pope francis

I'm not Catholic. I'm not even culturally Catholic really, although the fact that some of my formative years were spent in New Orleans, and my formal education in religious studies began there, is non-trivial. I was raised Congregationalist, which is about as far from Catholicism as you can get in the mainline Protestant denominations -- far from revering the Blessed Virgin Mary, Congregationalists don't even believe the virgin birth happened.

So that's my background. Now let's talk about the dumbass things I have seen people say in response to Pope Francis's visit to the United States.

Chronic migraines have me exasperated with a lot of the stupidity in my field of view; my tone reflects this.

1: Why does everyone care about the pope so much? I'm not even Catholic. Who cares what he says?

Well, you live in the fucking world, chuckles. Open the window and let the air in.

Francis is the spiritual leader to over 1 billion people, about 15% of the world. The Dalai Lama, in comparison, represents 20 million people at the outside. While the Catholic Church is not the political force it once was -- and ever having been that force is a subject of valid criticism -- the Catholic population is both widespread throughout the world and heavily concentrated in some areas, such that Catholic beliefs have significant political influence.

One of the things I will rail against over and over again in this blog is declining religious literacy. Declining religious engagement is a more complicated topic, and one in which I am a hypocrite -- I am not a churchgoer myself and can't fathom becoming one -- but it is definitely implicated in the decline of religious literacy. Religion is a key element of human culture, a key impulse in human nature, and may have been since before biologically modern humans even fucking existed. It doesn't go away just because science overtakes supernaturalism, nor is there reasonable basis to claim that religion depends on or extends supernaturalism.

That's another area for another time too, really, but the point is: the spiritual leader to a seventh of the world is someone whose views influence a great many people, and the views of a great many people are the musculature that bend the shape of the moment of that world that you get to experience, and what the fuck is wrong with you, you stomatous wet turd, that you think you can recuse yourself from caring about what happens in that moment?

If the President of France started making multiple speeches condemning, I don't know, Islamophobia and economic inequality, I would be interested and glad because these are utterances that can improve the world, and while I don't live in the part of the world that would be affected, because I am a living breathing human, I care about the lives lived in other parts of the world.

Francis is an especially newsworthy pope because of the ways he differs from recent predecessors. Though he is absolutely liberal in a Catholic framework, there's no denying that liberalism. Vatican II aside -- and most of its promises and intentions were never followed through, despite its reputation -- the general trend of American religion for the last five or eleven decades has been increasing conservatism and increasing alliance with political conservatism. The evangelicals succeeded in creating a political alliance with Catholics over abortion, which redirected Catholic political efforts traditionally spent on advocating for the poor, the sick, prisoners, and immigrants. (I'm not saying Catholics would not have wasted their time on the pro-life movement without evangelical involvement, don't worry.) Evangelical Protestantism has overtaken mainline Protestantism. In a handful of centuries we have shifted from a country in which church folk spent their time caring for the poor and pressuring the government to provide social services to one in which church folk are mobilized by -- let's call them what they are -- fuckstick evildoers to stop the poor from getting medicine.

So it is a good sign that there is a Pope who echoes the concerns of the Social Gospel, a Pope whose social and political priorities are aligned with what we like to think Catholicism has traditionally been associated with. This is a man with vast resources and vast influence. You have to be a dunce not to give a shit what he thinks.

That brings me to...

2) Fuck this Pope, he hasn't done anything about the sex abuse cover-up, abortion, or female priests.

Those issues are very important to me. There are a host of other concerns people have brought up in criticizing Francis, and I agree with many of those as well, but these seem to be the big ones -- the continued failure to do anything about the Church's orchestrated cover-up of rampant child sexual abuse, the Church's ongoing opposition to abortion, and the way it has dragged its feet on the inevitability of ordaining women as priests. (We are several decades into a severe shortage of priests, and the functional health of the Catholic Church depends on addressing it.)

However.

I voted for Barack Obama twice, in 2008 and 2012. My 2008 vote was predicated on several key issues, apart from being a vote against McCain/Palin: universal healthcare, serious finance reform, serious reform of higher education (including but not limited to the student debt crisis), the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and the de-escalation of our involvement in / instigation of foreign wars. In 2012 I knew I was only going to get one of those things, and voted to re-elect him anyway.

Yes, of course Obama has been a disappointment to progressives -- ironically, obviously, given how much idiot conservatives paint him as a socialist, when he has sadly turned out to be a centrist on most issues. Only some of this can be ascribed to Republican obstructionism. Some areas where he has failed to act pose disastrous consequences if they are not handled by his successor, and other areas simply reflect badly on us as a people.

So too with Francis. Neither Catholic nor non-Catholic voted for him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't represent an alternative to other possible Popes, and just as Obama's race signalled an end to a long-present barrier to entry, so does Francis's Argentinian nationality, which makes him the first Pope from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. Given the cultural differences in Catholic concerns throughout the world, this is not a minor thing.

While Francis has not abandoned many of the conservative positions of previous modern popes, he has not placed special emphasis on them either. He fails to give us the answer we want when talking about ordaining women, homosexuality, or birth control, but they're not part of his platform, as it were, either. (Abortion is another matter; his pro-life commitment is clear.) Meanwhile, he has advocated for the poor, condemned wealth inequality and the institutions that keep it in place, reaffirmed the Catholic opposition to the death penalty, reaffirmed evolution's compatibility with Catholic belief, and become the most prominent speaker on the necessity of addressing climate change.

He's a radical, as far as the far right is concerned.

As with Obama, he faces structural issues. I'm not saying that I believe he wishes he could be more progressive than he is. I'm not convinced that's true. But the Catholic Church by its nature moves slowly. Part of the decline of religious literacy -- or one of the factors contributing to it, maybe -- is that people have trouble perceiving in context the behavior of slow-moving institutions. Something as large and as old as the Church cannot pivot as quickly as we did from conservative Bush to centrist Obama any more than an elephant can do cartwheels. Change has to be understood in context and with an eye on the timeline. That's not always a great thing, though it has undoubtedly saved our asses a number of times in the past.

At his first consistory, Francis appointed 18 new cardinals, 16 of whom are young enough to vote in a papal conclave and who will likely be involved in voting for his successor. More than half of those 16 are from Third World countries, reflecting Francis's commitment to inequality and poverty issues. There are pretty good odds that whatever Francis doesn't get done will be followed up by the next pope.