The gap between moral norms and public policy
In less than two years, the American Catholic right’s sentiment toward Pope Francis seems to have drifted from wariness to criticism to anticipatory anger. This Pynchonesque turn from reactions to pre-reactions is marked by the still-unreleased papal encyclical on the environment, with its expected call to action on climate change.
Maureen Mullarkey, in a bravura performance at First Things, calls the pope “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,” as revealed by his “clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba.” According to Mullarkey, it is “megalomania” that “sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets,” rather than a valid exercise of his office or even a good-faith attempt to urge the world in healthy direction. This megalomania finds Francis “sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.”
In fairness to Francis’s other critics, not many of them sound like a McCarthyite version of Foghorn Leghorn. (In case you miss Mullarkey’s implication that the pope is a Marxist, her post underscores the point by including a painting of the 1920 assembly of the Communist International.) But this refrain is echoed in less fulsome tones by Catholic and non-Catholic commenters alike: the pope is beyond his competence in matters of science and public policy, at least where the environment is concerned. Robert George, while affirming the pope’s power to bind the consciences of the faithful on moral “norms,” insists that the pope has no special insight on “matters of empirical fact” such as the debate—which George presents as an even one—between scientists who affirm anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it. So if you doubt the empirical basis, you can ignore the prescription without denying the norm.
