't turn."

"They see the pope as a Supreme Court justice they can't intimidate. The Supreme Court scares the heck out of the left because to them it's infallible. Now, they succeeded. Obama and the left somehow succeeded in turning John Roberts when it came to the constitutionality of Obamacare, but they can't turn the pope."

Said Rush Limbaugh, yesterday, after playing a hilarious audio montage of media characters — Chris Cuomo of CNN, Shannon Bream of Fox, Erin Burnett, Juan Carlos Lopez of CNN Español, Gwen Ifill, Allen Pizzey of CBS — reacting to the new Pope.

CUOMO: Where is Pope Francis on the issues that matter most, issues about contraception, women priests?

BREAM: Pope Francis is staunchly orthodox on the issues of abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage.

BURNETT: He opposed same-sex marriage in Argentina. He opposed free contraception.

LOPEZ: He follows a conservative line. He opposes, uh, same-sex marriages. He is conservative on birth control.

PIERS MORGAN: He is known to be, duh, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage.

MARIA TERESA KUMAR: He has been against contraception. He's been against marriage equality.

PIZZEY: ...a conservative and opposes abortion!

IFILL: So this is not a pope or a papacy we were gonna see any kind of change when it comes to things like abortion or gay marriage.

They don't seem like they are clowning, though Piers Morgan has the wit to say "duh."

Pope Francis looks like...

... Ed Wynn!



A lovable face, I think. Something very sweet about it. Ed Wynn's real name was Isaiah Edwin Leopold. He made the middle name — we're told — into his whole name "to save his family the embarrassment of having a lowly comedian as a relative." You may remember him from the "Twilight Zone" episode "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" — about an old man who believed he would die if his clock stopped. Can you remember whether the clock stops and, if so, whether the man dies?