Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online critiques recent actions from Pope Francis.
Unpopular though it may be to say so, I, for one, grew exhausted by the non-stop pronouncements/commentaries of Pope Francis. The spiritual leader of 1 billion Catholics — roughly half of the world’s Christians — Francis just completed a high-profile, endlessly publicized visit to the United States.
But unlike past visiting pontiffs, the Argentine-born Francis weighed in on a number of hot-button U.S. social, domestic, and foreign-policy issues during a heated presidential-election cycle.
Francis, in characteristic cryptic language, pontificated about climate change. He lectured on illegal immigration. He harped on the harshness of capitalism, as well as abortion and capital punishment.
A fair-minded person might infer from his advice that capitalism is more prone to impoverish than to create enough wealth to bring the underclass out of poverty. Yet the poor in the free-market United States are mostly better off than the middle classes in Pope Francis’ homeland. Argentina’s statism has transformed one of the most resource-rich countries in the world into an impoverished nation. Are the wages of socialism therefore less than Christian?
Authoritarian regimes such as the Castro dynasty in Cuba or Iran’s theocracy do not receive much criticism from the pope for their administration of state justice. Yet Francis blasted capital punishment, which in America is mostly reserved for first-degree murderers, not the perpetrators of thought crimes as in Cuba and Iran.
