Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome V: In which Fox News “editor” Adam Shaw has temper tantrum against the pope.

dam Pshaw of Fox News (he spells it Shaw) claims to be a “news edi­tor” who “writes about Anglo-Amer­i­can and Catholic issues.” Or maybe it is just Fox News that makes the claim. Oh! thought I, if that is the case, let me take a look into what “Catholic issues” the twen­ty-some­thing new­ly­wed and father has tack­led for Fox News. Here is what I found: Of the thir­ty-one arti­cles on his archive page, twen­ty-four of them boast such titles as “For­get Xbox One: 2014 Could Be Nin­ten­do’s Year” (here); “Duck Dynasty Video Game Offers More Gun Fun” (here); “Can­dy Crush Saga Gets an Over­haul” (here); “One Week With the Sony Playsta­tion Four” (here); “Pokemon–Does it Still Have the X Fac­tor?” (here). There is even an arti­cle (here) claim­ing to list thir­teen rea­sons why San­ta Claus is a con­ser­v­a­tive. Well, I could go on, but you get the point: Mas­ter Pshaw hath writ­ten a full cor­pus of wise the­ol­o­gy, and every sem­i­nar­i­an ought read it in depth before Holy Orders be grant­ed. In truth if not in jest, dear read­er, the young man has written—count ’em—two arti­cles on “Catholic issues,” and both of them are histri­on­ic rants against Pope Fran­cis.

Read a sam­ple, will you, of some of what the petu­lant Mas­ter Pshaw writes in his hit piece. He exco­ri­ates the pope’s “mis­guid­ed snob­bery” and “deri­sive atti­tude.” With a straight face, he claims the pope (who oft hath fed and cleansed poor souls in jails, hos­pi­tals, and nurs­ing homes) does not under­stand the hopes of the poor. He says that the Holy Father, in his recent apos­tolic exhor­ta­tion, “put[s] a boot in[to]” the rich. (There’s a stale metaphor so stuffed with polit­i­cal cock and bull that George Orwell should return from glo­ry to smack the boy). He claims that the pope “has no time for nuance” and “blun­ders … with­out any clar­i­fi­ca­tion.” The pope, says this crack young gamer, is “crude” and “naive.” Mas­ter Pshaw writes off the pope’s eth­i­cal con­cern for the poor as no more than “noise,” “forced redis­tri­b­u­tion,” and “back­ward eco­nom­ics.” He ends, with all the deep wis­dom of a man whose years have just now passed a score, by accus­ing the pope—the pope!—of being out of “con­for­mi­ty” with Church teach­ing.

I am sur­prised Fox News would pub­lish such unre­con­struct­ed garbage and arro­gant snipe and present it as the work of some­one who “writes about Catholic issues.” No, sir. Fr. Z writes about Catholic issues. Mark Shea writes about Catholic issues. Pat Arch­bold writes about Catholic issues. Fr. Robert Siri­co, who has some years on Pshaw and knows a thing or two about eco­nom­ics and Church social teach­ing, writes about Catholic issues. Did Fox News think to ask any of these esteemed men, or their com­peers, to help them under­stand Evan­gelii Gaudi­um? Is Fox News unable to find informed and thought­ful sources? Why is it putting for­ward the tem­per tantrums and pan­ic attacks of a game­boy, recent­ly fired from Catholic News Agency, as a coher­ent com­men­tary on a very com­plex papal doc­u­ment?

The only thing worth not­ing about Mas­ter Pshaw’s drib­ble is its pale effort to sound like Rush Lim­baugh. And even Mr. Lim­baugh (as I wrote here and here) was out of man­ner dumb about Pope Fran­cis.

GET A GOOD JOB WITH GOOD PAY AND YOU’RE OKAY

Mas­ter Pshaw begins his remark­able hit piece with the fol­low­ing sen­tence: “Pope Fran­cis has declared war on those who aspire to pro­vide a bet­ter life for them­selves and their fam­i­lies, express­ing the mis­guid­ed snob­bery of a man for whom mon­ey has nev­er been an issue.”

When I taught fresh­man and sopho­more writ­ing, I often dreamed of a day when I could force any stu­dent who wrote sen­tences like that to copy, by hand, fifty times, the entire text of Orwell’s “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage.” Here is Orwell:

[T]here is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evoca­tive pow­er and are mere­ly used because they save peo­ple the trou­ble of invent­ing phras­es for them­selves. Exam­ples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cud­gels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoul­der to shoul­der with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fish­ing in trou­bled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed.

And “declare war on.” What does it mean to say Pope Fran­cis has “declared war on” those who hope for a bet­ter life? In what sec­tion of Evan­gelii Gaudi­um is this dec­la­ra­tion of war? When are the Vat­i­can troops going to march on Wall Street? Does Mas­ter Pshaw know? Does he care? Is truth his goal, or angry bilge? Are we to believe that, if Pope Fran­cis gets his way, the Inqui­si­tion will resume and Romish stormtroop­ers will seize the assets of the Koch broth­ers and build elec­tric fences around cor­po­ra­tions to keep out any­one who aspires to an income of more than $3000 a year?

In fact, as I read Evan­gelii Gaudi­um, I find the pope to be on the side of those who aspire to a bet­ter life:

We can only praise the steps being tak­en to improve peo­ple’s wel­fare in areas such as health­care, edu­ca­tion[,] and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. At the same time we have to remem­ber that the major­i­ty of our con­tem­po­raries are bare­ly liv­ing from day to day, with dire con­se­quences. … It is a strug­gle to live and, often, to live with pre­cious lit­tle dig­ni­ty. … [M]asses of peo­ple find them­selves exclud­ed and mar­gin­al­ized: with­out work, with­out pos­si­bil­i­ties, with­out any means of escape. (EG 52–53)

Where is the “dec­la­ra­tion of war” here? It sounds as though Pope Fran­cis loves those who strug­gle for a bet­ter life. It sounds as though he is their advo­cate. I can only guess what Mas­ter Pshaw might make of this part of the text, since he nowhere quotes from it—at least not in any­thing resem­bling con­text.

But do the pope’s words sound like “mis­guid­ed snob­bery”? Or does the snob­bery belong to Mas­ter Pshaw? While the young game­boy was play­ing Can­dy Crush and dream­ing of stacks of cash for wife and kid, Pope Fran­cis was tram­pling upon his ambi­tion by doing this. And this. And this. (Wait, was that last one pub­lished at Fox News? Mas­ter Pshaw must not have edit­ed that one.)

And it is worth point­ing out too, for the edu­ca­tion of the lad Mas­ter Pshaw at Fox, that the rea­son mon­ey has “nev­er been an issue” for Pope Fran­cis is because he took a vow of pover­ty, so that he could spend his life serv­ing the poor. The Jesuits sup­ply his liv­ing from the gen­er­ous (and very often sac­ri­fi­cial) offer­ings of those who sup­port the Church’s mis­sion, who love priests, and who have stern­er and nobler goals in their heart than play­ing the next ver­sion of Can­dy Crush Saga. (Or Ring Around the Rosie.) But the way Mas­ter Pshaw phras­es it, one would think the pope was born rich and has been an arm­chair econ­o­mist smok­ing a pipe and rest­ing his feet on the fend­er whilst ignor­ing the plight of those who dream of a bet­ter life.

THAT DO GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT?

But blind to the irony, Mas­ter Pshaw quotes these words from the Holy Father: “Oh how I long for a poor Church for the poor!” By sleight-of-brain, Mas­ter Pshaw seems to think that being “for the poor” means that the pope is “for pover­ty.” He seems to think it means the pope wants the poor to remain poor. Thus he quotes the pope: “The cul­ture of pros­per­i­ty dead­ens us.” It reads like a quo­ta­tion Mas­ter Pshaw picked up sec­ond­hand, and with­out both­er­ing to read the full con­text of Fran­cis’s remarks. Which are these:

Almost with­out being aware of it, we end up being inca­pable of feel­ing com­pas­sion at the out­cry of the poor, weep­ing for oth­er peo­ple’s pain, and feel­ing a need to help them, as though all this were some­one else’s respon­si­bil­i­ty and not our own. The cul­ture of pros­per­i­ty dead­ens us; we are thrilled if the mar­ket offers us some­thing new to pur­chase.

Such as Duck Dynasty the video game per­haps?

“In the mean­time,” the pope con­tin­ues, “all those lives stunt­ed for lack of oppor­tu­ni­ty seem a mere spec­ta­cle; they fail to move us.” (EG 54)

In con­text, the pope is not putting the stig­ma of sin upon pros­per­i­ty or earn­ing a bet­ter liv­ing. “We are thrilled if the mar­ket offers us some­thing new to pur­chase,” he says. His con­cern is the sin of greed, which dead­ens the souls of both rich and poor. Both rich and poor see their sal­va­tion in terms of the things they can have rather than in terms of the God they can love. The solu­tion, accord­ing to the pope, is not for the poor to remain chained to their pover­ty, nor for the rich to give up their wealth, but for all men be led to the Christ who tells us of our duty to the poor and frees our hearts to desire Him more than things:

Behind this atti­tude lurks … a rejec­tion of God. … In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a com­mit­ted response which is out­side the cat­e­gories of the mar­ket­place. (EG 57)

The free mar­ket is a good, but it is not the high­est good. Our first duty to the poor is to show them them the love of Christ, not to buy them a new Xbox. To say that is not to make threats or “declare war” against pros­per­i­ty, as Mas­ter Pshaw in his right­ist cocoon at Fox News seems to fear. Nor is it to claim that the poor do wrong to want to make a bet­ter liv­ing. The pope’s sub­ject, in this sec­tion, is the things that keep Christ locked out of peo­ple’s lives. One of them is the blind pur­suit of ever more stuff. The pope’s tar­get is the state of mind that says a per­son is a suc­cess because of what he has rather than who he is.

Mas­ter Pshaw con­tin­ues:

The pope’s snub of the strug­gle for pros­per­i­ty is a typ­i­cal­ly deri­sive atti­tude toward the Amer­i­can quest for self-devel­op­ment, and an atti­tude that is often encoun­tered among rich Euro­pean lib­er­als, or in this case, cler­gy­men who have not had to work to pro­vide a bet­ter life for their fam­i­lies.

Of course, it is the pope who is a snob, you see. Though, if I recall cor­rect­ly, Jorge Bergoglio was once a chemist and a bar bounc­er. Sounds like the job of a man born into priv­i­lege. But if Mas­ter Pshaw thinks that priests do not work, or that life among the poor in Argenti­na is com­pa­ra­ble to the elit­ism of “rich Euro­pean lib­er­als,” then it is more than pos­si­ble he does not know what he means, or what he is talk­ing about, or where the sun ris­es, or where the grass grows green and the gen­tle lilies bloom, and is just aping some­thing he heard from Mr. Lim­baugh. Nor does he tell us where, in Evan­gelii Gaudi­um, Pope Fran­cis links his cri­tique of mate­ri­al­ism to the “Amer­i­can quest for self-devel­op­ment.” Per­haps that is because Mas­ter Pshaw has not actul­ly tak­en the time to read, let alone under­stand, the doc­u­ment, and is sim­ply repeat­ing what he has heard on talk radio.

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL TODAY

But from this point, Mas­ter Pshaw, who looks like he just stopped being an altar boy yes­ter­day, pro­ceeds to play expert on Catholic social doc­trine. He notes that “recent popes,” even the “lib­er­al” John XXIII, “have focused on the dan­gers of social­ism.” (As though Pope Fran­cis got his ethics out of the Dai­ly Work­er rather than, say, the Cat­e­chism.) Here, how­ev­er, are some words from Car­di­nal Bergoglio that Mas­ter Pshaw does not men­tion:

[In social­ist the­o­ry] every­thing that is tran­scen­dent, and points to a hope in some­thing beyond, par­a­lyzes the work here. There­fore, it par­a­lyzes man, it is an opi­ate that makes him a con­formist, it makes him bear his suf­fer­ing, it does not allow him to progress.

In oth­er words, if I may trans­late for Mas­ter Pshaw, Fran­cis says that social­ism does not allow the poor to aspire to a more pros­per­ous life. Sounds like some­thing that could have come from the mouth of the great Mr. Lim­baugh him­self! Social­ism, says the pope, “par­a­lyzes” the poor in their cur­rent eco­nom­ic sta­tus. Pope Fran­cis, in oth­er words, does want the poor to have aspi­ra­tions toward suc­cess, and does not want social­ist the­o­ries to stand in the way.

Nor does Mas­ter Pshaw men­tion the fol­low­ing words—not from Fran­cis but from Bene­dict XVI:

[T]he world is sad­ly marked by hotbeds of ten­sion and con­flict caused by grow­ing instances of inequal­i­ty between rich and poor, by the preva­lence of a self­ish and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mind­set which also finds expres­sion in an unreg­u­lat­ed finan­cial cap­i­tal­ism.

Am I to think that Bene­dict XVI is a dan­ger­ous lib­er­al who does not under­stand the Church’s social doc­trine quite so well as Can­dy Crush expert Adam Pshaw does? For very much like Fran­cis, Bene­dict (to use Mas­ter Pshaw’s words and wit) “blun­ders in” with this homi­ly, “slam­ming the mar­ket and its adher­ents with­out any clar­i­fi­ca­tion.”

But as Mas­ter Pshaw tells us, the Church (in con­trast to the hereti­cal rav­ings of Bene­dict XVI) has always looked upon mar­kets as “the best way to pro­duce pros­per­i­ty and free­dom.” Nev­er mind that Pope Fran­cis point­ed out that very thing:

Busi­ness is a voca­tion, and a noble voca­tion, pro­vid­ed that those engaged in it see them­selves chal­lenged by a greater mean­ing in life; this will enable them tru­ly to see the com­mon good by striv­ing to increase the goods of the world and to make them acces­si­ble to all. (EG 203)

It is almost as though Pope Fran­cis want­ed to encour­age pros­per­i­ty through free enter­prise. And that is what I would con­clude from the above pas­sage, were it not that I had Catholic expert Adam Pshaw to tell me oth­er­wise.

The astute young man, in fact, goes on to tell us that Fran­cis “won’t have his poor church for the poor unless there are rich peo­ple to fund it.” Now, here is where I real­ly must call him out for pre­tense beyond mea­sure. It is as if Mas­ter Pshaw thinks that, with­out cap­i­tal­ism, there would be no rich peo­ple. That is his­tor­i­cal igno­rance. The Church has been around for 1,800 years longer than cap­i­tal­ism has. It flour­ished quite well under feu­dal­ism, as Mas­ter Pshaw might recall from his his­to­ry class. (Assum­ing his­to­ry teach­ers are teach­ing his­to­ry any­more.) But Mas­ter Pshaw, it is not rich peo­ple who fuel the Catholic Church, as though mon­ey were some­how a more pow­er­ful god than the Holy Spir­it. It is idol­a­try to think so, and Mas­ter Pshaw speaks like a young man who has made an idol of mon­ey. The Holy Spir­it is respon­si­ble for the Church’s con­tin­ued exis­tence. Christ said, I will send you the Holy Spir­it; not, I will send you Mam­mon.

In the end, what Mas­ter Pshaw fails to under­stand about Evan­gelii Gaudi­um—a doc­u­ment I strong­ly advise him to actu­al­ly read (tolle lege, Mas­ter Pshaw)—is that Fran­cis does not attack mar­kets so much as the con­sumerism that fuels them. “The caus­es of [social] break­down,” the pope writes, “include … unbri­dled con­sumerism which feeds the mar­ket.” This is an attack on the mar­ket’s diet, not the mar­ket itself. It is an attack, not on hav­ing an eco­nom­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful life, but on the con­stant pur­suit of mate­r­i­al objects as opposed to spir­i­tu­al depth. To that end, the Church has always chal­lenged both social­ism and the excess­es of cap­i­tal­ism.

If Mas­ter Pshaw does not think so, or thinks that the pope’s words are at odds with Church teach­ing, then he ought to read para­graphs 2424–2425 of the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church. He ought to read Bene­dict XVI’s encycli­cal Car­i­tas in Ver­i­tate. To say that, if the pope attacks the inor­di­nate pur­suit of wealth, he is there­fore in favor of social­ism and redis­tri­b­u­tion, is to think in the false dichotomies encour­aged by the gods of the air­waves and inter­tubes. The expres­sion “the love of mon­ey is the root of all evil” is in the Bible (1 Tim. 6:10). Every­thing else the Church has said is com­men­tary.

Evan­gelii Gaudi­um is more nuanced than Mas­ter Pshaw would like to pre­tend. The idea that a boy­ish-look­ing scrib­bler about video games needs to instruct the pope to “bring him­self into con­for­mi­ty with Catholic social teach­ing” is the true sound of snob­bery.

 

Note: Mas­ter Pshaw has informed me, via Twit­ter, that I am under a mis­im­pres­sion if I think his list of writ­ings at Fox News rep­re­sent all he has writ­ten. I have invit­ed him to send me a list of his oth­er arti­cles, so that I can see for myself how tru­ly exten­sive is his writ­ing about Catholi­cism. He has yet to send such a list. If you wish to extend the same invi­ta­tion to him, you can reach him on Twit­ter @AdamShawNY, or by e‑mail at adam.shaw@foxnews.com. Should I get the list, I will print a cor­rec­tion, and hope that Mas­ter Pshaw has the hon­esty to do the same.