In an official apostolic exhortation on holiness issued Monday morning, Pope Francis, Vatican City’s original bad boy, decreed that issues of poverty, migrants’ rights, and the elderly and infirm are just as important as the “defence of the unborn,”—a righteous subtweet of America’s allegedly Christian (but not Catholic!) Republican party, which will surely be triumphantly mangled, misinterpreted, or outright rejected with a #NotMyPope.
“The other harmful ideological error is found in those who find suspect the social engagement of others, seeing it as superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” the 103-page teaching document entitled “Gaudete et Exsultate” or “Rejoice and Be Glad” (i.e., lengthy blog post posted on his blog, Vatican.va) reads. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend. Our defence of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm, and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.”
“Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.”
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