What Pope Francis Really Said

What Pope Francis Really Said: Words of Comfort and Challenge by Tom Hoopes, 132 pages

The first question most people had when Jorge Bergoglio was introduced to the world as Pope Francis was "Who?"  Over the course of his pontificate, a number of narratives have shaped the public perception of the pope, many of them the work of politically obsessed and religiously illiterate journalists.  According to the American news media, he has declared that homosexual activity is not a sin and that denying global warming is.  The New York Times reported that Pope Francis told a boy grieving for his dog that animals go to heaven, while MSNBC proclaimed that he "says priests can allow" women to have an abortion.  According to social media, meanwhile, he declared that hell does not exist, proposed a "merger" of Christianity and Islam, and stated that voting for Hillary Clinton is a mortal sin.

Some of these are more or less creative interpretations of the pope's statements, especially his more spontaneous and therefore vague comments, while others are complete fabrications.  The pope's words, and the problematic reporting of them, have generated a great deal of confusion, a confusion Tom Hoopes has experienced both as a Catholic commentator and as a journalism professor at Benedictine College.  The worst aspect of this confusion is, as he sees it, not the scandal that many orthodox Catholics have taken, but rather the way that it has obscured central aspects of Francis' teaching.  In Hoopes' view, Francis is simultaneously trying to draw in those on the outside while fighting complacency among those already within the fold, stressing the positive truths of Christianity over the negative prohibitions of the moral law that follow from those truths.  Above all, Hoopes sees Francis as furthering the turn towards the human person already begun by his predecessors, opposing dehumanizing technologies and ideologies with a culture of encounter that recognizes the other as a subject rather than an object.