There is no doubting that Pope Francis is a different kind of Pope; he seems to be kinder, gentler, friendlier, and less judgmental. He appears to be more open, more humble, less full of himself, willing to make changes at the Vatican, and he's living a simpler life than most of the previous occupants of the Holy See. He's also much more media savvy than his predecessors. Although some progressives are leaping out of their Chuck Taylor All-Stars to get on board Pope Francis' social justice Pope-mobile - and there's nothing wrong with that -- it remains to be seen whether anything concrete comes out of the Pope's critique of trickle down economics and capitalism run amok.

Some, however, see the Pope's focus on the poor as part of a larger public relations campaign to draw in wayward Catholics and rebuild the reputation of the Church. In that regard, the Pope's recent exhortation ("Evangelii Gaudium") has already accomplished a few things: it has exposed some of the conservative critics of the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice for being hypocritical blowhards; and, news about the Church's financial and sexual scandals have all but disappeared from view.

Over the weekend, you might have seen a news story with a headline like, "Court Strikes Down Utah Polygamy Law."

If all you read was the headline, you might assume that polygamy was once again legal in Utah. It's not. Instead, the state has been told not to interfere in religious ceremonies that, while they may have meaning for the people who take part in them, bestow no government recognition.

Daily Kos: Jed Lewison reports that Fox News personality Mike Huckabee is thinking about running for president (again) in 2016. We will no doubt hear much about this over the next little while.  But whatever Huckabee says or does, I will always remember his cheap demagoguery following the mass murder of elementary school children in Newtown, CT.  Huckabee not only sought to blame the massacre on how we navigate matters of religion in the public schools, but to head off future school shootings, he suggested that people who think like him be deployed to hector school children about learning to fear "a holy God in judgment."  

The Guardian reports that a Scottish Catholic priest is suing the Church for wrongful termination of employment. It seems that the Church waged a vilification campaign against him after he spoke out publicly about the problem of sex abuse in the church. The Bishop then fired him while he was being treated for cancer.

BBC reports that controversy is growing over the 1994 book To Train Up a Child by Michael & Debi Pearl, which "is widely seen as the most extreme of the publications produced by conservative Christians in the US who advocate corporal punishment. The book, which is said to have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is widely used by homeschooling parents in the U.S. The book is published by the Pearls' organization, No Greater Joy Ministries, which is attached to the church where Michael Pearl is a pastor in Pleasantville, Tennessee.  

What did the late Nelson Mandela say about Israel and Apartheid? Even before Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to attend the memorial service for Mandela, the Internet was abloom with information planted on the shifting sands of incompetent fact-checking.

Now, I hasten to add that attempting to correct misinformation, disinformation, and just plain old lies on the Internet is akin to trying to delete a glacier with an icepick. But Mandela was a man of integrity, so he deserves a brief attempt to correct the record--if for no other reason that he hoped for the day that Israelis and Palestinians could live in peace. Antisemitism and Islamophobia always spread faster than the truth can put on its boots, to paraphrase an often misattributed quote.

Let's start with Netanyahu's decision and work from there.

Over at Haaretz Bradley Burston opined that there was a special place in Hell for Netanyahu, who is widely known as "Bibi" by friends and foe alike. According to Burston, by cancelling his planned trip to the "Mandela funeral as too costly, Bibi shows world what he's truly made of." Burston added that "Israel's prime minister proves he is not the smug, petty, vindictive, waffling, in-your-face insulting man he seems. He's something worse."

According to Burston, Netanyahu's snub shows that Netanyahu "does not consider a man like Nelson Mandela, or a nation like South Africa, or the sentiment of an entire world, worth the price of a plane flight."

"A few supervisors refused to hand out the forms that included questions on church affiliations. Some workers feared losing their jobs if they did not sign. They included Jews, Muslims and Hindus, gays and lesbians, atheists and even a lapsed Salvation Army member, employees said." -- New York Times, February 2, 2004, A Religious Renewal at the Salvation Army Raises the Threat of a Church-State Dispute

Almost every day at my local supermarket, I pass by a Salvation Army bell ringer who, by now, knows that I won't drop any money in his kettle. I feel bad about it. The bell ringer is probably down on his luck, and SA management would likely smile were he to bring in a fuller kettle. But I can't do it, because I just can't get the Salvation Army's purge of gays and Jews out of my head.

A few months ago I wrote about how the child sex abuse crisis in evangelical Christianity, although less reported, is at least as bad as it is in the Catholic Church. Taken together, this suggests that there is a crisis of a different kind looming for the leaders of the Religious Right, whose concern for the victims of abuse has been too muted, and too often belated when it is evident at all. There is also too often an obvious and alarming tendency to sympathize and side with the abuser over the victims. The proud defenders of what they call "family values" become bizarre self-parodies, at best, under such circumstances.  

There are signs that accountability is coming.

This week as the the world considers the life of Nelson Mandela, a leading advocate for victims of sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention offered a remarkable idea.
Christa Brown of Stop Baptist Predators suggested a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on the one that helped South Africans put the horrors of apartheid behind them, might help the Southern Baptist Convention come to grips with it's child sex abuse scandal.  She thinks that Baptist leaders have been long on reconciliation and short on truth, and that maybe a comprehensive effort at both might help.

When a mob of conservative commentators led by Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business News morning host Stuart Varney recently red-baited Pope Francis, many of us wondered what the self-appointed defender of all-things-Catholic William Donohue would say.

As it turned out, given the choice between movement conservatives and those in line with Catholic economic teachings, the President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights attacked the pope's defenders.

Now we know.  But most of us are probably not surprised.

In the 1980s some members of the Black Christian right saw such a danger from communism, socialism and liberalism to the free enterprise system and traditional God-centered family life that they were able to rationalize coalitions with fascists so long as they were sufficiently anti-communist.

The issue came up after the death of Nelson Mandela when White pundits on network television tried to paint President Ronald Reagan as supportive of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid. This Orwellian lie was quickly slapped down by the Reverend Al Sharpton. (See video excerpt here). See also: "Rush Limbaugh: Mandela ‘Has More in Common with Clarence Thomas Than Barack Obama’

Journalist Bill Berkowitz has detailed much of the background in his article "The Conservative Movement's Long-Time Hate Affair With Nelson Mandela." which is also online here at Talk to Action

Thomas was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Bush, but Thomas had close ties to the Reagan Administration.

Mother Jones reports that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has no comment on Rush Limbaugh's red-baiting of Pope Francis.

Addicting Info reports that The Satanic Temple wants to erect a monument honoring Satan on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol -- right next to the one honoring the 10 Commandments.  

Eyes Right has a backgrounder on the recent murder conviction of parents following the methods of No Greater Joy Ministries founded by Michael and Debi Pearl.

Associated Baptist Press reports that the trustees of Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon Georgia have picked fake ex-Muslim terrorist Ergun Caner as president.  ABP's Bob Allen writes:  

Controversy arose in 2010, when bloggers questioned written descriptions of Caner's academic credentials and apparent embellishments in recorded versions of his "Jihad to Jesus" testimony popular with evangelical audiences in the aftermath of 9/11.

"Jesus strapped a cross on his back so I wouldn't have to strap a bomb on mine," Caner said in a sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention pastors' conference in 2004. He preached in high-profile pulpits including First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., and Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, claiming he came to America to do what the 9/11 terrorists did before being saved from a martyr's death by accepting Christ.

Yesterday Fox News and Glenn Beck's website "The Blaze" reported that a public school in Bulloch County, Ga., had banned Christmas cards. According to the Beck site, this was done because earlier this year Americans United had demanded that the school order teachers to "curtail religious expression while teaching."

The story was soon appearing on right-wing blogs and making a splash on social media. There was a big problem with it, however: It wasn't true.

Pope Francis has given progressives, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, a lot to cheer about with his public deemphasis on so-called culture war issues (a term he has never used, btw), his focus on the needs of the poor, and his powerful critique of the excesses of capitalism.  And he has certainly upset American Catholic conservatives who have been heavily invested in various combinations of ritual traditionalism, boosterism of various forms of free market capitalism; little to no record of concern for the poor beyond charity or for the interests of working people; and of course, "obsession" with abortion, contraception and homosexuality.  

But the fact remains that the course of the American Church has been set for decades thanks to the previous two Popes who have appointed nearly all of the American bishops and who have aggressively squelched dissent. As Frank Cocozzelli has pointed out, how many and what kinds of bishops the 76 year old Francis will get to appoint in the U.S. may be where the rubber meets the road of his papal legacy.

Time will tell whether Francis's statement on economics will have much impact beyond the current frisson of media interest and liberal encouragement.  But it is worth noting, for example, that Pope John Paul II issued a strong encyclical on labor and Benedict was a strong opponent of the U.S. war in Iraq. But there was little to show for their statements. The power and influence of popes and presidents is almost always greatly exaggerated, as we all tend to project our greatest hopes and worst fears onto leaders of all kinds.    

In the meantime, there is little evidence of Pope Francis having any actual impact on American politics or American Catholicism, and certainly not the culture war or the American bishops' alliance with Protestant Christian Right leaders. At least not yet.  So it is wise to be wary of the media hype of a celebrity religious leader on the other side of the world who has been in office less than a year.

This post is reworked from one I wrote during last year's presidential election campaign entitled, Is Redistribution Marxism? No, Just Good Catholic Doctrine!.  In light of Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business News host Stuart Varney's strong suggestions that Pope Francis is espousing "Marxism" let's once again set the record straight. - FLC

Rush Limbaugh and Stuart Varney seem to be confused and perplexed by Pope Francis's recently encyclical, Evangelii Gadium (Joy of the Gospel). Perhaps the term "threatened" is a more accurate description. They have accused the pope of advocating Marxism in place of capitalism.