More strange new respect for religion on the front page of the New York Times – at least when it comes to the economically liberal Pope Francis, making his first trip to America. Times reporters are using liberal Pope Francis as their own Pope-mobile to carry their personal anti-capitalist viewpoints. (Quite a change from the "God's Rottweiler" tone they employed with Francis's predecessor, Pope Bendedict XVI).
Religion reporter Laurie Goodstein made the September 6 front page celebrating the Pope's attacks on "savage capitalism." Jim Yardley is the latest reporter to smuggle his own criticism of capitalism into a profile of the Pope, greeting the pontiff with a 4,000-word story, "A Humble Pope, Challenging the World – First Latin American Pontiff Attracts Fans and Stirs Anxiety in Push for Change." The jump headline: "A Humble and Popular Pope, Challenging the World." Yardley tried to mainstream the left-wing Pope: "But he is hardly a left-winger, either -- at least in the political context of the United States," while portraying conservatives as fearful: "Many conservatives project their fears onto him."
The symbolism of the morning services, which Francis now holds four times a week, is clear: a humbler papacy, where the pope is foremost a pastor to the flock, not a king. But a humbler papacy hardly means humbler papal ambitions. Francis is not just trying to change the Roman Catholic Church. He seems determined to change the world.
Popes are expected to challenge society. But Francis, 78, who lands in Cuba on Saturday and prepares to arrive in Washington on Tuesday for his first visit to the United States, has achieved a unique global stature in a short time.
His humble persona has made him immensely popular, a smiling figure plunging into crowds at St. Peter’s Square. He speaks in deeply personal terms about people discarded by the global economy, whether refugees drowned at sea or women forced into prostitution. His blistering critiques of environmental destruction have seized the world’s attention.
But he is also an inscrutable tactician whose push to change the church has stirred anxiety and hope -- and some skepticism. Many conservatives project their fears onto him. Many liberals assume he is a kindred spirit. Others argue that Francis is less concerned about left or right than he is about reversing the church’s declining popularity in Latin America and beyond.
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Francis has not fully revealed his hand. But already his spiritual mission to place the poor at the center of the church has enabled him to thrust it to the center of the global debate on issues such as climate change, migration and the post-2008 rethinking of capitalist economics.
To some degree, the question of how Francis will change the church -- and its role in society -- misses the point that much change has already occurred. Doctrine is the same, but Francis has changed its emphasis, projecting a merciful, welcoming tone in a church that had been shattered by clerical sexual abuse scandals and identified with theological rigidity. He has emphasized its historic connection to the destitute while sidelining culture war issues. In turn, his geopolitical influence, and that of the church, has risen.
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Through gestures and words, Francis has repeatedly challenged elites, inside the church and out. He has attacked an insular Catholic hierarchy for focusing too much on dogma and “spiritual worldliness,” and too little on ordinary people. He has attacked prevailing global economic orthodoxy – the belief that markets and the pursuit of wealth will lift all boats – as a false ideology, inadequate for fully addressing the needs of the poor.
In the United States, Francis’ biting critiques of the excesses of capitalism – if ringing true to many people – have caused discomfort even among some sympathizers and outright disdain from critics, who have called him a Marxist or a Communist. Those who have known Francis for years laugh at those labels, yet they agree that he can be elusive, having refused to be placed neatly inside an ideological box since his early days as a young Jesuit leader in Argentina.
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However, his hard-nosed style also brought him enemies. He would be dogged for decades by accusations that he failed to protect two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by the brutal military government ruling Argentina during the 1970s – allegations that have been challenged by biographers and were later refuted by one of the two priests. Among some Jesuits, he was considered an archconservative.
It would not be the last time someone tried to put him into an ideological box.
Isn't it pretty safe to say that Pope Francis is left wing on economic issues?
Traditionalists grumbled, but Francis had managed, seemingly overnight, to rebrand the church, at least in style. But then the substance started coming, too. He released what amounted to his papal mission statement in November 2013, with the publication of “Evangelii Gaudium,” a sweeping 224-page document that many Catholics received as an optimistic call for a tolerant, joyous Catholicism open to the world, and the world’s poor. But many capitalists were jolted by Francis’ blunt attack on the global economic system as “unjust at its root.”
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To some conservatives in the United States, the Argentine pope seems to be making a frontal assault on the American way. Rush Limbaugh blasted him as a Marxist. Others labeled him a communist or socialist. Some affluent Catholic donors withdrew pledges or expressed discomfort.
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The labels rang false to many who knew Francis in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Francis sharply criticized Marxism, especially as some priests sought to intermingle the dialectics of violent class struggle with the social justice goals of Catholic teaching. Later, he sharply criticized the neo-liberal belief that market economics were a cure-all for the poor.
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Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine who has served in the Vatican for more than 40 years, said Francis is not condemning capitalism in total, but he is criticizing the indifference it fosters toward the poor.
Yardley attempted to portray Francis as mainstream on economics, though it's not very convincing.
Ken Hackett, the United States ambassador to the Holy See, argues that Francis’ economic views have been wrongly simplified and scoffs at the suggestion that the pope is a socialist as “a naïve characterization.”
Mr. Hackett added: “I don’t think he hates capitalism. I think he hates the excesses.”
Yardley sounded positively pious here:
To a degree, Francis seems to be lashing out against the contemporary primacy of economics over faith. He believes the answers are found with the Gospel, not with Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
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Internal church warfare hews to a language of its own, and many reformers hope that Francis’ repeated emphasis of themes like “mercy” and “openness” signals that he is preparing to redirect Catholic teaching on gays, the divorced and remarried, unmarried couples and other divisive social issues.
Yardley uses a global measuring scale to again make Francis more politically mainstream. Pope Francis remains an opponent of abortion, though that was limited to a single mention in the vast story.
But he is hardly a left-winger, either -- at least in the political context of the United States. Even as some of his social and economic views have inspired the American left, he strongly opposes abortion and believes marriage should be between a man and a woman.
Yardley, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Times, betrayed his own capitalist skepticism in his reporting from China in April 2004. Apparently Communism was better for beggars, and China was better off when everyone was poor:
"But in the past six months, the number of beggars in Beijing and other Chinese cities has exploded. Their presence is another reminder of the growing divide between rich and poor in China as it rapidly switches to a market economy." – Yardley, April 7, 2004.
"The roaring Chinese economy is creating jobs and opportunities, but it has also created a stark divide between rich and poor." Yardley, April 14, 2004.
