Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome XI: I’m shocked, shocked to find that there is orthodoxy going on in this papacy.

ope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome, in the sec­u­lar media, has reached a crit­i­cal mass where more and more poor souls are report­ing them­selves shocked, shocked to find that the pope is Catholic. Such gasps would trick­le in before, but now they seem to be more fre­quent. Just this week­end there were two melt­downs in the lib­er­al press: the first at Mar­ket­Watch, over the shock­ing dis­cov­ery that the pope is not in favor of con­tra­cep­tion; the sec­ond at the Dai­ly Screech, over the shock­ing dis­cov­ery that the pope is not in favor of gen­der the­o­ry. I mean, how could such things be? And you real­ly have to mar­vel when one of these scrib­blers turns out to be a the­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at a uni­ver­si­ty that is, so we are told, Catholic. I under­stand that there are dis­si­dents at Notre Dame—we all know that!—but that any of them should be gape-jawed to learn that the pope is Catholic is a mat­ter of pro­found won­der to me. Per­haps it should­n’t be, but it is.

The World Must Be Peopled

I begin at Mar­ket­Watch, where Paul Far­rell writes to tell us that “Pope Fran­cis real­ly is a cap­i­tal­ist.” Well, this will be news to Rush Lim­baugh and Adam Pshaw (he spells it “Shaw”). But Mr. Far­rell is not cowed by such names. “For­get his ant­i­cap­i­tal­ist, anti­con­sumerism rhetoric,” he says with a scorn­ful wave of the hand. The pope is a cap­i­tal­ist! and the rea­son he knows this is because the pope speaks out against arti­fi­cial birth con­trol. Watch how Mr. Far­rell makes this sin­gu­lar and aston­ish­ing leap:

Unless he revers­es Catholicism’s out­dat­ed and destruc­tive dog­ma on pop­u­la­tion con­trol, Fran­cis is des­tined to help cap­i­tal­ists take absolute con­trol of the glob­al econ­o­my and do more dam­age to Plan­et Earth’s cli­mate than the “poi­son of con­sumerism.

Oh? What could do more dam­age than con­sumerism? Be patient, for Mr. Far­rell is about to tell us. Watch this:

Yes, thanks to Pope Fran­cis and his dog­ma on pop­u­la­tion con­trol, mar­riage[,] and con­tra­cep­tion, cap­i­tal­ists have a steady sup­ply of [Here it is.] new con­sumers fuel­ing their growth.

Let me trans­late this for you. In the morose and jad­ed minds of the neo-Malthu­sians, human beings are no more than a bur­den and a tax on exist­ing resources. Mr. Far­rell looks at a baby and sees a leech. He is free of any delu­sion that human per­sons can also be pro­duc­ers and cre­ators; he thinks not that they can give as well as take. But when the pope speaks of the val­ue of human life, is he quite so crass? We must go and find out, since Mr. Far­rell does not tell us; he does not quote Fran­cis even one time. As it turns out, the pope spoke on this very sub­ject on Feb­ru­ary 12, at his Gen­er­al Audi­ence:

Chil­dren are not a prob­lem of repro­duc­tive biol­o­gy, or one of many ways to real­ize one­self, let alone their parent’s pos­ses­sion. Chil­dren are a gift. Do you under­stand? Chil­dren are a gift! …

One loves a son or daugh­ter because he or she is one’s child, not because he or she is beau­ti­ful, healthy or good; not because he or she thinks like me or incar­nates my desires. A child’s life is intend­ed … for his or her own good, for the good of the fam­i­ly, of soci­ety, of all human­i­ty. …

How often do I meet moth­ers in the square who show me their bel­ly and ask my bless­ing. These chil­dren are loved before they come into the world. This is gra­tu­itous­ness. This is love. They are loved before they are born, like the love of God, who always loves us first. …

A soci­ety of chil­dren who do not hon­or their par­ents is a soci­ety with­out hon­or. When one doesn’t hon­or one’s par­ents one los­es one’s hon­or. It is a soci­ety des­tined to be filled with greedy and insen­si­tive young peo­ple. … [Now here’s the key part.] A soci­ety that is greedy when it comes to hav­ing chil­dren, that doesn’t love to be sur­round­ed by chil­dren, that con­sid­ers them above all to be a both­er, a bur­den, and a risk, is a depressed soci­ety.

What we find in all of this is that the pope by no means looks upon human life as though it were a means to an end. He does not say that more peo­ple means more prof­it for fat cats. No such crude idea cross­es his mind. Mr. Far­rell just super­im­pos­es it upon the pope’s oppo­si­tion to arti­fi­cial birth con­trol. That tells us more about Mr. Far­rell (and none of it good) than it does about Pope Fran­cis. For Fran­cis, chil­dren are an inher­ent gift. We must love them  for their own sake, and because they come from God. “These chil­dren are loved,” he says, “before they come into the world.” Before they con­sume one thing, before they put one pen­ny in the pock­et of a rich man, we love them. We love them for no oth­er rea­son than that they are: I love my child because she is my child; I made her, and she is a gift.

If Mr. Far­rell were right about the pope, you would expect to find him say­ing that chil­dren are stacks of cash from heav­en, and we trea­sure them because greed is good, and the more chil­dren we have, the more greed can come into the world, and the more things we can buy and sell and use, and the more we wll drop rich­es into the wait­ing laps of the Kochs, and coins into the cof­fers of the Catholic Church. But he does not say that; in fact, he turns it around on Mr. Far­rell. Greed is not hav­ing chil­dren. Greed is wring­ing your hands about what a risk babies are: Why, they might take stuff away from the rest of us! How self­ish! says the pope.

Mr. Far­rell is all wrought up in a morose knot because he fears that over­pop­u­la­tion will kill all the world’s resources. He’s a philoso­pher of doom:

Pope Fran­cis real­ly is a cap­i­tal­ist help­ing oth­er cap­i­tal­ists get rich­er and rich­er; he’s help­ing the dynam­ic duo of cap­i­tal­ism and its evil twin con­sumerism bore deep­er into the world’s col­lec­tive con­science, brain­wash­ing sev­en bil­lion humans. His dog­ma is help­ing glob­al pop­u­la­tion steadi­ly increase to 10 bil­lion by 2050. He’s avoid­ing food experts who warn that the world can’t feed 10 bil­lion in a lim­it­ed world of ever scarcer resources. And his actions enhance rather than elim­i­nate the “root cause of all the world’s ills.

The “root cause of all the world’s ills”—overpopulation? more peo­ple than can be fed? This explains ISIS? Am I real­ly to believe that ISIS is going on a mur­der spree in order to get rid of all the extra peo­ple who are eat­ing up all the food? Jiha­di John missed a meal and has to whack off a head? Is that the idea?

No. To tell the truth, I am lost at this point. Mr. Far­rell can’t seem to decide whether a bunch of new babies means that there will be a bunch of con­sumers mak­ing fat cats fat­ter, or whether it means that there will be noth­ing left to con­sume because all the resources will dry up. I also don’t under­stand how it can be that the pope’s refusal to give his approval to con­tra­cep­tion is the cause of all this over­pop­u­la­tion if, as we’re always told, 99% of Catholics just dis­re­gard the teach­ing any­way. That’s strange.

But the real prob­lem with his arti­cle is that Mr. Far­rell utter­ly dis­re­gards stud­ies that show that the real prob­lem is under­pop­u­la­tion, not over­pop­u­la­tion. Even the lib­er­al Slate has picked up on this news, in an arti­cle writ­ten by Jeff Wise in 2013. For although the human pop­u­la­tion recent­ly reached 7 bil­lion, Mr. Wise men­tions one impor­tant fact con­ve­nient­ly miss­ing from all doom and pan­ic:

It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 bil­lionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth—the first time in human his­to­ry that inter­val had grown. … In oth­er words, the rate of glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth has slowed. And it’s expect­ed to keep slow­ing. Indeed, accord­ing to experts’ best esti­mates, the total pop­u­la­tion of Earth will stop grow­ing with­in the lifes­pan of peo­ple alive today. And then it will fall.

We don’t seem to hear any­thing about this from the neo-Malthu­sians. As Mr. Wise explains in his arti­cle, 2.1 live births per woman are need­ed just to main­tain a pop­u­la­tion equi­lib­ri­um. But in Ger­many, the birthrate is 1.36, in Spain 1.48, in Italy 1.4. And even in poor nations, the birthrate has dras­ti­cal­ly fall­en: Since 1960, it has sunk in Mex­i­co from 7.3 to 2.4, in India from 6 to 2.5, and in Brazil from 6.15 to 1.9. The pope him­self not­ed, with alarm, the declin­ing birth rate in Italy. And not long after, the UK Tele­graph report­ed that the birth rate in that coun­try is at its low­est since 1861. “Italy,” we are told, “is a dying coun­try.” But you will search in vain through Mr. Far­rel­l’s arti­cle for any men­tion of that.

In fact, accord­ing to Mr. Wise, the real dan­ger is not that resources will go extinct but that the human race will:

Accord­ing to a 2008 IIASA report, if the world sta­bi­lizes at a total fer­til­i­ty rate of 1.5—where Europe is today—then by 2200 the glob­al pop­u­la­tion will fall to half of what it is today. By 2300, it’ll bare­ly scratch 1 bil­lion. (The authors of the report tell me that in the years since the ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion, some details have changed—Europe’s pop­u­la­tion is falling faster than was pre­vi­ous­ly antic­i­pat­ed, while Africa’s birthrate is declin­ing more slowly—but the over­all out­look is the same.) Extend the trend line, and with­in a few dozen gen­er­a­tions you’re talk­ing about a glob­al pop­u­la­tion small enough to fit in a nurs­ing home.

That is why the trend must be reversed. That is why the Church, and the pope, are right about con­tra­cep­tion. The world must be peo­pled, because life is of God and it is good for its own sake. Mr. Far­rell does not make the effort to under­stand what the Church says; he sim­ply flails his arms in a pan­ic about all those leech­es on soci­ety and then is shocked to find out that the Church is still the Church. What lies behind all this fin­ger-point­ing at bogey­men, as the pope tells us, is greed and self­ish­ness. We want the joy of sex with­out the bur­den of its nor­mal con­se­quences; but the end of that will be no joy at all, because there will be no life to be joy­ful about

It Started Long Ago in the Garden of Eden

Then, in the Dai­ly Screech, Dr. Can­di­da Moss of Notre Dame and Dr. Joel Baden of Yale Divin­i­ty School were shocked (the very title of the arti­cle, prob­a­bly writ­ten by an edi­tor for the Screech, declaims that it is “shock­ing”) to learn that the pope com­pared gen­der the­o­ry to Hitler Youth indoc­tri­na­tion. Yeah, that Fran­cis. So unpre­dictable what he’s going to say in these inter­views. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden seem to be con­fus­ing two sep­a­rate papal inter­views, since they say that the news only “emerged last week” that the pope had drawn a com­par­i­son to both the Hitler Youth and nuclear destruc­tion; but these were sep­a­rate com­par­isons, and the one to the Hitler Youth was spo­ken dur­ing the flight from Mani­la to Rome last month. That news has been around since at least as ear­ly as Jan­u­ary 20. The nuclear com­par­i­son, which is the one Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden quote in the Screech, was made in a dif­fer­ent, and ear­li­er, inter­view that will soon be pub­lished in a book called This Econ­o­my Kills. We’re just now get­ting pre­views of what will be in it.

After the papal inter­view on the flight from Mani­la to Rome, it seemed that all any­one want­ed to talk about was bun­ny rab­bits, but Amer­i­ca Mag­a­zine had the full tran­script as ear­ly as Jan­u­ary 19, and any­one who took the time to read it would find that the pope com­pared gen­der the­o­ry to Hitler Youth indoc­tri­na­tion”

Ide­o­log­i­cal col­o­niza­tion: I’ll give just one exam­ple that I saw myself. Twen­ty years ago, in 1995, a min­is­ter of edu­ca­tion asked for a large loan to build schools for the poor. They gave it to her on the con­di­tion that in the schools there would be a book for the chil­dren of a cer­tain lev­el. It was a school book, a book pre­pared well, didac­ti­cal­ly, in which gen­der the­o­ry was taught.

This woman need­ed the mon­ey, but that was the con­di­tion. Clever woman, she said yes and did it again and again, and it went ahead, and that’s how it was achieved. This is ide­o­log­i­cal col­o­niza­tion: They intro­duce to the peo­ple an idea that has noth­ing to do with the nation; yes, with groups of peo­ple, but not with the nation. And they col­o­nize the peo­ple with an idea that changes, or wants to change, a men­tal­i­ty or a struc­ture.

Dur­ing the syn­od, the African bish­ops com­plained about this, which was the same sto­ry, cer­tain loans in exchange for cer­tain conditions—I say only these things that I have seen.

Why do I say ide­o­log­i­cal col­o­niza­tion? Because they take, they real­ly take the need of a peo­ple to seize an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enter and grow strong—with the chil­dren. But it is not new: The same was done by the dic­ta­tor­ships of the last cen­tu­ry. They entered with their own doc­trine … think of the Hitler Youth.

Now, what the pope is describ­ing here is one way in which indoc­tri­na­tion hap­pens: Some ide­ol­o­gy, for­eign to a cul­ture, is made a con­di­tion of the edu­ca­tion of the young. He com­pares that to what the Nazis did in Ger­many and what the Fas­cists did in Italy. In the pope’s view, this is how peo­ple col­o­nize the mind of anoth­er. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not tell us why such words are shock­ing; per­haps we are meant to think that any com­par­i­son to Hitler, no mat­ter what it is, but espe­cial­ly if it some idea we’re attached to, is shock­ing. Any time any­one says, “Hitler did that,” the mouth is just sup­posed to smash against the floor, as though by reflex. Per­haps doc­tors should­n’t use those ham­mers to hit the knee any more; they should just say, “That’s like Hitler.”

But the real point of the arti­cle seems to be for Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden to use the pope’s words as an excuse to clear their minds of some griev­ances they have with Church teach­ing.

First, they con­test the idea that male and female are “bina­ries.” On the con­trary, they say: Gen­der is a “spec­trum”:

Gen­der the­o­rists [Who I guess have a sort of impe­r­i­al majesty to pro­claim on such mat­ters for the rest of us yokels.] argue that the way peo­ple iden­ti­fy them­selves is the result of social and cul­tur­al con­struc­tions of gen­der. This has impor­tant ram­i­fi­ca­tions for how we think about biol­o­gy and sex­u­al­i­ty.

But do you see where the slip­page is here? Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden speak of “the way peo­ple iden­ti­fy them­selves” and “how we think about … sex­u­al­i­ty” as though thought can stand in the place of real­i­ty. The gen­der the­o­rists may be very right that “peo­ple iden­ti­fy them­selves” across a spec­trum, and that cul­tur­al fac­tors influ­ence such things, but where do we learn that real­i­ty is noth­ing more than what peo­ple sub­jec­tive­ly think? Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not say.

Here is the com­par­i­son the pope made between gen­der the­o­ry and nuclear weapons:

Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the pos­si­bil­i­ty to anni­hi­late in a few instants a very high num­ber of human beings. Let’s think also of genet­ic manip­u­la­tion, of the manip­u­la­tion of life, or of the gen­der the­o­ry, that does not rec­og­nize the order of cre­ation.

Right. This is true. In the begin­ning he made them male and female—Jesus said that—so gen­der the­o­ry is destruc­tive of one’s very iden­ti­ty, so much so that it might as well be an ide­o­log­i­cal nuclear bomb. But Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do not like that idea at all, and they like it even less that the pope invoked “the order of cre­ation” in order to sup­port it. Dis­si­dents always find that they need to deny first prin­ci­ples. Thus Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden tell us that, in the first chap­ters of Gen­e­sis, “the con­flu­ence of tra­di­tion, bib­li­cal text, and gen­der runs into some dif­fi­cul­ty.”

The first prob­lem they have with the Cre­ation sto­ry is that “it has giv­en rise to mil­len­nia of female sub­or­di­na­tion.” Well, there may be a bit of truth in that, though they do not give us any exam­ples of what they have in mind, so it’s hard to know how much of it is based on a mis­un­der­stand­ing of both Gen­e­sis 2 and 1 Tim­o­thy 2. It’s also hard to know how much of what they describe as “sub­or­di­na­tion” is in fact some­thing else, quite dif­fer­ent from the idea that a woman is less than a man, or that he has mere auto­crat­ic author­i­ty over her.

Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do take issue with the Catholic notion of com­pli­men­ta­r­i­ty, but the prob­lem there is that com­ple­men­tar­i­ty has noth­ing to do with women being some­how infe­ri­or to men. Com­ple­men­tar­i­ty, as explained by Pope Fran­cis, says that, in mar­riage, men and women, being as they are dif­fer­ent, each com­plete what the oth­er lacks. In the pope’s own words, “It refers to sit­u­a­tions where one of two things adds to, com­pletes, or ful­fills a lack in the oth­er.” A hus­band com­pletes what is lack­ing in his wife, but it works the oth­er way too: The wife com­pletes what is lack­ing in her hus­band. “Com­ple­men­tar­i­ty” and “sub­or­di­na­tion” are oppo­sites. God, it is true, did not cre­ate Eve inde­pen­dent­ly of Adam; but Adam was also incom­plete with­out Eve. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden under­stand nei­ther the Cre­ation sto­ry, nor what the Church means by “com­ple­men­tar­i­ty.”

Next, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden pull out the “Bible con­tra­dicts itself” card and claim that Gen­e­sis 2—where Adam is cre­at­ed first, then Eve—contradicts Gen­e­sis 1, where they are cre­at­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Of course, even if we were to assume that this is true, there is no par­tic­u­lar rea­son why we should pre­fer Gen­e­sis 1 over Gen­e­sis 2, oth­er than that’s what we want to do. But it is just not true that Gen­e­sis 1 says that Adam and Eve were cre­at­ed at one and the same time:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our like­ness: and let them have domin­ion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cat­tle, and over all the earth, and over every creep­ing thing that creep­eth upon the earth. So God cre­at­ed man in his own image, in the image of God cre­at­ed he him; male and female cre­at­ed he them.” (Gen. 1:26–27)

Now, we do read here that Adam and Eve were both cre­at­ed on the sixth day. But there is no rea­son to believe that the six days of cre­ation were lit­er­al, 24-hour days. Nor does the text tell us that Adam and Eve were both cre­at­ed in a sin­gle divine act. That is just not there; it is an assump­tion that is super­im­posed upon the words “male and female he cre­at­ed them.” I can say “my wife gave birth to two chil­dren” with­out imply­ing that our chil­dren are twins, or that they came out of the birth canal at the same time. (For which I know she is grate­ful.)

Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden quote the Jew­ish philoso­pher Phi­lo in an effort to bol­ster their case about Gen­e­sis 1. Phi­lo, who was a con­tem­po­rary of Jesus (he lived from ca. 25 B.C. to ca. 50 A.D.), said that the orig­i­nal cre­at­ed per­son was a sin­gle indi­vid­ual who was “nei­ther male nor female.”

But there are two prob­lems here. The first is that Phi­lo did not say that Adam was this orig­i­nal per­son. Rather, what he said was that God first cre­at­ed a pro­to­type who was nei­ther male nor female, then cre­at­ed Adam out of the clay and Eve from Adam’s rib. Since Adam and Eve are our par­ents, and not this hypo­thet­i­cal pro­to­type (which Phi­lo called the “Mind of God”), the gen­der the­o­ry that Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden are try­ing to advance runs into a bit of a genet­ic snag.

The sec­ond prob­lem is that Phi­lo is not the founder of Chris­tian­i­ty. Christ is; and he said, “In the begin­ning God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). Pope Fran­cis under­stands Gen­e­sis the way Christ told us to under­stand it. Christ is God; I assume that means that what He said on this point has some weight. What Phi­lo may have thought does not mat­ter a whit. He was Jew­ish, but his ideas were more influ­enced by Hel­lenism and Pla­ton­ism than they were rab­binic Judaism. Nor did he speak with the author­i­ty of God Him­self.

Next, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden tell us that some ver­sions of the Sep­tu­agint trans­lat­ed Gen­e­sis 1:27 “male and female he cre­at­ed him”; as though Adam were an androg­y­ne. This is a case where a sim­ple check of the lex­i­con would help clear up mat­ters a lot. The Hebrew word in ques­tion is אֹתָ֛ם, otam, and in every case where it is used in the Old Tes­ta­ment, it is the third per­son plur­al pro­noun. (Well, okay, I did­n’t check all 11,050 uses of the word, but I did a few min­utes of spot check­ing; and it came up as third per­son plur­al every time.)

So how did the Sep­tu­agint get trans­lat­ed that way? Accord­ing to Rab­bi Dr. Ari Ziv­otof­sky, of Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, the rea­son some Jew­ish chaz­al changed otam to the sin­gu­lar was so that no one would mis­in­ter­pret Gen­e­sis 1 to sug­gest that God cre­at­ed Adam and Eve togeth­er at one and the same time. In oth­er words, they did not want any­one to make the error that Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden do. So the trans­la­tion “him” rather than “them” hurts rather than helps their case. And it cer­tain­ly proves noth­ing in the way of mod­ern gen­der the­o­ry; which seems to be their real point in all this. They want to look at Gen­e­sis and say, The Church has it wrong but the mod­ern gen­der the­o­rists have it right. But they have to strain and stran­gle the text in the process.

Final­ly, Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden suggest—they seem to need to cling to any the least hope they can—that per­haps Fran­cis is just try­ing to “pla­cate con­ser­v­a­tive ele­ments” in the Church. He is just tryng to “soothe frayed nerves” that are on edge about the upcom­ing encycli­cal. (For wingnut nerves are always frayed.)

For Fran­cis, the go-to issues for estab­lish­ing his con­ser­v­a­tive bona fides are his oppo­si­tion to women priests, con­tra­cep­tion, and his scathing judg­ment of child­less fam­i­lies. He may just be rehears­ing tra­di­tion­al Catholic per­spec­tives, but when you add to this his ten­den­cy to use neg­a­tive and mild­ly chau­vin­is­tic imagery to describe women a pat­tern emerges. Even if Fran­cis were a clos­et lib­er­al, he’s a lib­er­al who ranks women’s inter­ests at the bot­tom of his list of pri­or­i­ties. And if we take Francis’s posi­tion on gen­der the­o­ry and the “nat­ur­al order” seri­ous­ly, then we give up cer­tain kinds of gen­der equal­i­ty, as well as the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing a ful­ly wel­com­ing envi­ron­ment for same-sex cou­ples or trans-indi­vid­u­als.

It is some odd tic of the lib­er­al that, when they hear ortho­doxy from Pope Fran­cis, they have to con­sole them­selves that maybe he does not real­ly mean it. Dr. Moss & Dr. Baden seem less con­cerned that Fran­cis real­ly believes any of this stuff, and more con­cerned that his pre­tense is going to hurt the cause of “gen­der equal­i­ty.” Fran­cis should stop throw­ing bones to the wingnuts and just come out of the clos­et already.

This is all delu­sion, but there­in do we see why their shock exists. Lib­er­als see every­thing through the prism of their own ide­o­log­i­cal bat­tle. They can­not con­ceive of any oth­er way of think­ing; don’t care to try to under­stand it on its own terms; don’t think the pope real­ly means it; and so can­not accept that the Church does not and can not change. And thus, to col­o­nize the Church, they run them­selves into a wall, con­vinced­it will not be there, con­vinced they will be able to smash and lay waste to the City. When their heads get smashed instead, they cry out in shock. Then they tell them­selves that, sure­ly, the pope just put that wall up to appease and humor the con­ser­v­a­tive ele­ment; sure­ly he will tear it down tomor­row. Then they make a mad dash at the wall again.

Expect more shock.