I don’t know if it is really accurate to say that Pope Francis is splitting from the GOP, but he isn’t following their party line on abortion, contraception, gay rights, tax policy or climate change, primarily because he is both more moderate and more sane than the Republicans. He also has a much healthier respect for the intelligence and integrity of the scientific community. And this is going to become much more apparent next year.
Next year, as part of a speech he’ll give to the United Nations General Assembly, Francis will issue an edict urging the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to do what they can to fight climate change.
“He’s modeling the church as a place for open disagreement,” said Vincent J. Miller, who chairs the University of Dayton’s Catholic theology program. “In that sense, one of the most important changes he’s making is that conservative politicians are now openly disagreeing with him,” Miller said.
Perhaps it is because Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were such hardliners on social issues that American Catholics have developed the habit of picking and choosing which papal policies they will respect and which they will ignore. So, there is no guarantee that taking the reality-based community’s position on climate change will make much discernible difference in the voting patterns of Catholics in America. Republican Catholics may simply ignore the pope on that particular issue, just like millions of Catholics have ignored papal instruction on birth control.
Still, it creates difficulties for a political party when their positions are opposed by the Vatican, as pro-choice Democrats have known for quite some time. When the pope tweets “Inequality is the root of social evil,” and criticizes “trickle-down” economics as a “crude and naïve” theory, that is going to have an effect, especially over time.
Perhaps most importantly, the idea that a “good” Catholic is a Republican will weaken and perhaps even shift.
We hear a lot of talk about the Democrats’ difficulty in attracting white working-class voters. Among that group, the Dems have always done better with Catholics than Protestants, which can be seen by looking at the religious affiliation of white Democrats in Congress. I think we should anticipate an even better performance in upcoming elections, as the Francis Effect begins to take hold.