House Democrats Offer Pope Francis 30 Pieces of Silver

Surely the pope sees through the Democrats' attempt to buy his indulgence.

By John Zmirak Published on September 5, 2015

The church of Christ is not of this world, but its members are called to live in it, which means that we are subject to every kind of snare. Indeed, in the end times Revelation warns us that “even the elect” will be in danger of being deceived (Matt. 24:24). As institutions that live in time, churches are led by ordinary men, who have no day-to-day protection against compromising one area of Gospel truth that seems less urgent just now, if that is the price of gaining the help of secular powers with overlapping agendas in other areas. How else to explain the willingness of popes, and then of Protestant reformers, to use violent force in suppressing religious dissent? Or the church’s approval of slavery, which only ended in the mid-nineteenth century?

History is full of such partial deals with the devil, from the alliance of throne and altar that made the churches the props of tyrannical monarchies, to the infiltration of churches by Communist dupes in the name of that KGB side-project, Liberation Theology. When Christians with integrity have stepped forth over the centuries to point out the moral price of compromising essential truths about human dignity, they were frequently dismissed as reckless “purists,” and sometimes if they persisted they found themselves enduring persecution. But it is those men and women, who risked their livings and often their lives in defense of truth, whom we remember in subsequent centuries — not the clerics addicted to comfort, obsessed with influence, too timid to face the threat of being “marginalized” and cut off from apparent access to power.

We venerate brave rebels against the worldly status quo, like Bartolome de las Casas, William Wilberforce,  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko and Joan Andrews Bell (founder of Operation Rescue). Someday, we might well be adding the name Kim Davis to that honor roll.

Such Christians knew that the churches cannot effectively preach the gospel and bring souls to Christ without insisting on the truth of what man is and what he deserves. It is not the task of churchmen to treat God’s people like robots or animals, whose freedom, virtue and happiness are irrelevant, so long as we can keep them “in line,” attending services and repeating the Creed, herding them toward heaven like veal calves on an assembly line. That was the lurid vision that Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor offered in The Brothers Karamazov, and it is the certain outcome for any church that is willing to sell out human dignity in exchange for favors from the state.

And that is the offer on the table, which 80 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives have made to Pope Francis this week. They swathed it in gracious language, cloaking their offer of a tactical alliance in the intoxicating phrases of not-quite-Christian compassion:

We thank you for the many ways you have reminded us all of the centrality of the social teachings of the church and your clear emphasis on human dignity, solidarity and the rights of workers, and above all, the poor and vulnerable….

Your powerful example of solidarity with the poor and the marginalized will undoubtedly help inform our current debates around major U.S. policy affecting all Americans. Your message of hope could not come at a more crucial time, in particular to those in our nation that are struggling on a minimum wage salary, or relying on public assistance to put food on the table.

Go read the letter yourself. The congressional staffers who crafted it must have combed through every statement Pope Francis has made since he was elected, highlighted the most frequently used buzzwords, then put them in a computer program designed to deploy them at random intervals.

Using that program can’t have saved them all that much time, however, since those staffers were too busy to bother with the Capitol Hill screening of the Planned Parenthood videos, which expose how more than $500 million of taxpayer money was used last year to kill, harvest and sell unborn American babies.

The congressmen who released the letter are clear about what they want: political cover for scoffing at the sanctity of life; for forcing Christian business owners and even orders of nuns to dispense abortifacients as the price of offering health insurance; for supporting the legal attack on marriage and the religious freedom of churches. These congressmen want to continue dismantling whatever private-run, religiously motivated safety net for the poor still exists, and replacing it with a state-driven, secular bureaucratic mechanism that accepts an entirely different vision of man from that of the Christian worldview.

In return, the Democrats offer political support for the pope’s economic agenda, which they think hinges on redistributing wealth via the government. They may be right about that. Samuel Gregg has written here at The Stream about the weaknesses in Pope Francis’ personal understanding of economics. Still, it seems impossible that Pope Francis will accept the corrupt deal on offer, which amounts to a crass sleight of hand.

The Real Text of the Democrats’ Letter, Decoded

If the Democrat’s letter were decoded, or perhaps soaked in truth serum, it might read something like this:

Forget what our left hand is doing: Hey, look over here, at the shiny green silk scarf we are waving around! We Democrats will shovel some more of other people’s money, Holy Father, at projects that you approve of. (Along the way, we’ll be buying millions of votes, but don’t worry your anointed head about that — pay attention to how compassionate we’re being!) We will raise the minimum wage so that the same pile of money that businesses spend on low-skill workers will be divided among fewer people; the rest will be flat-out unemployed. But we will take care of them, too, with more handouts from the government, reducing them to hapless, sullen clients of the state.

The last thing we Democrats want is a confrontation, a collision between the Church and our new, improved plan for humanity. We are handling it, Your Holiness. We hear you use words like “mercy” and we get it. What you really mean is “slack.” We must cut people slack for their bad decisions, and help them to clean up their messes. (What else do you think that Planned Parenthood is for?) Most human beings really aren’t cut out to make all the decisions that face them nowadays. How are they supposed to navigate our ever-expanding understanding of sex and gender? Or the new and ugly implications of inequality and privilege that social scientists keep discovering? Or the baffling changes in economics and global politics? Or the future of our planet’s climate? Most people are busy, tired, and — just between us — not all that bright. They need firm, benevolent guidance, not so much from a holy father as a really, really big brother.

The most compassionate thing to do is for the best-educated and most enlightened among us to help those poor souls along, to swathe their lives in happy, pastel-colored nerf and keep them from harming themselves with pointy objects or things that go “bang.” In the long run, researchers may even discover that voting itself is dangerous, that it’s something best left to professionals. Indeed, your favorite scientist, John Schellnuber, has already advanced that theory.

We will take the post-Christian, post-gender, power-agglomerating monster that is the U.S. federal government, and we will grow it even larger. We will suck up still more of the air that is left, and shoulder aside private actors (such as the Little Sisters of the Poor) that dissent from our agenda, in favor of state-controlled agencies and compliant secular contractors. If you’re willing to work with us on a long list of issues where our demands are incompatible with Christianity and completely non-negotiable, we’ll hire your church agencies to follow our instructions to the letter. We can sluice other people’s money through you, if you like.

Or else, if placing adoptable kids with polyamorous families and counseling refugee children about their “transgender” options is just too much for you to swallow, Holy Father, that is perfectly okay. We will lift from the church’s shoulders the dreary burden of caring for the needy, teaching the young, placing children in adoptive homes, and so on. Since we’ve already gone a long way toward preventing the church from preaching the Christian gospel in the public square, that will leave you and your priests with a lot of free time on your hands. All of you deserve a nice vacation. Go ahead, take it! We hear that the beaches are lovely in Cuba.

Let us pray that the pope can read between the lines.

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