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Wednesday, Sep 30, 2015 4:38 PM UTC
The “Cool Pope” honeymoon is over: Meeting with Kim Davis could be a tipping point for American progressives
Sensible little Fiat aside, he's still the leader of one of the world's most sexually conservative institutions
Topics: Kim Davis, pope francis, Gender politics, Inequality, aol_on, Entertainment News, News, Politics News
Imagine if a rumor started to spread that Kim Davis – the Kentucky clerk disdained by many liberals for her very noisy opposition to gay marriage – had met with Jon Stewart, or Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or Cornel West, or just about any progressive hero. It would be pretty clear that it was either a hoax, or a media stunt resembling a cage match. We’d expect leaked photos with the two wearing boxing gloves.
But the early murmurings that Davis met with Pope Francis, increasingly known among liberals and lefties as the Cool Pope, turned out to be for real. After half a day of speculation, the New York Times confirmed the encounter with reference to a Vatican spokesman.
Ms. Davis, the Rowan County clerk, has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over whether government employees and private businesses have a legal right to refuse to serve same-sex couples. She spent five days in jail for disobeying a federal court order to issue the licenses.
On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said.
This should make any progressive who digs the pope wonder a little bit.
The most immediate question is, How could he do such a thing? Isn’t this the smiling, tolerant pope who has spoken out against climate change, against income inequality and ravages of unchecked capitalism, who has talked about protecting the earth and respecting the poor? Isn’t he – American progressives are asking – one of us?
But the Davis affair serves as a pretty strong reminder that the Anglo-American tradition of the liberal left and the lineage of Catholic social justice the pope represents – a life shaped by Latin America and its gender politics, and by a millennia-old church – are very different. The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote that while the United States was founded in the spirit of the Reformation, his nation was born during Spain’s Counter-Reformation, at a time when the church had “petrified” itself. Argentina, where Francis spent most of his pre-papal career, is not Mexico, but it’s still closer to that reactionary tradition than most North American and British lefties realize.
So let’s just remind ourselves, whatever the Pope’s economic liberalism – his vow of poverty and taking the name of a saint beloved by environmentalists, his sensible little Fiat – he still represents one of the most sexually conservative institutions in the developed world. He preaches love for individual gay people, but concurs with the church’s position that homosexuality is wrong. He opposes abortion. He’s spoken about the importance of women in Catholicism, but seems unlikely to budge allowing women to be ordained or to have a real role in church hierarchy.
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