Pope Francis and America

Who owns the pope?

A papal visit provides fresh opportunity for conservatives and liberals to scrap
Sep 19th 2015 | WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition

WE LOOK forward to welcoming you to our workplace and request the opportunity to
meet you. Pope Francis is known for holding ad hoc meetings with the poor and
bereft; even so, the invitation he received from 46 disgruntled canteen workers at the
Capitol, ahead of his visit there on September 24th, was audacious. The Bishop of
Rome does not mediate in petty pay disputes.

Yet the stunt illustrates a striking reality of Pope Franciss planned five-day visit to his
American flock, which is the richest and fourth most populous of any nation. From
aggrieved Hispanics to irate conservatives, from an increasingly questioning Catholic
rank-and-file to the many non-Catholics attracted to the popes blend of modesty and
celebrity, millions of Americans want a piece of him.
Not even John Paul IIs hugely popular visit to America in 1979, when the US church
was smaller by a third yetwith over 20,000 more priestsstronger than it is today,
excited more hoopla than is the looming prospect of Pope Francis. In Catholic
churches, schools and hospitals across Washington, DC, New York and Philadelphia,
destinations for his first trip to America, life-size cut-outs of the Argentine-priest are
being set out and posters unfurled. At the open-air mass he will say in Philadelphia, up
to 1.5m people are expected. And what the pontiff says, including in the first ever papal
address to Congress and another outside Independence Hall, birthplace of the
constitution, will carry unusual political weight. Because the political context into which
he will step, for Catholics, non-Catholics and especially the 55m Hispanics who
increasingly dominate the American church, is fraught.

Though far more vigorous than any dwindling European equivalent, the American
church badly needs a shot of the Francis effectthe institutional pick-me-up
Catholics have looked for in the popes popularity. The financial and reputational
damage done by revelations of thousands of child-abuse scandals has exacerbated
deeper and daunting changes: including a hollowing out of what were once pre-
eminent congregations, in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and other centres
of European Catholicism, as their members move to the suburbs, or simply quit. A
recent survey by the Pew Research Centre suggests that for every American converted
to Catholicism, six abandon iteasily the highest net loss of any church. Around 13%
of adult Americans are former Catholics: if that were a denomination, it would be
Americas third biggest.
The outflow is largely covered by the increase in Hispanic Catholics, who now
represent over a third of the total, a share that is rising fast. This is injecting hope and
dynamism into an institution that would otherwise be in decline. We do funerals, they
do baptisms, quips John Carr, a Catholic thinker at Georgetown University in
Washington, DC. Yet the change is not without friction. Hispanicisation is shifting the
churchs centre of gravity to the south and west and changing its culture, including the
language of worship, almost everywhere. This Easter we had three crosses outside
our church with actors on them, says Mr Carr. Thats not how we usually celebrate
Good Friday. Of eight special masses being said for the pope in the capital, where he
will also canonise Americas first Hispanic saint (seearticle), five will be at least partly in
Spanish, the language in which the pontiff will deliver most of his addresses.
El papa
General enthusiasm for the pope, whose approval rating among Americans is in the
high 80s, is a fillip for all Catholics. But at a time when the front-runner for the
Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump, suggests spoken Spanish has no
place in American public life, his visit is especially reassuring for Hispanics. The pope
is sending a message that you need to be welcomed if you speak other languages, that
language should not be an issue, says Father Evelio Menjivar, a Washington-based
parish priest who is organising the Spanish-language celebrations.
Pope Francis will address Congress in English, but that will not lower the political
temperature in a place where Catholics have never been more prominent. Fifty years
ago, John Kennedy, Americas only Catholic president, saw his presidential campaign
dogged by claims that it was impossible to serve both America and Rome. Eight
Catholics are now vying to be presidentincluding Jeb Bush for the Republicans and
perhaps Joe Biden for the Democrats. Almost a third of the House of Representatives
is Catholicincluding the Republican speaker, John Boehner, at whose invitation the
pope will make his address.
This does not mean he is about to swing the election: Catholics vote in line with all
Americanswhich is to say, whites ones lean Republican and Hispanic ones
Democrat. Yet the rise of Catholic politicians has brought into focus the wearisome
degree to which the churchs main split, between an ascendant conservative wing that
worries mainly about religious freedom and the rights of the unborn, and a liberal wing
more concerned with social justice, has become a proxy for Americas wider political
brawl. That will make the popes address inevitably politicised and acutely sensitive.
A champion of poor immigrants, a critic of capitalism and a tree-hugger who has,
meanwhile, done little to revise the churchs social teachings, Pope Francis has
something for both camps. So both are claiming himthe degree to which everyone
wants this guy on their team is remarkable, says George Weigel, a conservative
Catholic commentator. Yet right-wing Catholics are the more uneasy. People quite
close to the pope misunderstand America or dont like America, says Robert Royal,
another conservative commentator. Im worried about that.
There will be more such grumbling, not least because the pope is expected to speak on
immigration and the environment early in his visit, before issuing a defence of the
traditional family, at a summit in Philadelphia, later on. Yet any suggestion that the
pope is himself anti-American is hard to stand up. He is a critic of the greed and
economic fragility capitalism can engender; less obviously of the system itself. That is a
position that has long been taken, if more quietly, by American bishops, as indeed is
the popes concern for poor immigrants and the environment. As a son of European
immigrants, his biographer Austen Ivereigh notes, his personal history is also distinctly
American: Hes the first pope of the New World. And in his efforts to decentralise
power from the Vatican, he has perhaps done more to dismantle his offices thoroughly
un-American monarchic pretensions than any of his predecessors.
The real target of his papacy, argues Father Matt Malone, a fellow Jesuit and editor
ofAmerica magazine, is just the sort of polarisation awaiting him on Capitol Hill. Both
sorts of cultural warrior, on the left and the right, think the pope is aligned with them or
against them, but what hes really saying is: A pox on both your houses. He is
reminding us that our goal as Christians is not to be right, but to be holy. It is an
attractive message. But to endure the political pummelling, from left and right, that the
popes every utterance is about to attract, he may need a miracle.