When a 12,000-word article chronicling a lengthy interview with Pope Francis published in several Jesuit journals across the world last week, the resulting headlines in other publications were blunt and shocking.
"Pope Francis is a flaming liberal," stated Slate. The New York Times took a typically less declarative approach, heading its first story "Pope says church is 'obsessed' with gays, abortion and birth control."
And in an impressively wordy headline from the Huffington Post, "Pope blasts abortion after decrying Catholic Church obsession with abortion."
For the most part, these articles and the headlines that ran with them were based on a few sentences of the lengthy interview. So much of it focused on other aspects of the pope — his thoughts on what it means to be a Jesuit, his favorite paintings, movies and books, his preferred method of prayer — but the part that's been so publicized is a brief section on abortion, gay rights and contraception.
With just these few sentences taken out of context, it's easy for those who have grown frustrated with the Church's stance on social issues to take heart, much as they did when he asked, "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" in July.
However, these comments aren't nearly as earth-shattering as headlines would have one believe. Yes, the pope spends a good 600 words discussing these social issues, but he is not nearly as liberal-thinking as he's made out to be.
There is a big difference between accepting that gay people exist and aren't inherently more sinful than their straight peers, which is what the pope said, and advocating for gay rights, which is how many would like to read his comments.
In the original article, Francis tells his interviewer, "A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: When God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person."
Francis neither specifically endorses gay marriage or other rights, nor does he support the use of abortion or contraceptives. Instead, the paragraphs about these social issues focus on the thought of each person as an individual, a sort of ad hoc approach to sin and salvation.
Francis's thoughts on the Church's stance on these issues isn't revolutionary or unexpected. It's his take on how Catholics should meld these with other, more important church doctrines like helping the poor. "When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context," he says. "The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time."
The new pope is not liberal in the secular sense, nor is he a hidebound conservative like his predecessors. Taking these words out of context may make for a compelling news story and days worth of blog posts, but it misses the complexity of the problems that have taxed Christianity in general for thousands of years. The Church is hardly any closer to solving those problems now than when the first Christians were trying to make sense of the world around them.
Reach the managing editor at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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