In eleven days the much-travelled Pope Francis will set foot on American soil for the first time: Unlike his two immediate predecessors, he did not visit this country before rising to the papacy. His baggage will include the mind-set typical of Latin American anti-U.S. populists, in his case the Argentine variety, numerous vitriolic attacks on our economic system, and support for many of the positions being taken by the Democrats’ left wing. And he will be unpacking that baggage before a joint session of Congress, the UN, a school in East Harlem (NYC), a prison, and a variety of other groups, as well as before television cameras covering his visit on channels devoted to it on a 24/7 schedule.
There are some 70 million Catholics here in America, about 25 percent of them foreign-born, most Hispanic. That overstates their electoral significance, since none of the 13 states in which Catholics represent 30 percent or more of the population are swing states: most are reliably Democratic, a few equally reliable Republican. Still, in key swing states such as Florida (26 percent), and Ohio and Colorado (24 percent each), Catholics far outweigh the importance of Jews (3.3 percent, 1.3 percent and 2 percent, respectively), whose influence in elections is the stuff of which some folks’ nightmares are made. So they matter. And the Pope’s visit comes at a time when the battles for both parties’ presidential nominations are well under way, and involve economic and social issues to which he attaches great importance.
Which brings us to the contents of his baggage. Pope Francis, or the more egalitarian “Bishop of Rome,” as he prefers to be called, is unambiguously opposed to the American system of “savage capitalism”. He has famously quoted a fourth century Doctor of the Church, St. Basil of Caesarea, who called money “the devil’s dung”, has railed against the “anonymous influences of mammon” and a “new colonialism” that includes “free trade treaties … [and] imposition of austerity,” and stated a preference for “cooperatives.” Throw in Francis’ views that we are witnessing “a disturbing warming of the climatic system … due to the great concentration of greenhouse gasses”, and that “there is an urgent need of a true world political authority”, and you have positions that it will take more than a spoonful of the Pontiff’s charm to make go down the throats of many Americans. Including rich, philanthropic Catholics. Politico reports that donors such as billionaire Ken Langone, working to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, are so upset by the Pope’s attacks on capitalism, and on the rich, that they might just stop giving to the Church.
President Obama can live with the Pope’s attack on free trade deals. He believes that he can get the two now being negotiated through the Republican congress, over the opposition of most of his own party. But the President relishes papal support for the tough regulatory measures he will be carrying to Paris in December as part of his plan to reduce CO2 emissions, counting on what Churchill called the Pope’s “invisible legions” to pressure their governments to follow the American delegation’s lead.
Most directly on the firing line are the six Catholic candidates for the Republican presidential nomination: Messrs. Bush, Cruz, Jindal, Pataki, Rubio and Santorum. “He’s definitely aiming to influence the political process and doing so by stressing the moral implications of this issue and the urgency of this issue,” said Tomas Insua, founding movement coordinator at the Global Catholic Climate Movement. “Pope Francis is a hugely influential voice…”ƒ17 So far Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush have invited the Pope to stay out of the climate change debate, Bush adding, “I’m a Catholic and try to follow the teachings of the Church. … [But] I don’t go to Mass for economic policy or for things in politics.” Fortunately, we have come a long way from 1928 when Democrat Al Smith was swamped by Herbert Hoover, in part because the country was not ready to elect a Roman Catholic, and from 1960, when John F. Kennedy had to assure the voters that he believed “the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act…”. Besides, the Republican candidates will have ample opportunity to further inter the specious “dual loyalty” charge by voicing their disagreement with the Pope on the substance of the issues he will raise.
Climate change is not the only issue that will inevitably be brought up during the Pontiff’s tour. Like many others, Francis worries that our society is too unequal. But the Republican solution – more rapid economic growth – runs counter to the papal view that America already consumes too much of the world’s resources. So if the plight of the world’s poor is to be alleviated, income must be redistributed from rich to poor. Which Democrats will quite reasonably cite as support for raising the minimum wage and increasing taxes on “the rich”.
When all is said and done, to the extent that the Pope galvanizes any part of the electorate sufficiently to affect their actions some 15 months hence, it will be lower income groups, those Hispanic immigrants who are legally able to vote, and perhaps women who find the Pope’s more relaxed views on abortion and post-divorce remarriage less off-putting. These groups already lean heavily towards Democrats, but the first two often do not turn out in the numbers that Democrats would prefer and that a papal nudge might induce.
There is an irony in all of this. Three, in fact. The first is that this anti-American Pope was elected with the help of a solid contingent of 14 American cardinals, allegedly disgusted with the Vatican’s financial corruption and the failure of the its Italian bureaucracy to move determinedly against priests who sexually molested children. The second irony is that the liberal supporters of the economics of Pope Francis are the very same politicians who defend the provisions of Obamacare that require all businesses to insure the costs of contraception, and Obama- administration regulations requiring Catholic business owners to bake cakes and take wedding pictures of participants in same-sex marriages. And it is the opponents of the economic nostrums the Pope proposes, explicitly or implicitly, to cure the world’s ills, who are fighting in court to allow Catholic businessmen and others to refuse to obey laws that they say compel them to violate their faith.
Final on the list of ironies is that there is a sense in which Pope Francis is the world’s über capitalist. The church he heads and controls owns 20 percent of Italy’s real estate, 25 percent of all the real estate in Rome, and has worldwide real estate assets that, counting no other assets, are valued at $2 trillion. The English-speaking MBAs hired by Francis to sort out the Church’s finances (pre-Francis, Italian was the official language in the Vatican counting house, limiting the available labor pool) told New Yorker magazine’s Alexander Stille that they recently discovered $1.2 billion in financial assets not previously on the Vatican’s balance sheet. Financial manager Danny Casey and fellow Australian, Cardinal George Pell, Francis’ appointee to the job of Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, told Stille that assets not devoted to the Church’s central mission – helping the poor and elderly, for example -- “should be considered commercial assets, from which the Vatican should try to gain the best possible monetary return.” Oh.