Isn’t it great to have a nice Pope? A Pope who speaks out against manifestly bad things like poverty, slavery and – in his most recent encyclical – the devastation of the environment by human rapaciousness? Well, yes it is. Even someone as partisan to secularism as me can see that a holy man preaching compassion and generosity is an improvement on any number of deathly reasonable atheists. It shouldn’t matter where the impulse to goodness comes from, so long as the impulse is good.
But the thing is, sometimes it does matter. Some things come so deeply embedded in a belief system that they can’t just be shrugged off for the sake of a good message, and this is how it goes with the Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home.
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