The Politics of Pope Francis ( 사회주의자 교황 )

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-politics-of-pope-francis-1442877450

The Politics of Pope Francis

Perhaps America and this pope can learn from each other.

Sept. 21, 2015 7:17 p.m. ET

Pope Francis arrives Tuesday on his first visit to the United States, and the welcome event illustrates his unique and paradoxical appeal. The Argentine pope is being celebrated more for his embrace of progressive economics than for the Catholic Church’s moral teachings.

Millions of American Catholics will of course welcome the pope as a spiritual messenger and the head of a religion of some 1.2 billion world-wide. As a pastoral shepherd he has set a Christian example that Americans of all faiths might emulate with his modest life-style and manifest concern for the poor and least powerful. His public American itinerary—to a Harlem school, a Philadelphia prison—reflects this pastoral mission. He is a man of God who avoids the ostentatious trappings of man.

Yet the pope will also visit the White House and speak to Congress, and this is where his tour takes on an extra-religious resonance. Pope Francis has overtly embraced the contemporary progressive political agenda of income redistribution and government economic control to reduce climate change.

President Obama, who shares both ambitions, is therefore giving the pope the kind of hearty embrace we can’t imagine him giving to his predecessor Pope Benedict. Secular progressives who disdain the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion, same-sex marriage and divorce are ignoring all of that catechistic unpleasantness and claiming the pope as an evangelist for their agenda. You might call them cafeteria progressives, after the old line about Catholics who are selective in which church teachings they follow.

There is some risk for the pope and his church in this progressive bear hug. one is that the pope will come to be seen as a seeker of political popularity more than a speaker of hard and eternal truths. Another is that politicians may use the pope to serve their own political and cultural needs, as with the official White House guest list to meet the pope.

The Journal reported last week that the Vatican was upset that the presence of prominent dissenters from Catholic teaching will make it appear that the pope endorses their views. We doubt the White House intended any offense, but the oversight reveals how little secular liberal elites understand about traditional religious mores. You can bet the protocol office would not make such a mistake with a Muslim cleric of similar importance.

Our own hope for the papal visit is that he has a chance to better understand America and the capitalist roots of its prosperity. Like many Argentines of the left, Pope Francis seems given to suspicion about American wealth. But liberty and not coercion is the source of our strength and of the wealth that has lifted millions out of poverty.

Cuba, where Francis arrived this weekend, has denied its people economic freedom—and religious freedom—for the six decades of its revolution and remains poor and unable to develop the “new technologies” that Pope Francis has said should be available for all.

The U.S. has prospered by respecting property rights and relying on the voluntary decisions of individuals. The rule of law here means that unlike in countries such as Argentina, an American can build a large, successful business even if no one in the government likes him. And unlike in Argentina, capitalist success creates millions of jobs that allow men and women without political connections to support their families and live in dignity.

In Washington, D.C., the pope will visit a homeless program run by Catholic Charities. But he should know that Catholic Charities can do its good work because of the contributions from lay Catholics who succeed in a capitalist economy. The pope may also be surprised to learn that individual Americans voluntarily do far more than any government to assist the world’s poor.

A 2013 report from the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity found that nearly $31 billion of annual U.S. government aid to developing countries was eclipsed by $39 billion of private charity, plus another $108 billion of private capital flows. Americans also sent more than $100 billion of remittances to the developing world, often from immigrants working in the U.S. Nobody goes to Cuba to earn money to support relatives in America.

As for the environment and climate change, Pope Francis is sometimes given to an almost Malthusian, anti-modern pessimism. In his recent encyclical, “Laudato Si,” Francis wrote that “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

Well, he should have seen East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the air in Beijing today. Coercive governments are the worst befoulers of the environment. Democratic capitalism has created the wealth and electoral consent to clean the air and water, and only continued economic growth will create the resources to deal with climate change if it does become a serious threat to the Earth.

Catholics understand that while the pope speaks for God on matters of faith and morals, his infallibility does not extend to his economics or environmentalism. We hope he enjoys his visit to the land of the free, and that the education goes both ways.

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Pope Francis, Unfettered

The opposite of market competition isn’t cooperation—it’s collusion.

If you were poor—not a little poor, but downright struggling to put bread on the family table—which society would offer you more hope?

Some Latin American nation whose leaders eschew the competition of those soulless Yanquis to the north? Or that paragon of dog-eat-dog capitalism, Hong Kong?

It’s a question Pope Francis might ask himself as he begins his first visit to the United States. In his travels, the pope likes to contrast the great abundance of the 21st century with the hundreds of millions of men and women who still live like the Gospel beggar feeding on scraps that fall from the rich man’s table. And Francis is pretty sure whom to blame for it too.

In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, the pope says this: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

“Such an economy,” he goes on to say, “kills.” This description is music to some ears. In his speech welcoming the pope to Havana on Saturday, Raúl Castro noted that Cuba shares the papal disdain for an economic order that has “globalized capital and turned money into its idol.”

Now, some will say Pope Francis is not against capitalism itself, only “unfettered” or “unbridled” capitalism, as in the “unfettered pursuit of money” he assailed during his July visit to Bolivia. It’s also true that Christian warnings about the love of money go back to the Apostle Paul.

But this pope’s assault on the global economy suggests he believes the whole idea fundamentally disordered, leading to a world where competition is exalted over cooperation and people grow rich by exploiting the poor.

Only one problem. Even the most cursory look at the world confirms the opposite: The more fetters imposed on competitive markets, the harder life gets for those stuck at the bottom.

In fact, the poor fare much better in places such as Hong Kong, Taiwan or Korea, where markets and competition are relatively open, than they do in Latin America or Africa, where competition is far more limited. To put it another way, it isn’t global competition that makes nations poor but their isolation from it.

Why do critics such as Pope Francis have such a hard time seeing this? A big part is that they misconstrue the nature of market competition. They want what the pope calls a “cooperative economy.”

But competition in a free market is not like competition in a boxing match, where the outcome is one winner and one loser. It’s about sellers vying to please a third party: the customer. This is why capitalists do not think of themselves as pro-business. To the contrary, capitalists insist that businesses must earn their success by competing to please customers.

Look at it this way. Brazil has a state-run, quasi-monopoly called Petrobras, the largest company in South America. The government shields it from competition on the grounds that the people of Brazil will benefit.

But who have actually benefited? Prosecutors say it is Petrobras execs, who grew rich on kickbacks, and the Working Party politicos they are said to have bribed. Anyone really want to argue that Brazil’s downtrodden are better off with an economy that protects Petrobras at the expense of competitors who might offer workers more jobs and customers better products?

Or what about Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez nationalized huge chunks of the economy and appropriated the property of foreign companies. Are we surprised that Venezuela’s richest woman turns out to be the late Chávez’s daughter?

Come to think of it, what about Argentina? The pope’s native land used to rank among the world’s wealthiest. Today it is a synonym for crony capitalism—and decline.

Can it be just a coincidence that governments that fetter their economies in the name of social justice generally end up with more corruption and a class of elites enriching themselves on political connections while all others are left to fend for themselves? In this light, is it not a tragedy that a pope whose heart belongs to the poor reserves all his moral outrage for the one economic system that has already lifted billions of desperate people out of poverty?

Might not some papal outrage be directed at governments and leaders who, in the name of workers and justice, intervene in the economy in ways that make everyday life more costly, crush opportunity and cheat the have-nots of a future of hope and dignity?

A gentle way of suggesting that perhaps the best fetters for an economy are not regulatory and interventionist but legal and moral: a functioning rule of law operating inside a healthy, humane culture. Because if we’ve learned anything from Latin America, it’s that the opposite of market competition isn’t, as the pope seems to believe, cooperation.

It’s collusion.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-unfettered-1442875692

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-politicized-pope-1443047131

A Politicized Pope

The battlegrounds of secular politics may undermine Francis’ moral authority.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

Sept. 23, 2015 6:25 p.m. ET

The word “politicized” is not generally a compliment. It suggests that a nonpolitical event or subject—a natural disaster or poverty—is being used by a public figure for his own political purposes.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be hurting with the Republican electorate because many think he politicized Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012 by inviting President Obama to see its devastation. Mr. Christie rejects any such idea, but it sits there, a political casualty.

Pope Francis regards himself as not a political player. He dislikes the maneuverings of politics. Americans’ enthusiasm for Francis no doubt has much to do with the sentiment that, like Ben Carson, he is a “nonpolitician.”

Mr. Carson, however, has recently discovered that it isn’t possible to be simultaneously in politics and above politics. Modern politics is a relentless conflict waged by parties, politicians, their networks, activists and media.

They set the rules, and it’s their self-given right to reduce what you think to a buzzword, no matter what your personal beliefs may be. It’s brutal and often unfair, but you play the political game, and that’s the way it is.

In the past week, Pope Francis has met and been photographed with Fidel and Raúl Castro in Cuba and with Barack Obama at the White House. Thursday he addresses a joint session of Congress at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner. on Friday, he will address the United Nations General Assembly. Then on Saturday in Philadelphia, he will finally address a wholly religious event, the World Meeting of Families, which is organized by the Holy See in Rome.

The Catholic weekly newspaper Our Sunday Visitor aptly noted: “Based on the media’s coverage of the papal trip, it has been difficult to remember that Francis’ visit to the United States is centered around his commitment to come to the World Meeting and speak about the family and not immigration, the environment or globalization.”

Difficult to remember indeed. Pope Francis is becoming an aggressive public player in secular politics, from the environment to economic policy. That carries risks, not for Francis alone, but for the papacy and the institution the pope leads.

It is said widely that Francis will never allow himself to be co-opted into anyone else’s political agenda. The pope is famously his own man. But the pope has no control over whether he is co-opted into the political goals and strategies of others.

A TV commercial airing this week from NextGen Climate Action, funded by billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, unfurls frightening images of wildfires and floods and ends with Francis waving and smiling at us over the words, “With compassion and love—Pope Francis.” It’s propaganda, but legitimate propaganda by current standards.

The day before Pope Francis met with Mr. Obama, one of the president’s aides, Ben Rhodes, said: “How can we make use of the enormous platform that the pope’s visit provides to lift up the work we’re doing and demonstrate how it’s consistent with the direction that’s coming from the pope?” At the White House, Pope Francis praised Mr. Obama’s climate-change initiatives, and the president thanked the pope for supporting his policies on that and his opening to Cuba.

It is not possible to do this and be “above” politics. Everyone in politics is one of the boys, including the pope.

In Cuba, when the pope’s spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, was asked if Pope Francis knew that 50 dissidents had been arrested, he said: “I don’t have any information about this.” Embarrassing bunk is standard for the Josh Earnests of the world. It should not become so for the pope’s spokesman.

Politics today—which transforms any major public figure into a celebrity—is more fraught, divided and risky than ever. on one hand, Francis is amenable to being photographed smiling and squeezing hands with Fidel Castro, a decades-long oppressor of his nation’s Catholics. But then the Vatican objects that the pope might be photographed with a famous pro-abortion nun invited by the White House. Barack Obama plays hardball. His Justice Department had already sued the anti-abortion Little Sisters of the Poor.

In the past two years, the plight of Christians in the Middle East has gone from persecution to slaughter. Decades of Vatican diplomacy there for the world’s most at-risk Christians has produced very little. Soon there may be nothing left to protect. on Friday, the pope reportedly will address the U.N. about climate change. A jeremiad against Christian extermination would be welcome this week, too.

Francis’ popularity remains high, but the dangers in his current course are high. What many of his new political friends mainly seek is to have the pope “moralize” their politics. Francis’ spiritual message could not be more secondary. They won’t be with him in Philadelphia. How allowing the papacy’s core moral authority to be politicized is in the interests of the Catholic Church as an institution is difficult to see.

Write to henninger@wsj.com.