As a lifelong and devout Catholic, I don’t enjoy criticizing the Pope. I would prefer not to do it. I also don’t especially enjoy the backlash that will inevitably come my way from certain other Catholics, who believe that I am behaving inappropriately, or even committing a sin, by issuing these criticisms publicly. If anyone feels that way, I won’t be able to convince you otherwise. But I have to do what I believe is the right thing. And in a time when we simply cannot rely on church leadership to actually lead with moral clarity, it falls on the rest of us to speak up. The other option is to be silent, or to pretend that we’re okay with something that is very obviously not okay. And I have no interest in trying to convince myself that the latter is the correct course of action. So here we are.
After a 30-day-stretch in which one of the most prominent Christians in the country was murdered in front of the entire world, prompting thousands of public celebrations — a murder that was bookended by mass shootings at two churches, one of which was targeted by a trans-identifying terrorist who explicitly despised Jesus Christ — you might hope that Christian leaders throughout the world, and in all positions, would be focused on that crisis.
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