A mural of Pope Francis in Midtown Manhattan. (Photo: Walter McBride/Getty Images)
When Pope Francis arrives in Washington, D.C., next week, the most intriguing moral leader on the global stage will find throngs of adoring crowds and glowing media coverage. A pope who can make Catholicism cool, and the Vatican a good news story, is rare enough. But Francis’ role as a reformer with a common touch has disarmed even many critics of the world’s most influential institution.
Simmering just under this sunny narrative, however, is a subtext that Pope Francis himself recognizes. In the United States, the epicenter of global finance, the pope — who challenges “trickle-down” economics and questions the “absolute autonomy of markets” — will run head first into the buzz saw of American politics. Francis touches down in the nation’s capital at an especially charged moment.
A historic number of Catholics (the majority of them Republicans) are running for president at a time when the pope has put economic inequality, climate change and the plight of immigrants at the forefront of his papacy. As if the backdrop of the 2016 elections weren’t enough to frame the contours of this visit, Francis, the first Jesuit pope and the first pope from the global South, will also be the first pontiff in history to address a joint session of Congress. His audience in the chamber will be an attentive bunch. Nearly one-third of Congress is Catholic, and about 1 in 10 graduated from a Jesuit university, including House Speaker John Boehner, who invited the pope to Capitol Hill.
Even months before his scheduled visit, ripples of tensions surfaced in Washington. A simple congressional resolution to recognize the pope’s “inspirational statements and actions” floundered last year and attracted minimal Republican support. A GOP official told The Hill that the resolution sputtered because of the perception that the pope was “too liberal” and is “sounding like President Obama” by talking about inequality.
A new Catholic political narrative?

In recent decades before the election of Pope Francis, a vocal minority of Catholic bishops, conservative intellectuals with clout in Rome, and sharp-elbowed culture warriors wielded disproportionate influence in shaping the political voice of the U.S. church. Pope John Paul II denounced the temptation to make an “idol” of markets and spoke out strongly against the Iraq war. Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the “scandal of glaring inequalities” and was dubbed the “Green Pope” for his efforts to make the Vatican the first carbon neutral state. Nevertheless, Catholic Republicans during the Reagan and Bush administrations usually felt the wind at their backs, as Catholic identity increasingly became most conspicuously defined through the prism of the church’s teachings on abortion, sexuality and marriage.

By the time the University of Notre Dame invited President Obama to give the commencement address a few months after his historic 2008 election, church politics felt long removed from the days when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago took the stage at Fordham University in 1983 and famously stressed that the church’s “pro-life” commitment had to include not only abortion, but also an expansive set of moral issues that included economic justice and war. Catholic bishops who opposed Notre Dame’s decision to honor a pro-choice president lined up to scold the university with such intensity that a former president of the U.S. bishops’ conference warned that the church was putting at risk its historic posture of non-partisanship. “The condemnation of President Obama and the wider policy shift that represents,” wrote John Quinn, the retired archbishop of San Francisco, “signal to many thoughtful persons that the bishops have now come down firmly on the Republican side in American politics.”
Republican Catholic politicians have spent years watching their Democratic colleagues face public scrutiny from the Catholic hierarchy over the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage. But now, under Francis’ papacy, they find themselves in the unusual and often uncomfortable position of explaining why they disagree with the pope — and even Catholic teaching — on certain issues.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the former House Budget Committee chair, has not been shy about appealing to Catholic teaching to defend proposed cuts to government programs to aid low-income families. But he balked when Pope Francis described trickle-down economic theories as “crude and naive.” After praising the pope as a moral leader, Ryan rhetorically patted the pontiff on the head with a patronizing dismissal. “The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” he scoffed. “They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.”
Months before the pope even released his June encyclical — the first in church history specifically devoted to issues of ecology and environmental stewardship — Republicans pounced. The pope is “a complete disaster when it comes to his public policy pronouncements,” Stephen Moore, a Catholic and the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in Forbes. Moore fumed that the pope was aligning himself with “the radical green movement that is at its core anti-Christian, anti-people, and anti-progress.”
Catholic convert and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush also seemed rattled when asked about the encyclical. “I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” Bush said, adding that religion should be about “making us better as people” rather than “getting into the political realm.”

It was a revealing and unusual response for an elected official who has often appealed to his faith tradition to explain or defend his political positions, most notably his decision as Florida governor to keep a brain-damaged woman, Terri Schiavo, on a feeding tube against the wishes of her husband.
In a sign of how the center of gravity at the Vatican has changed, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, a key adviser to Pope Francis on the encyclical, criticized Bush during a CNN interview for de-linking faith and morals from political obligations.
Pope Francis has also become persona non grata for Fox News pundits and conservative talk radio hosts, important echo chambers for the GOP establishment. They were especially outraged in May 2014 when Francis called for “the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits.” Fox News executive editor John Moody accused the pope of becoming a “robe-wearing politician.” Sean Hannity lectured the pope on the virtues of hard work. Rush Limbaugh has called the pope a “Marxist,” and after Francis pressed for urgent action to address climate change, Limbaugh raged again. “Essentially what this papal encyclical is saying is that every Catholic should vote for the Democrat party. … How else do you interpret it when the pope comes out and sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?”
The Pope is not a Democrat or Republican
Pope Francis and his team are not naive above the fact that some of his fiercest critics are waiting for him in the United States. One of the pope’s key advisers, Cardinal Oscar Rodriquez Maradiaga of Honduras, has specifically pointed to “movements in the United States” as fundamentally opposed to the pope’s emphasis on inequality and climate change. “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” the cardinal bluntly explained in May. Francis himself is aware of his U.S. antagonists and has pledged to study their arguments before his arrival.
But before liberals start doing a victory lap, it’s important to state what should be painfully obvious but is perhaps easily overlooked: Pope Francis is not a Democrat. His challenge to consumerism and individualism is a wake-up call for Americans across the spectrum. A pope who speaks often about a “throwaway culture” and who has said it’s not “progressive” to end a human life cannot be easily pigeonholed as a cheerleader for the secular left.
Even so, it would be equally mistaken to underestimate Pope Francis’ potential to recalibrate the Catholic voice in public life. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, appointed by Francis in March, argues that the pope’s call for a “new balance” in how the church disseminates its teachings and his desire to put more institutional muscle behind addressing root causes of inequality “demand a transformation of the existing Catholic political conversation in our nation.”
Whether that transformation will take root or fizzle in the future is an open question. But the fact that the leader of the Catholic Church is even provoking that kind of discussion is a sign that the “Francis effect” can’t be ignored.