Morning Reading - "A Pope Who Leans Left"

Harold Meyerson has today's morning reading, where he reminds the right-wingers whose sudden antipathy to the head of the Roman Catholic Church that they may be taking issue with a certain carpenter as well:

The Wall Street Journal laments his overt embrace of the “progressive political agenda of income redistribution.” My Post colleague George F. Will writes that, “Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

It’s not clear, however, whether the Journal and Will’s argument is with the pope or with the Christianity of the saint whose name he took, or even more fundamentally, with the Nazareth carpenter whom Christians believe was the son of God.  [snip]

Suppose, for instance, that the pope elects, in his address to Congress, to repeat one of that carpenter’s most famous quotes: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Based on past performance, can we expect some Republican congressman to leap to his feet and shout, “You lie,” or Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to shake his head in dissent? Both occurrences greeted addresses to Congress by President Obama, speeches that were nowhere remotely as inflammatory as those in a recent papal encyclical, much less the Sermon on the Mount.  [our emphasis]

Meyerson goes on to illustrate how -- in addressing capitalism, worker rights, human dignity and poverty -- Pope Francis is following the teachings of "the Nazareth carpenter" as well as that of Popes going back to Leo XIII in the 19th Century,  the main difference being Francis is "walking the walk."  At the same time, he's de-emphasizing the socio- political issues beloved by the right. As such, he's of course infuriating the knuckle draggers:

These conservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question. By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition.

A pope infused by the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models. The final scene of George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan” places Joan of Arc in a dream sequence in which all her persecutors, once she’s safely dead and canonized, praise her and acknowledge her sainthood. When she asks them if she should return to Earth and live again, however, they answer with fear, loathing and a resounding “no.” That, in essence, is the conservatives’ response to Pope Francis, and to the spirit and faith he embodies.  [our emphasis]

The Pope is about to address Congress as we post this.  We await what he has to say, and how it's received.

UPDATE:  Here's the text of the remarks Pope Francis made to Congress.