Note: When this diary was published Galtisalie was still a separate pseudonym from Francisco Nejdanov Solomin. Here's an explanation for the prior separate pseudonyms and the decision to discard the separation: http://www.dailykos.com/...
This may be the most important message in a bottle I will ever send out to my friends on the left. I do not know the best ocean in which to set it free, but I think it is Daily Kos. What I have to write should be valuable to the "liberals" too, who also need to do their homework about Pope Francis, but as I am one of those "on the left wing of the possible" people, my target audience is mainly those who consider themselves considerably left of center, i.e. social democratic or further to the left. (Please don't worry, I believe in working within the Democratic Party, and this diary will meet the policies of this website, which I happen to think are strategically sound.)
Since at least the Paris Commune, the left has been seemingly "hopelessly" divided around the world, and the U.S. is no exception. I dispute this paradigm of hopeless division. I think the left can and should come together democratically, whether it concerns the U.S., Cuba (where I am in support of democracy and human rights but oppose the blockade and Gitmo), or anywhere else. In the U.S., after generations of intimidation and ostracism, the left, prior to the Occupy Movement that is, no longer had much of an identity at all. That is now a little less the case, but still it is rather odd that I must come to what in many countries would be a highly mainstream centrist "liberal" website to even be in the large "left" community of the U.S. Oh well, enough about that. I am not writing about the structural dynamics of democracy-lite in the U.S., which does not give third parties of the left much of a chance to be anything other than spoiler most of the time.
In any event, I urge you, if you consider yourself to be on the left, and not merely "liberal" as the term is generally used in the U.S., to consider the unique opportunity a Catholic pope of all people is giving us to get our own act "together." Pope Francis cannot be our leader, and we should not expect him to be. We may never have a leader and need to be our own leaders. He certainly cannot do the heavy lifting for us. He cannot "flush Rush" and his kind for us. That must be done one toilet at a time. As a step in our own continuing recovery in the U.S., we must recognize that we on the left are not truly "we." We are all about factions and schisms--just like greater Christianity is.
The good news is that Pope Francis is actually one in a long line of great unifying Christians who worked for social justice and in doing so built bridges of empathy with new allies. Obviously number one on my list as an American is Dr. King. I also have a particular warm place in my heart for Thomas Merton. (With permission, I am going to quote freely from the preface and introduction to an almost 30,000 word piece entitled A Socialized Reflection on the Praxis Implications of EVANGELII GAUDIUM, Jesuit History, and Jesuit Scholarship that was recently published. No sense in reinventing the wheel. I am omitting links, so if you want them, please go to the original.)
Ralph Ellison concluded and Pope Francis surely agrees that it is not acceptable for any society or economic system, including both capitalism and socialism, to treat others as if they are invisible. The poor and outcast, and their allies, must as necessary cause cultural "disturbance" to confront injustice from whatever direction it emanates. Causing a disturbance creates risk for those causing the disturbance, a price many are unwilling to pay. This socialized reflection and this website are cautious cultural "disturbances" within my power to make, so I am making them. I wish I could do more. I am not a major moral leader like Pope Francis, but I can make tiny drops in the human bucket of moral leadership, and so can you. Therefore, in that respect, we are all potential moral leaders.
Moral leaders can provide varying levels of moral suasion in various ways to persons who would otherwise be unwilling to pay the price. Father Louis, i.e., the monk Thomas Merton, whose prophetic abbey I have visited twice, was a moral leader through his written words although, as a Trappist, he largely remained silent. Achieving justice is not easy. He wrote in "Letters to a White Liberal":
We must dare to pay the dolorous price of change, to grow into a new society. Nothing else will suffice!
The only way out of this fantastic impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their inexorable demands. This is what our society, based on a philosophy of every man for himself and on the rejection of altruism and sacrifice (except in their most schematic and imaginary forms) is not able to do. Yet it is something which it must learn to do. It cannot begin to learn unless it knows the need to learn. ...
[The Negro] ... has come to realize that the white man is less interested in the rights of the Negro than in the white man's own spiritual and material comfort. If then, by making himself visible, the Negro can finally disturb the white man's precious "peace of soul," then by all means he would be a fool not to do so. ...
It seems to me that we have little genuine interest in human liberty and in the human person. What we are interested in, on the contrary, is the unlimited freedom of the corporation. When we call ourselves the "free world" we mean first of all the world in which business is free. And the freedom of the person comes only after that, because in our eyes, the freedom of the person is dependent on money. That is to say, without money, freedom has no meaning. And therefore the most basic freedom of all is the freedom to make money. If you have nothing to buy or sell, freedom is, in your case, irrelevant. In other words, what we are really interested in is not persons, but profits. Our society is organized first and foremost with a view to business, and wherever we run into a choice between the rights of a human person and the advantage of a profit-making organization, the rights of the person will have difficulty getting a hearing. Profit first, people afterward.
Seeds of Destruction, pp. 9, 21, 23 (1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (emphasis in original shown by bold-face).
The invisible people should not be left to struggle alone. They should be “helped” in the struggle. Pope Francis has decided to cause cultural “disturbance” on their behalf. To this I say “Amen Papa, now please keep going and unite with others engaged in the struggle rather than standing apart.” The concept of “we” must be reexamined, something Jesus is written of as having done by telling the Good Samaritan story. We should support what really works best for everyone, regardless of privilege of birth, strength or weakness, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or religion, not just the powerful and those who win their bread wars sufficient to enter the always imperiled middle class.
Just at we need to be allies with each other and to have the Pope as an ally, so too the Pope needs us for his allies:
In looking at organized Christianity, and leaving aside parochial education, one sees some denominations rendering material mutual aid, primarily stop-gap or emergency assistance to idiosyncratically supply human needs. This is largely made possible indirectly by the government in the form of tax deductions but also helped by individual in-kind efforts in the form of volunteering of time and ”non-tax deduction-focused” fund-raising efforts such as rummage sales. This is all well and good but leaves plenty of room for self-satisfaction, although I am not here to lecture about the sin of pride.
I am here to lecture in part about the hypocrisy of Christians opposing governmental efforts to fill the enormous gap between private ”charity” and human needs. Volunteerism is inadequate, always has been, and short of utopian dreams, always will be. I will leave Christians to their pride, and don my socialist hat and say that sorry Christians, and all other religious groups as well, through your individual and combined efforts, you have failed to meet the vast majority of human needs on our planet. I am not saying it is your “fault,” I am just saying that is reality. You cannot expect me and socialists the world over to wait on the results of your next round of fund-raising much less your revival efforts.
The pessimist in me has to admit that Pope Francis’s ”exhortation” is down deep and by definition a revival effort. Nothing is wrong with that. That is largely what the leaders of religions do. The optimist in me, while recognizing that the pessimist in me is probably correct, nevertheless sees great cultural value in what the Pope has done in his exhortation and even greater potential for what he realistically can do in its aftermath, which I will gradually try to make clear in this socialized reflection.
The Pope can try to build his religion and improve the stewardship of what he takes to be God’s creation at the same time. The perception that an innate harmony exists between evangelism and promoting social justice has a history and scholarship, not least within the Society of Jesus. But it is not a panacea, and the Pope will have his hands full at every juncture. The order from which Pope Francis came has been particularly adept at analyzing the role of structures in causing social injustice but not always clear about specific changes that are needed and still less clear about how these should be brought about. Jesuits who dare to get too specific and active have tended to get into trouble with the Catholic hierarchy, leaving the heavy lifting to laypersons, who sometimes are left twisting in the political wind with little meaningful Church support for justice. Meanwhile, poised against meaningful Catholic support for justice is capitalism working through an array of conservative Catholic power groups often casting themselves as the very essence of justice, usually tied to “pro-life” causes but also pointing to true acts of charity and sometimes even mouthing nice words about justice all the while knowledgeable that none of it will actually be implemented.
Are we capable of becoming good allies even with each other, much less with the Pope? Will we forever be captive to our histories of internal antagonisms, largely pertaining to the issues of "cooperation" and "control"? Can we all become "democratic" without being coopted by the very system we need to disturb?
Achieving effective political “cooperation” to make adequate structural changes will never be just a religious problem. For those in need, excuses do not amount to anything. As a socialist, I do not accept as a matter of fate affairs down here on earth. However, combined with the fact that the world’s religions, including Christianity, have not brought about a good situation of cooperation down here on earth is the fact that none of its political or economic systems have done so either, leaving the powerful to dominate the mass of humanity. In frustration, the temptation sometimes has been to obtain and retain “control” at all costs, in order to not accept the failure to achieve ”cooperation.”
How do we get out of this mess? Sorry, but I do not know. I do believe, however, that it will be important for the Church to have a credible united and democratic left with which to cooperate. As a socialist, I want to particularly admit that “socialism” as a functioning alternative to capitalism has largely not gotten its own house in order. It has not only sometimes imposed itself in an unnecessarily undemocratic manner but also bungled real opportunities that have been thrust upon it from humans desperate because of the failures of capitalism. Socialism’s failures have not been all about capitalist sabotage, and to the extent they are, socialism needs to be designed to take this predictable sabotage into account while retaining humaneness. Capitalist sabotage did not lead to Stalin and Mao. As it predominately has been applied, in its so-called “actually existing” or “real,” form (think Soviet Union), socialism has sometimes failed to work very well economically, although sometimes not as badly as its reactionary critics contend; and it has caused a great deal of alienation to rival and sometimes surpass capitalism, on occasion leading to mass injustice.
A common thread in these socialism failures had been lack of democracy and respect for human rights. Religions are not the only human institutions with “control” problems. Both Christianity and socialism may need to unlearn certain habits. Dissenters, doubters, and would-be innovators acting in good faith can be viewed as troubling and in need of crushing or as potential sources of constructive criticism. Not everyone who questions authority or conventional wisdom is a heretic or a reactionary. We do not all have to be true believers to be valuable to a cause. Skeptics can work just as hard and bleed and die for causes they only partly believe just as much as zealots. Meanwhile, zealots manufacture a lot of stupid decisions and stay a lot of stupid courses. Stupidity is simply stupid, and systems that do not engineer good means for stupidity elimination are stupid. Moreover, even our outright reactionary opponents have human rights and on occasion can have some small valid points amongst their propaganda and viciousness. It is not good to spend much of a religious or political-economic system’s credibility and energy sorting out who is a loyal skeptic and who is a reactionary. Let their ideas be sorted out democratically for what they are worth.
If socialism is ever going to be an attractive economic system it will have to find a way to be democratic and respecting of human rights while preserving enough central control to assure everyone’s basic needs are met. Again, religions might take a clue in this area too. They especially need to come to an understanding of the left’s varied and profound history of dealing with “control.”
(The quoted piece has an extensive critical discussion of "'Control' on the Left." Although written to introduce Christians to this Achilles heel of some of the left, it also may be worthwhile reading for those already self-identifying as being on the left.)
In learning how to work with each other and the Pope for social justice, we would be well-served to begin by doing homework to learn some of the language the Pope, or his opponents, will be using:
From whence cometh Pope Francis’s exhortation?
After all is said and done, humans down here on earth can either work together to make the best of things, even if making the best of things is inconsistent with the desires and scapegoating of the powerful, or not. This reflection is about possible influences on the Pope’s wanting to make the best of things down here on earth, including the possible impact of a deceased priest now largely forgotten outside Jesuit circles, and the possible impact of these influences on future praxis by the Pope and his potential allies in the quest for economic justice. ...
[W]hether all of Christianity or just the Pope’s denomination expands or contracts, however long his papacy will be, humanity does not have time for dithering or infighting by those who should know better. If Pope Francis wants to help and not to judge, he can be of great assistance to humanity. If he is more interested in filling empty pews and sustaining the Vatican budget than filling empty stomachs and sustaining our world until an asteroid or the Sun determines otherwise, which I do not think is the case, we will still accept his nice words of comfort to the weak, because we are either weak ourselves or trying to be friends to the weak. We will do our best with or without him, and some of us may forgive ”[t]he hopeless sinner, [W]ho has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs”:
...
[I]n light of Pope Francis’s loving words since he became head of the Church ... the powerful and their mercenaries now scurry to find plan B. But I and the other friends of the weak need to have a plan B too. Right now, we don’t even have a Plan A. The more sophisticated rightwing analysts are mindful of the need to coopt the Church’s social doctrine back to a pleasing reactionary bent. Thus, Ross Douthat thrusts forward a questionable “talking point” interpretation of Church doctrine, complete with a term new to many (“subsidiarity”):
[C]atholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy.
Mr. Douthat no doubt realizes that most of the left will be too unversed in this doctrine, too repelled by the Church’s attitude toward women and gays, or maybe even too celebratory to bother retorting him with a more accurate interpretation.
The left certainly should not be resting on its newfound papal laurels. It would be a shame if at least some on the left would not learn how to rebut the conservative spin using the Church’s own language. Pope Francis’s exhortation is a game-changer, but it awaits fruition and even a determined humane Pope cannot do it alone. The Exhortation can easily be deflected and redirected to dithering or worse in civil and political societies if the Pope has few allies on the left who know this language and are willing to examine its history and subtleties.
Just as for a time Keynesian economists were triumphant and thought classical economists were dead, laughable, and dishonest, only to find that classical economists had waged a two-headed comeback called libertarianism and free market neoliberalism, so also the Church easily can be used once again to do what Marx and Gramsci predicted: help to make sure the powerful get what they want.
Moreover, because the left desperately needs to improve its own “praxis” (to use the fancy term Gramsci preferred) anyway, not to mention to develop an improved positive agenda that accounts for the failings of “actually-existing socialism,” we might ”actually” learn a lot by dialoguing with open-minded members of the Catholic community about some of the Pope’s ideas and even those of his predecessors going back to the late nineteenth century. Some of the Church’s notions that a Douthat could misuse to benefit the anti-social Nozickian status quo may have social value in the stubbornly non-privileged world where most of the human population lives. If they can be properly interpreted and applied some may fit within a realistic and compassionate socialized world. While we cannot afford to fixate on the Church’s ideas any more than we can afford to fixate on Marx, we have a lot to learn ourselves–and we do need allies.
Culture matters, but not in the way suggested by conservatives. To use another favorite Gramscian term, the Church has often played a pronounced negative role in “cultural hegemony.” Culture should not be about the invisible outcast needing to conform, either by tolerating the oppression or adopting the couture of the ruling class. Culture should not be a weapon used for deflecting from the material needs of the weak and outcast by pointing to their boot-straps that need pulling. Pope Francis appears to be willing to shift the cultural hegemonic force of the Church from buttressing the global capitalist system preferred by the powerful, which he has now strongly condemned, to constructing a humane alliance with all persons of good will, with special attention to the needs of the poor.
Cultural hegemony is always at work around us, usually at the behest of the powerful. All too often the Church has been in partnership with capitalism–and because it relies upon private “charitable” contributions for its own funding, let’s not deceive ourselves–it still is and will be for the foreseeable. As much as the Church talks about the widow’s mites, the large tax-deductible checks placed by capitalists in collection plates will always tend to have a corrupting influence on the Church in the same way campaign donations of the wealthy corrupt politicians. I am not trying to disparage the Church or its legitimate need for money. I am a preacher’s kid myself, and I know we were one step above poverty the whole time I grew up. However, it is easy enough for a pope to touch the base of “charity” (as Pope Benedict XVI did in CARITAS IN VERITATE, “Love in Truth”) without making the capitalists the least bit nervous in terms of the system they impose upon humanity. If they have to the powerful will try to destroy Pope Francis just as they, through sins of commission and omission, willingly cause or suffer the suffering of the powerless every day.
At least for now Pope Francis aims to change the Church and through it the world in a positive way, and he has my hand of friendship in this endeavor. This friendship must, however, be critically honest and authentic. As discussed below, the Church makes a distinction between what the priests and other religious can do and what the laypeople can do. It generally leaves strenuously pushing political causes to laypeople, except, that is, over the last few decades for “moral issues” affecting reproduction and sexuality. When the going gets controversial from the vantage point of the powerful, the clergy may not be found. The poor and disadvantaged may have prayers and handouts but little in the way of true solidarity from the Church to change the very structures that cause the poor and disadvantaged to remain in need of charity.
Below the croissant, I will put some information on the subsidiarity issue that I think is very important. Please go to the above-cited piece if you want lots of other details, including an extensive discussion of the Pope's exhortation with respect to Jesuit history and scholarship. The Jesuits already experienced the same attacks Pope Francis is experiencing, and it is worth studying how they handled these attacks and what they might have done better, if protecting the world's poor and needy is the objective.
Below (links omitted) is excerpted from Part III. Textual Analysis in A Socialized Reflection on the Praxis Implications of EVANGELII GAUDIUM, Jesuit History, and Jesuit Scholarship
Perspective matters. Life experiences matter. Intellectual and spiritual mentors matter too. I find it fascinating that a socially-conscious priest-scholar with a one sentence Wikipedia entry, with core beliefs concerning the need to focus on the poor that were widely disparaged during the papacy of John Paul II (but not for the most part by John Paul II himself or even Benedict thereafter), could help to plant tiny intellectual and spiritual seeds in Jorge Mario Bergoglio. If he did, these seeds were in some ways not planted on fertile ground–if one ignores the slums of the world. They would have had to survive through the Reagan era, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, China becoming an authoritarian version of a market capitalist economy, classical economics hegemony, the Great Recession, austerity blood-letting “cures,” and so many other dramatic global changes–only to bear unexpected really huge fruit two papacies later.
Of course, “influence” itself is a loaded term, particularly I suspect when it comes to a pope. To a Roman Catholic, a pope is speaking “to,” but to one degree or another “for” the Church, and the Church is supposed to be “the body of Christ.” So in a sense the mysteries of metaphor are the message and take on reality. At the least, influence, assuming it is capable of analysis, can be direct or indirect and depend upon innumerable coincidences, serendipity, or to many Christians, the work of “the Holy Spirit.” (See the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation, EVANGELII GAUDIUM, sections 262-283.)
Perhaps no one, not least I, could begin to understand or explain “influence” when it comes to Pope Francis. But, although I am no pope or a Jesuit, I have been positively “influenced” by some good priests, some of whom were Jesuits. So I know a bit about how Jesuits can influence people. Perhaps, being a person, an eventual pope and formerly rank-and-file Jesuit can be similarly influenced by the often brilliant self-effacing servants with whom he lived in community and from whom he, directly or indirectly, had the opportunity to learn.
I, for example, was positively influenced in person by the late Robert Drinan, S.J., whom I knew a little back in the early 1980s. He had left Congress and put back on his clerical collar on orders from John Paul II, at the behest of powerful conservative U.S. Catholics. He was put out to pasture at a Jesuit university in Washington D.C., where he could explain to people who crossed his path like me the true meaning of scriptures such as “the poor will always be with you.” He was a good and kind priest-scholar.
Much more recently, I have been positively influenced through practical yet somehow still soaring scholarly writings of another good and kind deceased Jesuit, Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J.. He has been a profound help to me, a democratic socialist who is also a Christian contemplative, because he was the go-to person for decades within the Society of Jesus for analysis of liberation theology, Marxism, and related subjects, including as they relate to Vatican II and its aftermath. Totally unrelated to the eventual Pope Francis, when I wanted to get a sophisticated Christian take on the thoughts I was thinking, I turned “to” the Jesuits, and specifically “to” Father Calvez, because when he died in 2010 he left behind important scholarly works on matters important to me. I do not read these works uncritically, but rather mine them for wisdom and understanding. Just as I would not read the works of Marx, or even the reported words of Jesus Christ, without bringing all of my faculties, such as they are, I refuse to give a priest or a pope responsibility for directing my conscience, heart, and mind.
Father Calvez is in some ways an unpromising ”influence” and better described as a magnificent conduit to a large degree. For, when writing to elucidate Church doctrine, he did not even claim to be “original” as far as I can tell and might even have been repelled by the notion. He was seeking to reflect and amplify the work of others, including early on various popes and in later years the work of his mentor, Father General Pedro Arrupe, leader of the Jesuits from 1965-1983. Despite his humility as an author, however, I have come to treasure the three of Father Calvez’s books in my possession, all first published in French, the most recent of which, a humble and relatively short paperback, I will discuss at some length below.
The other two are more properly considered major works, one discussing Church social doctrine from economic and morals perspectives and the other discussing the political reasons the economically achievable has not been achieved in developing countries. I will not discuss them in detail, or for the most part either endorse or refute them, in this post. One was originally published in French the year Fidel Castro came to power: The Church and Social Justice: The Social Teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII, 1878-1958 (Calvez, Jean-Yves and Jacques Perrin, 1961. Chicago, Ill.: Henry Regnery Co.). Presumably because it was critical of actually-existing socialism (and overlooking that it was also critical of actually-existing capitalism) during the Cold War when that was a priority, this book managed to be published in English by the same company that published William F. Buckley, and was the predecessor to Rush Limbaugh’s publisher. I only wish to emphasize three points from this book. ...
•Third, the fact that this book will provide a great deal of helpful social doctrine information for those who wish to refute the propaganda of the rightwing, which is hurling out deception to minimize the impact of the words of Pope Francis. For instance, the section on the principle of "subsidiarity" (id., pp. 328-337) contradicts rightwing libertarian assertions that, not without a little irony, the state is supposed to wither away and local charitable organizations take over:
In a resumé of the teaching of Rerum Novarum, Pius XI listed the theses of Leo XIII on the intervention of the state: its right and duty to work for the prosperity of the community and its members; limitation of the freedom of citizens and their families by the requirements of the common good and respect due to the rights of others; the positive duty of the state to look to the good of the whole community as well as to that of its parts; and, lastly, an obligation for the state to take particular care of the weak and poor. ...
[T]here is no limit to the state's right to intervene when intervention is necessary for the common good or the protection, in the name of distributive justice, of the rights of a member of the community or a class. ...
It was possible that the state ought to take over some particular economic activity because of its size or importance in the name of the common good. ...
[T]he principle does not mean that the state should intervene as little as possible. ... [N]othing which does concern the universal common good and the realization of distributive justice is outside its competence.
The principle of state subsidiarity does not, therefore, look for the suppression of the state, if that were possible, for it is quite impossible to delegate to lesser societies than the state the functions and responsibilities which belong to it. That would be to suppose that these societies also are subsidiary to the state, and this is impossible: subsidiarity looks only one way. The state brings aid (subsidium) to other societies, but they do not bring aid to the state--at least, not in the same sense. ...
[T]he principle stems from the common good, which must be the criterion of legitimacy.
(Id. pp. 330-333; footnotes omitted.) It quotes Pius XI as recognizing, "The state should therefore leave to smaller groups the settlement of business of minor importance, which otherwise would greatly distract it; it will thus carry out with greater freedom, power and success the tasks belonging to it alone, because it alone can effectively accomplish these: directing, watching, stimulating, restraining, as circumstances suggest and necessity demands." (Id. p. 333; footnote omitted.)
2:59 PM PT: The cited piece also frankly and in detail acknowledges the Pope's unfortunate failure so far to modify the Church's positions on choice and birth control but nevertheless recommends that the left work with the Pope as much as possible on other areas where there is agreement. This is a snippet on those key issues:
" Because Pope Francis is concerned about youth and young married people turning away from the Church he should consider how the Church sticks its head in the sand about how women and men can prevent unplanned pregnancies using modern medical science, and then tries to stick its nose where it does not belong when women deal with the consequences. Although he preaches intolerance toward rights to reproductive freedom somewhat half-heartedly, he still does it, all while evidencing elsewhere [221 and 231] cognizance of the “constant tensions present in every social reality” and that “realities are greater than ideas”–every reality that is other than pregnancy. Church critics relating to abortion are not unfairly typecasting the Church as ”ideological, obscurantist and conservative” [213]; they are asking for women to be able to make their own choices about issues involving their own bodies that are endlessly debatable and often tortuous to the people involved because of their complexity. The Church’s credibility on the issue is particularly low because the Church does so little to help women avoid unwanted pregnancies based on positions that are plainly to most of its own membership ideological, obscurantist and conservative.
To the delight of the powerful, Pope Francis has still allowed every reactionary priest, politician, and pundit a rallying cry on the complex issue of “life” that will substantially negate the democratic effect of his noble position on the poor (overlooking that family planning is a major economic issue). Much more important than his language choice on one issue or the other is the effect his overall language choices will have, which is too bad, because the Pope’s position in regard to the poor is indeed noble, and highly courageous too. It provides leadership the world desperately needs. Pope Francis, by seeking to spread the good news, may nevertheless wind up doing some “charitable” things to materially (and a believer would say, spiritually) benefit many of the poor, but he could do much more if he used his moral authority to reconcile the Church with women while he was taking on poverty."