Pope Benedict XVI: How he’s like Obama

last updated 8 January 2015

Is the pope to the left of Barack Obama? said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. That might be a startling notion for some American conservatives, but it’s a logical conclusion to draw after the president met in Rome last week with the titular head of the world’s 1 billion Catholics. As expected, the pope pressed Obama on abortion and stem-cell research—issues on which Obama’s liberal views conflict with the church’s socially conservative teachings. But just days before their meeting, Pope Benedict XVI released an encyclical in which he sounded like a “left-of-center Christian Democrat,” endorsing “the redistribution of wealth” and even calling for a “world political authority” to oversee the global economy. For conservative American Catholics fulminating that Obama is some kind of godless socialist, the pope’s warm reception of the American leader—and his “radical critique of capitalism”—must have made for a mighty confusing week.

It’s true that the pope has some misgivings about the profit motive, said Tyler Cowan in The Wall Street Journal, but he’s hardly a radical. “For all its left-wing rhetoric on economic matters,” the pope’s encyclical is “a fundamentally conservative piece of work,” the whole premise of which is the “continued reign of the status quo—a globalized, wealth-creating market economy—with some ethical adjustments.” Yet there is one status quo the pope clearly would overturn, said Republican Rep. Eric Cantor in National Review Online. That’s the continuing destruction of human life by abortion. In Rome, Obama promised the pope he would work to reduce the number of abortions in America. He should honor that commitment by ending policies that force insurance companies and taxpayers to fund abortions.

The pope might agree with that goal, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times Online, but he won’t take sides in America’s partisan warfare. Despite his conservatism on sexual and social matters, the pope’s “vision doesn’t fit the normal categories of American politics.” He’s an economic liberal, far more concerned about human welfare than the free market; yet he’s firmly rooted in traditional morality, in which work, marriage, and family provide dignity and meaning. In his latest encyclical, he manages to link disparate issues—“the despoiling of the environment to the mass destruction of human embryos”—in a way that would discomfit both liberals and conservatives in the U.S. In fact, Benedict’s “left-right fusionism” has little traction in contemporary, polarized America. But wouldn’t we be better off if it did?