I attended a public viewing of the Pope’s address to Congress at the shared worship space of the First Congregational Church (FCC) of Sonoma and the Shir Shalom synagogue. There were over 50 people gathered at the church, mostly drawn from FCC Earth Care Committee (the sponsor of the event), St. Leo’s Parish, the United Methodist Church, and members of Transition Town Sonoma. John Donnelly, the chair of the Earth Care Committee (which operates independently of the FCC) stated: “In 2014, the Earth Care Committee of the First Congregational Church Sonoma recognized the need to offer more opportunities for people of faith to mobilize their collective voices in advocacy of public policies relating to climate change advocacy at the governmental level.”
The Pope spoke in careful and measured English, which is clearly not his native tongue. The deliberate and solemn pacing helped to distinguish the discourse from the conventional political language that is typically associated with that podium. I had secretly hoped to hear a Papal jeremiad against the maleficent influence of global neo-capitalism, but I was probably as disappointed in that regard as Catholic social conservatives who had hoped for a reprise of the golden oldies hits on gay marriage, abortion and contraception that his predecessor, Pope Benedict, might have delivered. What we got was good, old-fashioned Catholic social justice teaching, which cannot be easily mapped on the Left/Right spectrum of American politics.
The Papal address made four major points:
- The role of government is to protect and serve the common good for all members of society.
- The attitude of fundamentalism, which attempts to reduce the glorious and vexing complexity of human life to a binary conflict between unalloyed good and pure evil, is contrary to a harmonious society.
- The creation of jobs should be a central feature of the practice of business, not just seen as an unwelcome cost to be minimized in the service of maximization of profits for shareholders.
- Climate change is real and it is the role of government to address it through collective action and legislation.
Those who had anticipated the Pope to stake out a clear position on global climate change, based on the recent Papal encyclical, “Laudito Si: On Care of Our Common Home,” were not disappointed. The gauntlet has been thrown down. As he stated in the encyclical, “Society must put pressure on governments to develop more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls. Unless citizens control political power–national, regional, and municipal–it will not be possible to control damage to the environment.”
In that document the Pope also underscored the importance of collective social action to address global challenges, rather than on relying on individual acts of environmental responsibility: “Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds … the ecological conversion needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion.”
The cultural impact of the Pope’s address, in my view, is that climate change denial has been made disreputable. It cannot be regarded as merely an alternative point of view on a contested topic. The Koch Brothers can buy Congress but they can’t buy respect. The benighted adherents of climate denialism will be increasingly isolated, marginalized, and stigmatized figures of ridicule and scorn. The Pope has helped move the social consensus closer to the scientific consensus.
The Pope covered all the bases in the course of his address. He briefly checked off all the social conservative boxes on marriage and reproductive issues and added the less-emphasized call for the abolition of the death penalty. On the other side of the ledger, he offered a rebuke to the self-centered culture of corporate capitalism and called for religious tolerance and empathy for the plight of the immigrant. Try to sort out that mix of concerns within the matrix of the American political system!
Pope Francis’ gift for social justice Catholics is his re-balancing of the priorities of the Church away from the obsessive focus of the social conservative Catholics with the culture wars hot-button ‘pelvic’ issues, towards a wider perspective that emphasizes the economic and environmental concerns that have a profound impact on the quality of life for the human race and the health of the planet.
I have been amused by the ideological confusion of the flummoxed Catholic conservatives who have been telling me for years that I am a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ who is not down with the program because I heed my own conscience on issues like contraception. They have claimed for themselves the mantle of the ‘true Catholics,’ because they used to fully accept the pronouncements of the Pope, even on secondary teachings (like the ban on contraception or the reality of climate change) that are not specified in the unchanging core ancient sacramental doctrine that defines the essence of the Catholic faith.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the culture war Catholics have suddenly started carving out personal exceptions, when they find that their politics conflict with the Pope’s agenda. So, now are they are cafeteria Catholics, too?
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