I admire the pope immensely — his brains-over-brawn eminence is truly awesome — but I'm bewildered by his office. I have never understood the purpose of organized religion; not in the modern world, where science can explain what only religion once could. As for instructing us in human ethics — which are unimposing to, and on, the unethical — there is a vast body of literature that ably competes with the Bible or Koran or any other "holy" manuscript. For courage one can read Homer; for vision, Dante; for all of humanity's richness and meanness and foibles, Shakespeare. Libraries are temples. It is from there that the modern mind initiates battle with ignorance, bigotry, and ancient sins.
The Golden Rule? Pithy. Yet political philosopher John Rawls "fleshed" it out with deeper meaning in his "veil of ignorance" — an imaginary social construct into which one is thrust, before which, one must decide what kind of society. Is slavery permitted? When you arrive, you may be one of the slaves. Ravages of income inequality? You may be one of the ravaged. And so on. So now decide. What kind of society would you wish to find yourself in? — considering, first, that you may be one of the losers in the breed of society that world religions, feudalism and capitalism have, in reality, bequeathed us.
Secular Rawls's is a longer route to wisdom and human decency, but it packs a more thoughtful punch than does "Do unto others," which most others are in the habit of merely mouthing. Rawls is an apostle of Reason.
So yes, I'm bewildered by the admirable pope's office. Speaker Boehner — a "devout Catholic," a two-word term that for reasons unknown is as inseparable as "damn Yankee" — is, however, not bewildered. Not one bit. He sees the pope as the emissary of God and vicar of Christ. For all I metaphysically know, maybe he is. Yet if that's the case, then why will Speaker Boehner proceed to ignore the divine wisdom that the pope dispensed this morning?
Francis spoke directly to Boehner and his party — that unhappy little band of polarizing pols and rebellious ideologues — about the violence and bloodshed which extremism causes. Boehner's party practices, of course, a much milder form of the kind of violent extremism that Francis deplored, but theirs is an extremism nonetheless. The pope was just practicing subtlety. And the idiots applauded. They can't even recognize themselves; so how in the name of the Holy Father can they recognize what Francis was getting at?
The short answer: They can't, and they can't because they don't wish to, and they don't wish to because cooperation with the vastly decent President Obama would result in the unselfish adventure of having their lily-white asses primaried.
So, all that holiness was squandered; what Republicans heard and applauded they neither heard nor appreciated. It was just another come-to-Jesus Sunday meetin' that will be trashed at the next political-strategy coven. To hell with cooperation and reason and the country to boot. Reelection is Lord.
To history, the pope's speech was indeed historic. To our GOP Congress it was just more nice-sounding words that can't work in the "real world," for they, mostly, are "real men" — men of brawn over brains.