We should listen to the pope, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote on Tuesday this week, for, in the words of the headline as it appears in her Nation column, “Francis shows us a better politics.” Peace, negotiation, cooperation, and, much noted for its appearance in his statements as both noun and verb, “dialogue”—the absence of these in our social, civil, and political discourse is made the more conspicuous by what many see as Francis’s employment of them. Accurately or inaccurately, dialogue has come to be understood as his default mode.
Well, there’s politics, and there’s politics; there’s dialogue, and there’s dialogue. The news (now confirmed by the Vatican and noted earlier by Margaret O’Brien Steinfels) that Francis met with Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis doesn’t seem all that surprising in light of the pope’s comments on conscientious objection during his flight home. There wasn’t a whole lot of parsing needed there; it was clear whom he was referencing, even if he didn’t mention Davis’s name. But the secrecy of the meeting, combined with the decision not to publicize it until after Francis left the United States (and then only after media requests for confirmation), prove vanden Heuvel half-right: he showed us a better politician than most have already given him credit for.
Conscientious objection is not the same thing as (take your pick) obstructionism, narcissism, or a martyr complex, which the Family Research Council was already set to indulge with an award to Davis in Washington during Francis’s visit. The timing proved opportune, and so Davis went home with a pair of rosaries from the pope as well. “Stay strong,” he is reported to have told her after their fifteen-minute meeting.
“Francis’s words … may fall on more receptive soil than the media think,” vanden Huevel concludes, “and the candidates who vie to present the most pugnacious postures may find themselves losing, not winning, support.” She wrote a day too early. Francis’s actions, not nearly so nuanced in this case as the messages lurking in his addresses or remarks, will find a plenty receptive audience as well, if maybe not the one everyone assumed he was playing to. "Pay attention to the people Francis visits," E. J. Dionne wrote here a little over a week ago. Noted.
