A PAPAL BLUNDER

Summary: Pope Francis improvidently cast away a huge reservoir of goodwill by receiving in audience at the Papal Nunciature militantly homophobic Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis earlier this week.  The Pontiff’s ill considered action managed to dissipate overnight many, if not most, of the good feelings that had started to come his way and the way of the Vatican from American progressives, from non-Roman Catholics, and from queerfolk.  Having been illusioned, many of us now regretfully knowledge being disillusioned.  All of the old misgivings and suspicions have come roaring back, as we realize that the Roman church has actually changed very little from the stultifying neo-Pian, Republican-leaning days of Karol Wojtyła and Jozef Ratzinger’s papacies.  The whole fiasco looks like the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partners in the criminal dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.
    Given the “yooodge” (pace Donald Trump) magnitude of the Pope’s error, now might be opportune time to urge again the impropriety of having an American ambassador to the Holy See.  Certainly, there is an Establishment Clause issue inherent in having official U.S. diplomatic representation at the headquarters of a religious organization.   If an occasional official visit to the Apostolic Palace is necessary, it can be just as easily and just as economically handled by the American Ambassador to the Italian Republic.

The notoriously anti-clerical Italians, who have had the Roman Catholic Church on their backs for far too many centuries to allow it to ride their consciences as well, have a kind of Socratic joke for proving the existence of God. God must exist, the Italians assert, because only a truly loving and astonishingly merciful God could have allowed the Roman Catholic church to exist for so many centuries under such incompetent mismanagement. 

Certainly, both the Vatican and the Roman Pontiff have themselves managed to provide the American public with an astonishing example of the kind of incompetent mismanagement that has kept Italians shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes for so many centuries.

When Pope Francis gave an audience to defiant, homophobic, marriage equality-denying Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, he managed, in one act of breathtaking improvidence, to fling away a huge reservoir of goodwill from American progresses, American queerfolk, and the majority of Americans who are not of the Roman obedience.  

Romanist recusancy became the enabler of militant Nonconformity.  Not only did it come across like St. Peter cuddling with a snake handler, but even worse, Pope Francis's meeting with Kim Davis puts many historically-literate Americans in mind of nothing quite so much as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact by which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became complicit conspirators in the dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.

Now, most Americans are profoundly reductive in their thinking.  We are the kind of people who if an individual's track record contains 99 things and one bad one, we will allow one bad act to cancel out all of the other 99.  Unfortunately, our reductive thinking is often justified.  While conservative Americans have eagerly lambasted the first Jesuit Pontiff for "interfering" in areas in which he is ostensibly not well enough informed to opine, most liberal Americans have given Francis a pass, largely because he has so emphatically not been cast from the authoritarian, neo-Pian mold of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 

Under The aggressively conservative pontificates of Wojtyła and Ratzinger, The Roman Catholic Church in America skewed its allegiance decisively toward the Republican Party.  It was easy for American conservatives, particularly for conservative Roman Catholics, to be ultramontane, and to solicit vigorous, muscular Vatican intervention in domestic American politics.  Until the other day, American liberals had thought those days behind us. Having been illusioned, we must now regretfully acknowledge being seriously disillusioned.

Until the other day, most American liberals, most non-Roman Catholic Americans, and an awful lot of queerfolk had been prepared to think very well of Papa Bergoglio. After all, who could not think well of the pontiff who, when asked about queerfolk had responded by asking who he was to judge?

So, who are we to judge?  The answer is very simple.  We are Americans living through a Maoist time, in which every single act of every single public figure is routinely scrutinized for its political implications.  If the Roman Pontiff had thought that the personal was not the political, then he has made a tragic mistake.  

If the Roman Pontiff had thought that by giving an audience to a huckstering woman who has become the poster child for Christian Persecution Syndrome, a woman who has come to personify everything a majority of Americans don’t like about self-pity, self victimization, and self-promotion, he was making some kind of anodyne statement in favor of “religious liberty,” then he has managed to set back the Roman Catholic cause in this country by generations.

Because when Papa Francesco received in audience the voice of militant Nonconformity that Kim Davis has become, it really did represent a slap in the face not only to millions of progressive American Roman Catholics, but also to the estimated three quarters of the population of the United States that is not Roman Catholic.  Recusancy and Nonconformity came together in a mutually enabling love feast.

Sadly, the bloom is now off the rose with this Pontiff.  In one ill considered audience, but Francis has managed to resurrect all of the suspicion and doubt so many American progressives had come to entertain about the good faith and good intentions of the Roman Catholic Church.

God must love the Roman Catholic Church, and must look out after saints and fools especially, because while Pope Francis may have the makings of a saint, he also was a great fool to have met with Kim Davis.  It will take American progressives of very long time to find it possible to forgive the Holy Father for what may be one of the most rash and impolitic acts ever committed by a visiting Roman Pontiff on the soil of a host country. 

Indeed, so serious is the magnitude of what The Donald might call the “yoooodge” papal transgression in this matter that a serious case can, and should, be made for discontinuing US diplomatic relations with the Holy See, on the grounds and accrediting and ambassador to the Vatican represents a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  We’ve done quite well across more than two centuries without a Papal Nuncio in Washington.  Our relations with the Vatican can certainly be handled just as well by informal visits to the Apostolic Palace by our ambassador to the Italian Republic.