Here’s another sign of reporters trying way too hard to make President Obama and Pope Francis some kind of political twins.
Gary Emerling at the U.S. News & World Report website wrote an article headlined: “Pope Francis Just Echoed Obama's 'Offensive' Prayer Breakfast Remarks: The pontiff said all religions are susceptible to extremism and violence, just like Obama said in February.”
U.S. News enjoyed putting “offensive” in quotes, implying Obama had just been cleansed of all arrogance by the global leader of the Catholics.
Emerling wrote of the pope: “Many of his comments were lightly delivered and unlikely to elicit much controversy, though the reaction might be different if they were given by another world leader.” He plucked out this section of the papal speech to Congress:
Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind. A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms.
Emerling thought this Obama utterance was extremely similar:
Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ … So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.
As Tom Hoopes at Catholic Vote declared: “Pope Francis’ words acknowledge that there is extremism in every religion. Only someone with no knowledge of the facts would deny that. But Obama said that the Crusades and the Inquisition were like ISIS. Only someone with no knowledge of the facts would say that.”
One can say that Francis was making an ecumenical appeal for humility, an acknowledgement that any religion can be distorted to justify violence. That is not at all the same as Obama’s remarks, which were intended as an indictment of arrogant (conservative) Christians and their tendency toward “Islamophobia.”
Obama appealed for humility, but Emerling doesn’t see that Obama’s arrogance in dealing with his opponents make his words at the Prayer Breakfast sound tinny:
I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.
Again, Obama here is suggesting that conservative Christians are far too assured that God “only cares about us.” He and Emerling don’t see that conservatives start laughing when Obama starts talking against “being so full of yourself.”
He shoved Obamacare and the Iran deal down the throats of Congress and imposed “executive action” on illegal immigration, so how is that matching what the Pope said? “Building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and cooperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity.”
