Rick Santorum should read the transcript of Pope Francis’s “rabbits” remark. So should everyone else.

n Medi­aite, Matt Wilstein reports that Rick San­to­rum “did not appre­ci­ate” Pope Fran­cis’s recent com­ments about Catholics and rab­bits. “It’s some­times very dif­fi­cult to lis­ten to the pope,” Mr. San­to­rum said in a radio inter­view with Hugh Hewitt. He con­tin­ued:

Maybe he’s speak­ing to peo­ple in the third world, but the prob­lem cer­tain­ly in most of the Catholic world is not pro­cre­ation. I mean, in Europe in par­tic­u­lar, you have birth rates that are only over, just a lit­tle over one for every two peo­ple. So this isn’t a glob­al prob­lem, and I don’t know what the Pope was refer­ring to.

Here’s a case where a sim­ple check of the tran­script would help every­body, not just Mr. San­to­rum. For Pope Fran­cis made that very point himself—twice. Here’s the first:

The refusal of Paul VI [to ease the Catholic teach­ing on birth con­trol] was not only to the per­son­al prob­lems, for which he will tell the con­fes­sors to be mer­ci­ful and under­stand the sit­u­a­tion and par­don. Being under­stand­ing and mer­ci­ful, no? But he was watch­ing the uni­ver­sal Neo-Malthu­sian­ism that was in progress. And, how do you call this Neo-Malthu­sian­ism? There is less than one per­cent of birth rate growth in Italy. The same in Spain. That Neo-Malthu­sian­ism that sought to con­trol human­i­ty on the part of the pow­ers.

By “Neo-Malthu­sian­ism,” the pope is refer­ring to the idea that there needs to be pop­u­la­tion control—an idea which he rejects.

Here’s the sec­ond time the pope speaks words like that:

I think the num­ber of three chil­dren per fam­i­ly that you men­tioned—it makes me suf­fer—I think it is the num­ber experts say is impor­tant to keep the pop­u­la­tion going. Three per cou­ple. When this decreas­es, the oth­er extreme hap­pens, like what is hap­pen­ing in Italy. I have heard, I do not know if it is true, that in 2024 there will be no mon­ey to pay pen­sion­ers because of the fall in pop­u­la­tion. There­fore, the key word, to give you an answer, and the one the Church uses all the time, and I do too, is respon­si­ble par­ent­hood. How do we do this? With dia­logue. Each per­son with his pas­tor seeks how to do car­ry out a respon­si­ble par­ent­hood.

So Pope Fran­cis is just as con­cerned about falling pop­u­la­tions in Europe as Rick San­to­rum is. One read through the actu­al tran­script would have told him that. The pope prais­es large fam­i­lies. Cou­ples must always be open to life, he says.

Of course, a look a the tran­script would also clar­i­fy the true sense of the pope’s remark about rab­bits. Here it is; it comes right after the last para­graph I just quot­ed:

God gives you means to be respon­si­ble. Some think that—excuse the language—that in order to be good Catholics, we have to be like rab­bits. No. Respon­si­ble par­ent­hood.

So the pope does not say here that Catholics “should not breed like rab­bits”; in fact, he does not use the word “breed” at all. What he says is that Catholics should not feel that they must “be like rab­bits” with no sense of “respon­si­ble par­ent­hood.” In his replies, the pope gives the full Catholic teach­ing. He does not just say that life is good and that cou­ples should bring life into the world, and life more abun­dant­ly; he also says that cou­ples have an oblig­a­tion to be respon­si­ble with their par­ent­hood. The Church says both.

In fair­ness, Mr. San­to­rum is not the only one get­ting the pope’s words wrong. Every­one else is too. The media tends to report half of the pope’s words as though the oth­er half did not exist; and then, when they are forced to dis­cov­er the oth­er half, they feign shock.

Here is Mr. Wilstein in the same arti­cle in Medi­aite:

In an unprece­dent­ed state­ment to reporters dur­ing his flight from the Philip­pines to Rome, the Pope sug­gest­ed that Catholics could take mea­sures to lim­it the num­ber of chil­dren they have.

Unprece­dent­ed? I’m sor­ry, Mr. Wilstein, but that kind of state­ment shows that you have no idea what you are talk­ing about. The Church has talked about Nat­ur­al Fam­i­ly Plan­ning and respon­si­ble par­ent­hood for a long time. See the USCCB here and John Paul II in 1984 here and Pope Paul VI in 1968 here (§16). Well, in fact, here are Paul VI’s words:

If there­fore there are well-ground­ed rea­sons for spac­ing births, aris­ing from the phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion of hus­band or wife, or from exter­nal cir­cum­stances, the Church teach­es that mar­ried peo­ple may then take advan­tage of the nat­ur­al cycles imma­nent in the repro­duc­tive sys­tem and engage in mar­i­tal inter­course only dur­ing those times that are infer­tile, thus con­trol­ling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral prin­ci­ples which we have just explained.

The pope’s remarks were no more “unprece­dent­ed” than the media, or a politi­cian, get­ting the pope and the Church wrong. These things hap­pen every day. What’s sad is that no one seems to much try. Anna Matran­ga, writ­ing for CBS here, is one of many today report­ing that the pope has some­how “changed his mind” or is “walk­ing back” his words in the inter­view. The papal quo­ta­tion they are using to sup­port this claim is this one:

It gives con­so­la­tion and hope to see so many numer­ous fam­i­lies who receive chil­dren as a real gift of God. They know that every child is a bene­dic­tion.

No again. I’m sor­ry to have to point this out, but the pope said that very same thing in the inter­view. There is noth­ing new here. Here, again, is what the pope had already said in the first place:

Anoth­er curi­ous thing in rela­tion to this is that for the most poor peo­ple, a child is a trea­sure. It is true that you have to be pru­dent here too, but for them a child is a trea­sure. Some would say ‘God knows how to help me’ and per­haps some of them are not pru­dent, this is true. Respon­si­ble pater­ni­ty, but let us also look at the gen­eros­i­ty of that father and moth­er who see a trea­sure in every child.

“A child is a trea­sure”: the pope says it three times in just this one reply. And there are many oth­er times in the inter­view when he remarks on what a great gift a child is.

Does no one, any­where, ever, make even the least effort to get the facts right, or to know what they are talk­ing about, before they open their mouth or write their copy?