The
People’s Pope will shake up Washington before addressing the UN General
Assembly and meeting with prisoners.
Battles
are raging over whether local government officials have a religious right to
refuse to marry same-sex couples. And the federal government may shut down over a dispute
concerning funding for Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion reproductive health
services.
As
if those melodramas weren’t creating enough faith-tinged headaches, here comes
Hurricane Francis.
After
a three-day jaunt in Cuba, the People’s Pope will fly to Washington. He’ll become the
first pontiff to address Congress while quite possibly urging lawmakers to take firm action on climate change and to promote immigration
reform.
Pope
Francis has a few other things planned for his U.S. visit, too — like
delivering mass. In Spanish.
Among a host of reasons Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl cited: It’s the Argentine-born pontiff’s native language, the pope will be canonizing a Spanish-American Jesuit missionary on that occasion, and he’d like to show some deference to our nation’s growing Latino population. One out of three U.S. Catholics are either Spanish-speaking immigrants or descendants of Latin Americans.
Rush Limbaugh, who loves to hate what Pope Francis
says about capitalism, is already complaining. This linguistic
choice also clashes with Sarah Palin’s recent call for immigrants to “speak American.”
After
shaking things up in D.C., Francis will mosey over to New York City, where
he’ll bless undocumented immigrants and address the United
Nations General Assembly, speaking truth to power more globally.
Then
it’s off to Philadelphia, where he’s got a packed agenda that includes visiting prisoners held at the Curran-Fromhold
Correctional Facility. There’s a good chance that he’ll wash the feet of
several inmates.
Right-wingers
shouldn’t try to declaw this pontiff by badmouthing him. British writer Austen
Ivereigh makes a few things clear in his biography, The Great
Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope. Among them:
Having made afflicting the comfortable while comforting the afflicted a
lifelong habit, Pope Francis isn’t vulnerable to bullying.
Perhaps
more than his embrace of migrant rights and climate action, the pontiff’s calls for economic justice are
what irk conservatives the most.
“Once
capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money
presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society,” Pope Francis
said in Bolivia two months ago.
This
kind of analysis has raised the volume in a debate over whether the pope is
Marxist, or at least socialist.
It’s
an ironic conversation. As Ivereigh describes in detail, the hyper-humble
Catholic leader formerly known as Padre Jorge Bergoglio spent most of his last
30 non-papal years battling the misconception that he wasn’t leftist enough.
In
addition to openly criticizing Cuba’s government, Francis has tried to set the record straight about his mindset since
becoming pope. A passion for helping the poor and the powerless, not ideology,
drives him to make stunning statements and gestures as he calls for worldwide
systemic change.
Regardless
of why House Speaker John Boehner thought inviting the Pope to address Congress
was a good idea, the Catholic Republican from Ohio appears calm before this
storm.
“I’m
not about to get myself into an argument with the pope,” Boehner told The New York Times in July. “I’m sure
the pope will have things to say that people will find interesting, and I’m
looking forward to his visit.”
Boehner
probably won’t have any epiphanies about immigration, climate action, or
economic justice. But he’s right: It will surely be an interesting encounter.
Columnist Emily
Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords,
a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy
Studies. OtherWords.org