Pope Francis’s trip to America has riveted the media and the public. So it is little surprise that politicians are hoping to exploit his presence and remarks in order to promote their own agendas. Since there are aspects of the pontiff’s stances that dovetail with both the left and the right, he has become something of an equal opportunity bandwagon for Democrats and Republicans to jump on. Democrats hope the Pope’s words about the environment, immigration, and social justice will boost them while Republicans can point to his references to abortion and religious freedom that puts him on their sides of those arguments. But since the emphasis of his remarks has primarily been on issues where he is more in agreement with liberals, his visit and, in particular, his address to a joint meeting of Congress has been viewed as events which can have an impact on American political debates. Indeed, there’s little doubt that the White House is hoping the fanfare over the popular Pope will give it an advantage over their Republican opponents. But such expectations about the Pope’s speech are almost certainly going to be disappointed. There are two reasons why this is so.
The first is that those political animals that are seeking to make hay from the Pope’s words profoundly misunderstand his purpose.
The Pope’s speech, which was read in halting English, was a dense and somewhat equivocal document. With one exception — his support of the efforts of the Conference of Bishops to oppose the death penalty — the speech failed to come to concrete conclusions and never made direct policy recommendations. That’s not because the Pope doesn’t have opinions about policy. He clearly does. On economics, he seems to be deeply influenced by the populist Peronist movement of his native Argentina. He has little understanding of American capitalism and the positive impact on the lives of ordinary people, something made plain by his simplistic advocacy against letting “money” outweigh other considerations. He also seems vulnerable to fashionable liberal notions about global warming and is, more defensibly, deeply sympathetic to the plight of immigrants and refugees.
But what those who spent this week scheming to take advantage of his presence in the country fail to understand is that the Pope is a religious leader, not a politician. Though his positions often do overlap with those held by those who engage in political debates but his purpose is not quite the same. His agenda is spiritual teaching; not legislation or even executive action. That’s why cherry-picking passages or sentences from the speech is a fruitless exercise for the chattering classes as they seek to identify themselves with his popularity.
That was evident in his address to Congress as he challenged its members to “preserve the dignity” of those they represent and to pursue “the common good.” Even when he seemed to come closest to specific recommendations, his text acknowledged the difficulty of the choices they faced. On the whole, despite the obvious liberal tilt of parts of his speech, his goal seemed more to elevate the tone of the debate and to remind us of the necessity for mutual respect. Whatever you may think of his particular positions on various issues, that is a message that Americans need to hear. After a summer dominated by the utterances of a person like Donald Trump, who exemplifies the willingness of so many of us to glorify a politics of disrespect rather than civility, it’s understandable that the Pope’s teachings feel like a breath of fresh air.
Aside from that necessary moral lesson, the Pope’s commendable diffidence about involving the church in political squabbles prevented him from weighing on specifics. The second reason why this won’t change much has to do with the gap between homilies, even those disseminated in that most political of places, and political choices.
Absent direct comments about particular issues, just about everyone was able to walk away from the Pope’s speech thinking themselves on his side. After all, even those most concerned with border security and stopping illegal immigration could consider him or herself to be an advocate for human dignity. Being for social justice as a general principle does not require one to agree on a specific tax rate. He may have urged them to take action to heal a world torn by strife, greed, poverty and pollution. But translating that into policy prescriptions is another thing entirely.
Indeed, the harshest words he uttered were against international arms dealers. That is an anodyne position that few members of Congress, no matter their party, were inclined to disagree with.
Nor could most liberals argue all that much with those positions that seemed to tilt to the right. His call for a defense of “life at every stage of development” was a clear reference to his opposition to abortion. His defense of religious liberty, marriage and the traditional family is also relevant in the context of the gay marriage debate. But no one walked away from the speech inclined to change their positions on those issues any more than he persuaded conservatives to adopt the sort of Peronist economics that he seems to favor.
That he did not address the question of religious persecution around the world except in the most oblique fashion was a disappointment. If he wanted to focus international opinion on the plight of the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East this was the perfect opportunity. But as with other issues, here again he refrained from condemning Islamists such as the ISIS terrorists or the way Muslims are driving religious minorities out of the region. That may be a function of the Vatican’s foolish diplomatic position that is based on appeasement of extremist forces and oppressors but it also pointed out how reluctant this Pope is to translate his moral teachings into direct action.
Thus, while the administration and other liberals may hope they will benefit from the Pope’s visit, the political impact of this media extravaganza is likely to be minimal. We should all take the Pope’s advice about personal responsibility and the Golden Rule to heart. But votes on legislation or even in elections aren’t going to be changed by anything he said.