Republican presidential candidates are finding it as hard to wrap their heads around the whole "pope talking about morality beyond sex" thing as
congressional Republicans are, and they're coming to the same basic answer: if we disagree with it, it counts as politics, not religion, so
the pope can stuff it.
Even as Francis was in Havana on Sunday, Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.), a practicing Catholic, told CNN: “I just think the pope was wrong. And so the fact is, that his infallibility is on religious matters, not on political ones.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another Catholic, expressed a similar view on ABC. While he follows the pope “100 percent” on spiritual matters, including teachings on the sanctity of life, Rubio said, “the pope, as an individual, an important figure in the world, also has political opinions. And those, of course, we are free to disagree with.”
The problem here is that the pope is talking about poverty and inequality as a religious issue—and it's kind of hard to dismiss that with any degree of honesty when you consider that Jesus also had a thing or two to say on those topics. And so it goes in Francis's
encyclical on climate change, in which he wrote:
Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years. Yet we are called to be instruments of God our Father, so that our planet might be what he desired when he created it and correspond with his plan for peace, beauty and fullness.
But whatever. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie say they get to decide what's a political opinion they can ignore rather than a religious argument they should listen to.