An open letter to Mr. Rush Limbaugh on Pope Francis.

ear Mr. Lim­baugh: No one is try­ing to make you the “vil­lain” in a “soap opera” about the pope, as you claim. Okay, yes, there is a nut­ty left-wing group, pro­mot­ed by Media Mat­ters, who is out there gath­er­ing sig­na­tures for some dumb peti­tion. But all that is street the­ater. They hard­ly speak for the many seri­ous and ortho­dox Catholics who for good rea­sons object to your claim that the pope is a Marx­ist. I have not heard you men­tion them. Now don’t you think that’s odd?

You might, for exam­ple, have read my own rebut­tal; I sent it to you. Or you might have giv­en a pass­ing glance at Mark Shea, in the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter. Or you could have read Trent Horn at Catholic Answers. And Fr. John Trig­ilio, a host on EWTN, also replied to your facile words about the pope. Not I, nor Mr. Shea, nor Mr. Horn, nor yet Fr. Trig­ilio, are part of some “left-wing, pro-abor­tion bunch.” We are faith­ful Catholics who know how poor­ly you have under­stood the pope, and we have said so. But so far as I can tell, you remain unaware of this analy­sis that exists out there in the Catholic blogosphere—not on kook sites like Media Mat­ters, but on well-respect­ed, ortho­dox sites like the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, Patheos, and Catholic Answers. (And my blog.)

You have said and said and said again that the pope railed against “unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism.” But the sim­ple fact, Mr. Lim­baugh, is that those words are nowhere to be found in the actu­al text. The pope used that phrase a grand total of zero times. A writer for For­eign Pol­i­cy, Chris­t­ian Caryl, wrote an arti­cle in which he like­wise mis­quot­ed the pope. I sent him a tweet that Fran­cis nev­er said any­thing of the kind; he cor­rect­ed the arti­cle. I sent you an email stat­ing the same thing. Where’s yours? Who is real­ly engag­ing in a “relent­less pur­suit of the truth” here?

So I will issue you the same chal­lenge one more time: If Pope Fran­cis attacked “unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism,” then show me where he does that. Give me a cita­tion from the actu­al text. It should not be hard for you to check out, Mr. Lim­baugh. You go to the Vat­i­can’s Web site; you run a key­word search. Now, per­haps the key­word search func­tion on my Inter­net brows­er is bro­ken; that kind of thing hap­pens. But here is what I found: Not only is the phrase “unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism” nowhere in the text, but the words “cap­i­tal­ism” and “unfet­tered” are not there either. If I am incorrect—if I mis­spelled a word, or if my iPad is buggy—then prove me wrong. Do your home­work; ver­i­fy your sources; don’t just rely on the Wash­ing­ton Post to get it right. Does your dai­ly, relent­less, unstop­pable pur­suit of the truth actu­al­ly stop when it comes to going to the Vat­i­can’s Web site? Or has the pope just blocked your IP address? You have no prob­lem blast­ing him by name, but have you read him? Have you looked at the text?

Now, I know that the media has run wild with the expres­sion “unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism,” to such an extent that one might believe that the pope real­ly does “bad­ger” cap­i­tal­ism, as you claim. But that would be false. Just because the dri­ve-bys say it does not make it so, Mr. Lim­baugh. The pope does attack con­sumerism, but that is not at all the same.

The rea­son the pope is con­cerned with con­sumerism is not because he has a bias against free mar­kets. Instead he has a love for the intrin­sic worth of the human per­son; so much so, that he does not like to see it blunt­ed by greed—by the con­stant pur­suit of stuff. When things become more impor­tant than peo­ple, and when hav­ing becomes more impor­tant than being, we can not ful­fill our true long­ing, which is for God. The pope attacks a spir­i­tu­al sick­ness, not an eco­nom­ic sys­tem.

If you do a key­word search of the text, you will find that the word “con­sumerism” does show up—four times. And that is four more times than the word “cap­i­tal­ism” does. It is four more than “unfet­tered.” The fourth time it shows up, the pope is talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al con­sumerism rather than eco­nom­ic con­sumerism, so we can leave that one go and focus on the oth­er three.

Here is the first:

The great dan­ger in today’s world, per­vad­ed as it is by con­sumerism, is the des­o­la­tion and anguish of a com­pla­cent yet cov­etous heart, the fever­ish pur­suit of friv­o­lous plea­sures, and a blunt­ed con­science. (§2)

Now, this is hard­ly an attack on the free mar­ket, but rather the con­stant pur­suit of stuff. The gist of what the pope is say­ing here is not that free mar­kets are bad, but that greed does not sat­is­fy the human heart and blunts the con­science.

Here is the sec­ond:

Today’s eco­nom­ic mech­a­nisms pro­mote inor­di­nate con­sump­tion, yet it is evi­dent that unbri­dled con­sumerism com­bined with inequal­i­ty proves dou­bly dam­ag­ing to the social fab­ric. (§60)

And indeed, who would deny that adver­tis­ers are always appeal­ing to greed (and also sex) in order to sell prod­ucts? The ethos of the ad is not “buy this and have a good life” but “buy this and sat­is­fy your lusts.”

And here is the third:

The caus­es of [social] break­down include … unbri­dled con­sumerism which feeds the mar­ket.

If con­sumerism “feeds the mar­ket,” that does not mean the mar­ket itself is bad. But the pope does have some real con­cerns about the mar­ket’s diet.

It is not true to say—as you do—that Evan­gelii Gaudi­um is an “eco­nom­ic trea­tise.” The pope’s true sub­ject is the Gospel and what­ev­er stands in the way. Greed so mis­forms the mind that pros­per­i­ty becomes a high­er val­ue than truth. The pope is not telling nations to choose one eco­nom­ic sys­tem over anoth­er; in fact, he goes out of his way to point that out. But he does cau­tion us about the moral truths that should gov­ern our eco­nom­ic behav­ior, in the same way that popes also dis­cuss the moral truths that should gov­ern our sex­u­al behav­ior. If the pope says that birth con­trol is wrong, he is not writ­ing a trea­tise on sex; if the pope says that greed is wrong, he is not writ­ing a trea­tise on eco­nom­ics.

Sex is a good thing, but not every­thing that peo­ple do sex­u­al­ly is good. And free mar­kets are a good thing, but not every­thing that the free mar­ket does is good either. The pope meant no more than that, and no more than that should be read into his words. To rave on about how all pros­per­i­ty comes from cap­i­tal­ism and how the Unit­ed States is the great­est source of char­i­ty in the world is apro­pos of noth­ing, because the pope does not dis­pute any of that. In fact, he nev­er even brings it up.

In truth, Mr. Lim­baugh, I am more than a lit­tle sur­prised that you would blind­ly accept the media nar­ra­tive about this pope. I am sur­prised because it is not your usu­al prac­tice to do so. Has the thought not occurred to you that the media may be say­ing that the pope attacks cap­i­tal­ism only because that is the what they want us to believe? It suits their pro­gres­sive agen­da if they can say the pope is on their side. But since when has the main­stream media felt oblig­at­ed to tell the truth, par­tic­u­lar­ly about some­thing relat­ed to the Church? Has the thought of going to the text, and see­ing for your­self, not occurred to you?

There is a war of nar­ra­tives going on about this pope. It is dis­ap­point­ing to watch because the pope’s cat­e­gories of thought are not polit­i­cal but spir­i­tu­al. He is less con­cerned with the king­dom of this world than he is with the king­dom of the next; and he is hard­ly going to waste his time writ­ing a text as long as this one just so that he can attack free mar­kets in the Unit­ed States. You sim­ply can not under­stand this pope, or any pope, through the stan­dard dichoto­my of right and left. Peo­ple do try. But that is a sign of just how much we have cre­at­ed an idol of the news. That too stands in the way of the Gospel.

You say that you admire Catholi­cism and have often want­ed to learn more about it. I have no rea­son to doubt you. Per­haps this is the time for you to do so. It may also be the time for you to try to admire it for some­thing deep­er than just your friend­ships with some priests and your admi­ra­tion of the great wealth of the Vat­i­can. The Church is sup­posed to direct us to truth, not to mon­ey.

That is why it is also dis­ap­point­ing to hear you say that the Catholic Church would be nowhere with­out cap­i­tal­ism and that it took a great deal of wealth to build the Vat­i­can. But no. The Catholic Church got by quite well under feu­dal­ism, and mon­ey and rich peo­ple exist­ed long before cap­i­tal­ism did. That does not mean cap­i­tal­ism is bad. But the rea­son the Catholic Church has sur­vived for 2000 years is not because of cap­i­tal­ism but because of the Holy Spir­it. The Vat­i­can is beau­ti­ful not because wealth is beau­ti­ful but because truth is beau­ti­ful.

Thomas Stor­ck at Ethi­ka Poli­ti­ka has writ­ten a great piece that I think you should read. In it he says that Fran­cis’s crit­i­cism of the behav­ior of mar­kets is con­sis­tent with Catholic teach­ing and, in fact, very mild by his­tor­i­cal stan­dards. I also invite you to read the social doc­trine of the Church as found in the doc­u­ments Mr. Stor­ck cites, as well as the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church. I invite you to read the words of the pope him­self, who prais­es busi­ness and attacks Marx­ism. (Yes, the pope attacks Marx­ism, not cap­i­tal­ism. If you read my ear­li­er blog arti­cle, you will see I have the quo­ta­tions to back it up.) I invite you, final­ly, to make your­self more famil­iar with the writ­ing of ortho­dox Catholics on the Web sites I men­tioned ear­li­er. You could do no bet­ter than to read the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, or the great blog­gers at Patheos, or the great apol­o­gists at Catholic Answers. They cer­tain­ly under­stand the Church, and the pope, much more deeply than your sources in the main­stream media do. Not only do they write about the faith every day, but they live it every day.