{"id":8665,"date":"2013-08-10T16:16:54","date_gmt":"2013-08-10T16:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=8665"},"modified":"2013-08-10T18:07:21","modified_gmt":"2013-08-10T18:07:21","slug":"a-pope-for-the-descamisados","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/a-pope-for-the-descamisados\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pope for the Descamisados?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"descamisados\"<\/a>Over at the National Catholic Reporter<\/em>, John Allen exults<\/a> over the undeniable success of the early months in office of the genial, (sort of Peronist<\/a>) prelate now known as Pope Francis.<\/p>\n

Some of the rejoicing is over the top\u2014given the venue, what do you expect\u2014but, I thought that this more substantive passage was worth repeating:<\/p>\n

[W]hether it’s a matter of instinct or conscious strategy, Francis seems to be repositioning the church in the political center, after a fairly lengthy period in which many observers perceived it to be drifting to the right.<\/p>\n

Veteran Italian journalist Sandro Magister recently observed, “It cannot be an accident that after 120 days of his pontificate, Pope Francis has not yet spoken the words abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage,” adding that “this silence of his is another of the factors that explain the benevolence of secular public opinion.”<\/p>\n

Yet Francis has imposed no such gag order on himself when it comes to other political topics, such as poverty, the environment and immigration. It’s telling that for this first trip outside Rome, Francis chose the southern Mediterranean island of Lampedusa<\/a>, a major point of arrival for impoverished African and Middle Eastern immigrants seeking to reach Europe. The pope called for greater compassion for these migrants, chiding the world for a “globalization of indifference.”<\/p>\n

While the trip played to generally rapturous reviews, the anti-immigration right in Europe was outraged. Erminio Boso, a spokesman for Italy’s far-right Northern League, said: “I don’t care about the pope. \u2026 What I’d ask is that he provide money and land for these extra-communitarians,” referring to undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

The shift to the center also seems clear in ecclesiastical terms. In Rome, the perception is that power brokers associated with moderate positions, such as Cardinal Oscar Rodr\u00edguez Maradiaga of Honduras, coordinator of the commission of cardinals, are on the ascendant, while those linked to neoconservative or traditionalist stances, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States, head of the Vatican’s supreme court, are in decline.<\/p>\n

The church may not veer sharply in its political allegiances, but there seems a clear preference for the social Gospel over the culture wars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That rather depends on how you define \u201dthe center\u201d. Allen seems to view social conservatism\u2014to use the shorthand\u2014 as being something for those on the political<\/em> right. Well, sometimes it is. And sometimes it isn’t. There are others on the right\u2014let\u2019s call them the \u2018economic right\u2019\u2014 who tend to be indifferent or even opposed to much of the socially conservative socio-political agenda. It\u2019s this group who may well turn out to have the most difficulty with the new Pope. His shifts on social issues (as North Americans understand that term) will prove, I suspect, to be more a matter of tone and emphasis than anything else. This is, after all, a cleric who believes that same-sex marriage is the work of the Devil. <\/a><\/p>\n

And to be fair, the same is true of the pope’s pronouncements on matters such as immigration and economics. They have not, in reality, strayed too far from what we have heard from the Vatican before. Nevertheless, the emphasis that Francis puts on what the religious left like to euphemize as ‘social justice’ seems set to increase. That\u2019s an ominous development given his evident charisma, current popularity, and apparent determination not just to talk the talk, but walk the walk. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at the National Catholic Reporter, John Allen exults over the undeniable success of the early months in office of the genial, (sort of Peronist) prelate now known as Pope Francis. Some of the rejoicing is over the top\u2014given the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[609,1026,998,403,16,410],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8665"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8675,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8665\/revisions\/8675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}