Pope Francis may have delighted leftists with his depiction of the inequalities of capitalism, but there is also some unhappiness with his reluctance to engage those who openly oppose the Catholic Church. What has been difficult to understand is that Francis has not responded to attacks on the Church when they happen.
Praised by publications as far-left as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, as Sandro Magister writes, Francis “never proclaims Church teaching out loud at a moment when the dispute over an issue has become heated. He has kept quiet now that the euthanasia of children has been permitted by law in Belgium. He keeps himself apart from the millions of citizens of every faith who in France and in other countries are opposing the dissolution of the idea of the family made up of father, mother, and children. He has remained silent after the unprecedented affront of the UN report.”
Magister compares Francis to his predecessor, Pope Benedict, and found him wanting, writing of the attacks on the Church:
There is a Jacobin-style attack against the Church, not only in France, that simply wants to exclude it from civil discourse. But there is also a more subtle attack that cloaks itself as a consensus for a Church refurbished and new, up to date, in step with the times. There is also this in the popularity of Francis, a pope “like never before,” finally “one of us,” molded through a copy-and-paste of his open, adaptable statements. This worldly cunning could not have been used against his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He, the meek one, preferred conflict in the open field, with the courage of the yes that means yes and the no that means no, “in season and out of season,” as in Regensburg, when he lifted the curtain on the theological roots of the connection between faith and violence in Islam, and yet again on the “non-negotiable” questions. This is why the world was so ferocious with him.
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