Throughout Pope Francis’ six-day visit to the U.S., from the moment he touches down at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland this afternoon, political observers will search for political meaning in everything he does.
Liberals, who consider Francis an ideological ally, will want him to speak out on climate change, immigration, criminal justice reform, income inequality and more. Conservatives, meanwhile, hope the pope will shine a light on abortion, marriage, the family and religious freedom.
But those looking to glean something meaningful from the visit would do better to avoid trying to fit the pope and his views into the binary, left-right categories of American politics. The intellectual framework through which Francis sees the world makes him simultaneously more conservative and more liberal than most members of either political party.
That’s in part because Francis is not a politician or policy expert, but a priest and pastor. It’s also because Francis, who before today had never set foot in the United States, comes from a political culture alien to most Americans. That fact, as the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney wrote last week, “makes his visit a learning opportunity both for Francis and for Americans unused to seeing things his way.”
Francis will have several opportunities to weigh in on issues and controversies at the heart of political discussion, including during the first-ever papal address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday and at a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Friday. Above all, people should expect to hear a message that stresses compassion and mercy over judgment and justice — a message of loving society’s excluded and marginalized, and encountering them wherever they are.
Some of the pope’s most moving and memorable moments have involved gestures — he washed prisoners’ feet and embraced a disfigured man — that allowed Francis to touch millions of hearts without uttering a word. This is Pope Francis at his most powerful. He will have many such opportunities during this trip, including when he visits prisoners in Philadelphia, homeless people on the streets of Washington, and immigrant and refugee children in New York City.
When Francis speaks out on political matters, his statements are sometimes insightful and illuminating; almost as often, they can create confusion, especially when they are shaped by experiences in other nations vastly different from this one.
For instance, Francis has acknowledged that he doesn’t understand economics, and yet he insists on making statements about economic policy that seem reactionary and hyperbolic. It is one thing to speak out against the idolatry of money, as Francis often does, and as his predecessors often did. It is something else entirely to condemn capitalism as a driver of income inequality while ignoring that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system in history.
Francis views capitalism through the distorting lens of the way it is often practiced in his native South America, where an absence of the rule of law excludes hundreds of millions of people from the formal economy. As a result, many remain poor, even as the system’s benefits dramatically improve the lot of city-dwellers and the politically connected.
Americans can learn from Francis’ condemnation of materialism. But he also has an opportunity to learn, by looking attentively at this nation, where capitalism works without such mass exclusion.
