John Cadavini, professor of theology and director of the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, writes for the New York Daily News:
Everyone tends to blank out the sayings that are uncomfortable to them, the conservatives believing that the warnings against trickle-down economics and his confidence in theories of global warming are outside the Pope’s competence, the liberals deciding that the Pope’s stance on life issues and issues of human sexuality are idiosyncratic holdovers from an anthropology outdated long ago. No harm, no foul, we can all take up only what leaves our comfort zone intact, and selectively use what we can to advance our own positions.
But most uncomfortable of all may well be Pope Francis’s conviction that these issues are all interrelated. That a culture which has learned to subordinate life to its own comfort zone will never have the moral courage to subordinate profit to human dignity, will never make the sacrifices necessary to reverse the spread of a “disposable” culture which not only exploits but excludes, which produces as a matter of routine human “leftovers,” the outcast, the “discarded,” used and then disposed of.
