The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  After Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, Cardinal Joseph Tobin called on the U.S. bishops to increase their climate change activism, “given the possibility that the administration isn’t going to be very interested in the questions that Pope Francis is interested in.”26

  Don’t Breed “Like Rabbits”

  Environmentalists often chafed under the rhetoric of Pope John Paul II, who decried the left’s “culture of death,” and Pope Benedict XVI, who described its politics as a “dictatorship of relativism.” But Pope Francis has avoided those phrases. Environmentalists have breathed easier knowing that any opposition from Francis’s Vatican on contested moral issues will be minimal. At the beginning of the papacy, they cheered his comment that the Church is too “obsessed” with abortion and artificial birth control—stances that environmentalists regard as a major obstacle to their climate change agenda. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore wrote that environmentalists support a “Global Marshall Plan” with “fertility management” at the core of the plan—fertility management being a euphemism for widespread abortions and ubiquitous government-regulated contraceptive use.27

  Francis’s predecessors unequivocally condemned the sexual revolution, but he has been far more elliptical on the subject. While he hasn’t promoted the population control agenda of the Al Gores, he does allow himself heterodox musings from time to time that undercut the Church’s opposition to it.

  In early 2015, for example, Francis appalled conservative Catholics with large families, and delighted environmentalists who call for small families, when he told the press that Catholics shouldn’t “be like rabbits.”28 “Good Catholics,” he said, should practice “responsible parenthood.” Catholic married couples who conscientiously follow the Church’s prohibition on artificial birth control were aghast, and even liberal Catholics acknowledged that Pope Francis had adopted a startlingly novel line. “As a Catholic, it’s kinda shocking to hear @Pontifiex say, ‘Catholics must not breed like rabbits.’ Really?” tweeted CNN anchor Carol Costello.29

  Nor could conservative Catholics believe their ears when Pope Francis expanded on his remark by recalling the time he rebuked one of his parishioners—a mother who had had seven children by caesarean sections—for “tempting God.” She was guilty of “irresponsibility,” he said.30

  Past popes quoted the scriptural admonition “Be fruitful and multiply,” but Pope Francis has sent mixed signals on family size. In recent decades, the size of families for many Catholics has shrunk—a trend with which Pope Francis appears comfortable. Around the time he was telling Catholic couples not to be like “rabbits,” he pointed to a finding of modern demographers: “I believe that three children per family, from what the experts say, is the key number for sustaining the population.”31

  The British Catholic organization Voice of the Family expressed concern that Laudato Si’ omitted any traditional defense of the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control. Voice of the Family official Maria Madise noted that at a time when “contraception and environmentalism so often go hand-in-hand” Pope Francis declined to reaffirm “Church teaching on the primacy of procreation.” The organization has also expressed concern that Pope Francis’s representatives to the United Nations are consenting to the UN agenda in favor of abortion and free contraception.

  “There has been extensive collaboration between other Holy See bodies and powerful proponents of abortion, contraception and population control during the current pontificate, under the guise of promoting sustainable development,” according to the group. It points in particular to a 2016 speech in which Monsignor Jean-Marie Mupendawatu, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, endorsed the UN’s sustainable development goals, even though one of them is “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services.”32

  In his post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis makes passing mention of Humanae Vitae without quoting its direction condemnations of artificial birth control. He also belittles the Church for its past teaching on marriage: “we often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.”

  Where his predecessors condemned artificial birth control in all cases as an “intrinsically disordered” act, Pope Francis has said that it is permissible under certain circumstances. On a flight back from Mexico in 2016, he approved of contraceptive use by women infected with the Zika virus.33 In the course of his remarks, he falsely claimed that Pope Paul VI had approved of contraceptive use in the 1960s by missionaries in Africa who were in danger of rape. This falsehood was pointed out to Francis’s press secretary, but he didn’t bother to clarify the pope’s remark. He just reiterated it: “So contraceptives or condoms, especially in cases of emergency and seriousness, may also be the subject of a serious conscience discernment. This is what the pope said.”34

  Once again, the situation ethics of the Church’s first Jesuit pope confused the faithful and gratified the Church’s critics, who gleefully observed that if contraceptive use is justified for Zika, then the pope must surely also condone it for the even deadlier AIDS virus.

  The Darwinist Pope

  The first radical green pope is also impressing the environmental left with his support for Darwinism. Leading Darwinists have called mainstream evolutionary theory—which holds that species form as a result of random mutations and natural selection—the “greatest engine of atheism ever invented,” insofar as it provides a creation story without a creator.35 Understanding the atheistic implications of the theory, the Church has long viewed Darwinism with suspicion. But Pope Francis doesn’t. In the contemporary clash between Darwinism and “intelligent design,” Pope Francis sides with the Darwinists.

  Pope Francis has lectured Catholics on the need to embrace a conception of God that comports with Darwinian theory. “Pope Francis: God is not ‘a magician, with a magic wand,’” ran a headline in October 2014. Reporters noted that his deference to Darwinism represents a significant “rhetorical break” with his predecessors.36

  “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Pope Francis said in a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “[God] created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

  Pope Francis, from time to time, indicates that he doesn’t share the Church’s traditional understanding of Christ’s miracles, a position explained by his exaggerated respect for the rationalism of modern science and his weakness for trendy currents within modern biblical scholarship. For example, Pope Francis has interpreted Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes as nothing more than a metaphor. On multiple occasions, he has said that the “miracle” wasn’t a physical event but a lesson of “sharing” that Christ had imparted to the crowd, which inspired them to take food out that they were hoarding and give it to those nearby. He has called it a “parable” and that it was “not magic or sorcery.” In one homily he said, “Jesus managed to generate a current among his followers: they all went on sharing what was their own, turning it into a gift for the others; and that is how they all got to eat their fill. Incredibly, food was left over: they collected it in seven baskets.”

  That sermon, as one priest put it, “leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion that, along with so many modern historical-critical biblical scholars, he has taken on board the well-known, century-old rationalistic ‘demythologization’ of this Gospel miracle. So we are left to wonder what other miracles of Jesus he may think require the same treatment.”37

  For Vatican officials these days, theistic Darwinism, even though it remains a contested theory, is treated like cata
strophic man-made global warming—as unquestionably factual. (Pope Francis’s chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has ludicrously said that the pope’s support for the global warming claims carries the same moral and magisterial weight as the Church’s opposition to abortion.38) The number two official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Archbishop Augustine Di Noia, said at a lecture in New York City in 2016 that “we can’t ignore what evolutionary science is telling us.” But Fr. Michael Chaberek, a Dominican and author of Catholicism and Evolution: A History from Darwin to Pope Francis, believes that Pope Francis and his aides are sowing “confusion” on the issue by treating Darwinism as a fact. He argues that this unwarranted deference to Darwinian science threatens to corrupt the Church’s understanding of creation and the doctrine of Original Sin.

  “Even in the seminaries and theological departments, the classic theological treatise ‘On Creation’ (De Deo Creante or De Creatione) has been replaced with the teaching about different science-faith models and vague speculations about ‘God working entirely through secondary causes,’” he has said. “In Biblical scholarship the historical and literal meaning of Genesis (1–3) was abandoned, giving place to all kinds of reductive interpretations. But new science shows how little the Darwinian mechanism can actually accomplish.”39

  In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis makes admiring mention of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Darwinist who was disgraced by his association with Piltdown Man, an “early human discovery” that turned out to be a hoax. The writings of Teilhard were repeatedly censured by the Church. But Francis cites him as an impeccably orthodox source, writing in Laudato Si’ of his “contribution” to the Church’s understanding of creation.40

  A scientist interviewed for this book called Pope Francis’s slavish adherence to “unfettered Darwinism” a “cover-your-ass strategy” designed to placate a Western elite quick to call the Church anti-science.

  Like the climate change activists, the Darwinists see the pope’s support as a propaganda coup and have incorporated it into their politics. “The Pope would like you to accept evolution,” intones Smithsonian Magazine.41 In 2016, in keeping with his enthusiastic embrace of Darwinism, Pope Francis lifted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s sanction on a scholar, Ariel Álvarez Valdés, who denies the historicity of Adam and Eve.

  By placing the Church at the front of the left’s environmentalist juggernaut, Pope Francis has become a superstar in the eyes of the Western intelligentsia. But many Catholics in the pews view it as one more frivolous abuse of his authority. On the moral issues a pope should address, he falls silent. On contentious political issues, he couldn’t be more voluble.

  A study released by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2016 suggested that the pope’s encyclical on global warming had left faithful Catholics and non-Catholics cold. Texas Tech professor Nan Li, who led the study, concluded, “While Pope Francis’s environmental call may have increased some individuals’ concerns about climate change, it backfired with conservative Catholics and non-Catholics, who not only resisted the message but defended their pre-existing beliefs by devaluing the pope’s credibility on climate change.”42 “The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters,” said Australian cardinal George Pell, in an implicit rebuke to the pope’s environmentalism.43

  In his attempt to pressure Catholics into embracing the radical green movement, Pope Francis is creating needless divisions within the Church, handing a propaganda tool to her moral enemies, and exposing the Church to future embarrassment when the “science” behind global warming claims is discredited. Where other popes sought to save souls, he prefers the more fashionable cause of “saving the planet.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Open-Borders Pope

  Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,” Jesus Christ told his disciples. Traditionally, the Church has interpreted this to mean that Catholics are duty-bound to obey the state’s just laws, including its immigration laws. To the cheers of the left, Pope Francis has broken with this tradition, openly encouraging defiance of national borders. His pontificate has been a bewildering spectacle of stunts and speeches designed to advance the cause of open borders and illegal immigration.

  In 2016, seeking to sanctify illegal immigration, Pope Francis traveled to the border between Mexico and America to hold a Mass. A needlessly provocative gesture, the Mass in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, had the predictable effect of dividing Catholics and galvanizing liberals. The pope used soft and platitudinous language to present illegal immigration in the most benign terms. He called it “forced migration.”

  “The human tragedy that is forced migration is a global phenomenon today,” he said during his homily at the Mass. “This crisis, which can be measured in numbers and statistics, we want to instead measure with names, stories, families.” They are “brothers and sisters excluded as a result of poverty and violence, drug trafficking and criminal organizations.” He made no mention of the problems associated with illegal immigration or the duties of the state to address those problems. Gazing over at the U.S. border fence, he made a sign of the cross and gave his blessings to the illegal immigrants.1

  His one-sided characterization of the immigration debate was seen by Democrats as a political windfall in an election year. But Republicans pushed back against it.

  “I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico,” said Donald Trump during the Republican presidential primaries. The pope, in reply, called Trump “not Christian” for proposing to build a wall along the southern border.2

  “It is stunning,” said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. “I don’t ever remember in my lifetime that a pope has ever injected himself into the specifics of an American presidential election and specifically calling out of a candidate.”3

  The pope’s criticism encouraged left-wing bishops to launch attacks on Trump. Santa Fe archbishop John Wester said, “I think some of the rhetoric coming out of [the Trump] campaign is deplorable.” He dismissed Trump’s position as “scapegoating and targeting people like the immigrant, the refugee and the poor.”4

  But in a measure of his wilting support among conservatives, the pope’s criticism of Trump only enhanced Trump’s appeal in the Republican primaries. Mary Matalin, a Republican strategist who opposed Trump in the primaries, found the pope’s broadside unhelpful. “The pope should stay out of politics,” she said.5 “He gave Trump a big, fat, wet kiss, whether he meant to or not.” After Jeb Bush lost the South Carolina primary, he blamed his defeat in part on the pope’s open-borders activism. When asked by MSNBC what contributed to his loss, Bush replied, “The pope intervening in American politics.”

  The pope’s questioning of Trump’s faith was ironic, given his unwillingness to question the faith of pro-abortion Catholic politicians, not to mention the faith of third-world dictators. Rush Limbaugh noticed the latter, saying: “Has he questioned the faith of the Castro brothers? Has the Pope questioned the faith of any communist leaders?… Has he ever said that Mao Tse-tung, that Fidel Castro, that Raul Castro, any other communist is not a Christian? Why Donald Trump? ’Cause Trump wants to build a wall?”

  The pope’s anti-Trump outburst highlighted his tendency to prioritize political rather than religious issues. He reserves his rhetorical fire not for defiant members of his flock but for easy targets reviled by the liberal elite. Many theological subjects leave him cold, but immigration politics draws out his passions. (After Trump won the presidency in 2016, Pope Francis immediately called on the U.S. bishops to ramp up their amnesty advocacy, “mindful of the contribution that the Hispanic community makes to the life of the nation.”)

  “Let everyone come,” he said in 2016 while surrounded by amnesty advocates whom he had invited to join him on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica in a spontaneous gesture.6 His open-borders ideology is closely co
nnected to his anti-capitalist, third-worldist view that poor countries have a right to the wealth of richer countries. It also flows from his confidence in international institutions and dim view of national sovereignty, which he sees as an impediment to world progress. In Laudato Si’, he calls for “stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions” to address matters related to “migration.”

  Just as he has called on wealthy countries to forgive the debts of poorer countries, so he also believes that wealthy countries have a duty to open their borders to immigrants from those countries. Were the goods of the earth more “equitably” distributed, he argues, people wouldn’t need to migrate.

  “These poor people are fleeing war, hunger, but that is the tip of the iceberg. Because underneath that is the cause; and the cause is a bad and unjust socioeconomic system,” he has said.7 In other words, if the poor have a right to the property of the rich, then it follows that they also have a right to citizenship in their countries.

  His speeches are replete with “apologies” and appeals to the third world, without any scrutiny of the internal causes of poverty in those countries. “I want to be a spokesman for the deepest longings of indigenous peoples,” he says. In this role, he has castigated the Church for evangelizing indigenous peoples: “I say this to you with regret: many grave sins were committed against the native peoples in the name of God.”8 He often condemns “new forms of colonialism” even as he operates like a lobbyist for paternalistic forms of liberal neocolonialism that come from the United Nations.