President Selfie Stick Welcomes Pope Tambourines to the White House

Mr. President, together with their fellow citizens, American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions. And, as my brothers, the United States Bishops, have reminded us, all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.

Mr. President, I find it encouraging that you are proposing an initiative for reducing air pollution. Accepting the urgency, it seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. When it comes to the care of our “common home,” we are living at a critical moment of history. We still have time to make the changes needed . . .

If you have not read it, I would encourage you all to read this full transcript of the Pope’s interview on the plane from Cuba to America. It does not read like an interview with a faith leader, but with a politician. He is leaving a meeting with an explicitly anti-Christian Communist dictator, and he is being asked why he would glad-hand with a dying tyrant while ignoring the many dissidents who wanted to meet with him. He even suggests that those who accuse him of political idiocy are extremists who assess him on the basis of his shoes instead of his ideas. The interview reads like one of a cornered politician, defensive and old, not crafty enough to work around the not very clever questions from journalists. The part where he offers “Hey, maybe one of the wheelchair guys was a dissident?” reads like a line from Veep. They are the answers of somebody embarrassed by the real answer.

This is not always the way it was. Contrast with John Paul II, on 2 June 1979, in Warsaw. He was 59 to Francis’s 78, a young Pope, a Polish Pope, speaking less than a year after his selection. He was speaking in the heart of Soviet military power in Eastern Europe, an occupied capital, under the guns. Over a million people turn out to see him. It is perhaps the largest Mass in the history of the Catholic Church… until the following week in Krakow, when two million will turn out. He is standing in a city run by a government dedicated to atheistic Communism, to subservience to Soviet power, to the rejection of faith and the domination of every thought to the service of the collective.
And this is what he says.
“Therefore Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. Without Christ it is impossible to understand the history of Poland, especially the history of the people who have passed or are passing through this land. The history of people. The history of the nation is above all the history of people. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In him it becomes the history of salvation….
“It is therefore impossible without Christ to understand the history of the Polish nation—this great thousand-year-old community—that is so profoundly decisive for me and each one of us. If we reject this key to understanding our nation, we lay ourselves open to a substantial misunderstanding. We no longer understand ourselves. It is impossible without Christ to understand this nation with its past so full of splendour and also of terrible difficulties. It is impossible to understand this city, Warsaw, the capital of Poland, that undertook in 1944 an unequal battle against the aggressor, a battle in which it was abandoned by the allied powers, a battle in which it was buried under its own ruins—if it is not remembered that under those same ruins there was also the statue of Christ the Saviour with his cross that is in front of the church at Krakowskie Przedmiescie. It is impossible to understand the history of Poland from Stanislaus in Skalka to Maximilian Kolbe at Oswiecim unless we apply to them that same single fundamental criterion that is called Jesus Christ….
“Today, here in Victory Square, in the capital of Poland, I am asking with all of you, through the great Eucharistic prayer, that Christ will not cease to be for us an open book of life for the future, for our Polish future.”