Immigration and the Pope

The pope’s visit to Mexico and his criticism of Trump brought more attention to his support of massive immigration from Latin America into the United States.  Various people have speculated as to why he cares – often attributing it to his generally  leftist political opinions.  While that should not be discounted,  there is another reason that I think is important.

People these days often forget that the  papacy is and for centuries has been a political as well as a religious office.  Historically popes have been active participants in geopolitics with the goal of preserving and extending the power and domain of their office and the  Catholic church.  For the last two hundred years since Waterloo, the world’s dominant political and economic power has been a mainly protestant nation with strong liberal and secularist  components and tendencies. There is no reason to believe this is anything other than undesirable to the Catholic church.

The facts make it plain that the chances of any Catholic nation supplanting the United States in that role are effectively nil.  Without that happening the next best thing from the viewpoint of the papacy  would be to make the United States more Catholic.  Since a majority of people in Latin America are Catholics, mass immigration to the United States from Latin America would serve that purpose.  That, I think, is a natural and simple at least partial explanation for the pope’s interest in such immigration. 

Manning and the Media

The recent flap in the sports media over Peyton Manning is worth noticing. The story itself is trivial and insignificant. Depending on whom one believes,  about twenty years ago Manning as a young college player either mooned a teammate while a female trainer was working on his ankle, giving her an unintended but unwelcome view of his testicles and backside, or flashed her with that view intentionally.  As might have been expected in those post- Anita Hill and pre-Monica Lewinsky days, there was a series of  accusations, legal actions, and settlements which went on for a good while.  There was no hint in any version of the story of sexual assault, groping or striking the woman,  or anything beyond puerile and  moronic horseplay of a sort not too unusual in teenage boys.  The story was old news and had been so for over a decade until several sportswriters and commentators revived it after the Super Bowl.

Now, all of a sudden, we are getting a campaign of shocked and sanctimonious denunciations of Manning and pompous ruminations about whether or to what degree this destroys his “legacy” or even proves he is a phony and an evil person. That is odd enough that it’s useful to try to figure out why.

The first thing one might notice is that the offense, even Manning’s version of it, violates the canons of political correctness as they apply to gender. Here was a woman working in the locker room with a bunch of youthful jocks.  One of them behaved like a youthful jock in a locker room, instead of realizing that women are  strong, tough as nails,  and able to function in any environment  or situation and simultaneously  delicate Victorian flowers who will be horribly damaged by any sort of unseemly conduct or language, and then conducting himself accordingly.  The horror is there for all to see.

The next  thing which comes to mind is that Manning is white, and for many in the media there are different standards  for white and black athletes. Violent run ins with cops and ordinary citizens, profligate fathering of illegitimate children, beating up women (so long as no pictures or videos hit the news), and rap sheets  of assorted felonies are accepted as  normal and unremarkable and either unmentioned or quickly dismissed or forgiven if the athlete is black. White guys generally are more likely to be  expected to behave themselves and to be given nothing like this sort of slack when they do not  - even in comparatively minor ways.   (While on the surface this might appear to be sensitive to and solicitous of black people, in fact it shows a clear prejudice against them, since the indicated  conclusion is that the people doing this  do not think blacks are  worthy of being held to and capable of meeting usual behavioral standards.  In that assumption  they  find themselves in agreement with a common opinion of anti-black bigots and racists.)

Politics may also be part of it. Manning is a Republican and  young, attractive, popular, articulate, competitive, and in need of something to do with the rest of his life. Most of the people in the media are on the left, and there could have been a desire to torpedo a possible political career in the wrong party.  Then there are the simple explanations of envy, resentment, and schadenfreude which always should be considered in such cases.

This is all  just guess work, the product of lazy speculation on a warm Saturday afternoon, but the scope and intensity of the thing  are  strange.  

An Imaginary Country

Think of Kipling and Mundy and consider an imaginary nation somewhere in remote Central Asia north of the Khyber Pass and beyond the Hindu Kush Mountains.  Its government is a representative democracy with a popularly elected president. The population consists mainly of Muslims, most of whom, while generally tolerant, would be loath to vote for a politician who was not a follower of the Prophet.  There are number of  Jews and a small and politically insignificant number of Christians, the latter mainly recent immigrants or the children of immigrants. For the last couple of decades the country has been plagued by acts of terroristic violence committed by Christian fanatics, both foreign and domestic, who oppose the nation’s government, leaving Christianity unpopular with many of the citizens.

 The president is a self-proclaimed Muslim, but many in the country doubt him. They point out that since politicians are unscrupulous opportunists who will  lie about just about  everything, this  one could be lying about his religion for political advantage. They consider the fact that the great majority of people who have a religion stick to one version or another of the one they grew up  in.   They note that he was raised in a Christian home in a strongly Christian nation and speaks sincerely and nostalgically of  the glorious church music and beautiful, haunting  chants of his youth with emotion he never displays when speaking  of Islam.  They observe  that  while he is always  quick to criticize Muslims and Islam in harsh terms for both present day shortcomings and for failures and brutalities going back centuries, he always speaks fondly and warmly of Christianity and reminds  people that it  is a religion exclusively of love and peace and that the terrorists are apostates perverting true Christianity.  Some see significance in the fact that the unconventional or even heretical Imam who led him to profess adherence to Islam said that he did so by presenting the faith to him in a way that was compatible with his Christian background.  Many cite the famous occasion  when the president publically spoke of his Christian faith before being corrected by a friendly interviewer and note that they have never heard anyone else make a slip of the tongue in which accidentally said he followed a religion different from his actual creed.  The president’s most devoted followers try to dismiss the doubters as fools and ignorant peasants, but every time the president speaks about religion, he gives them a little more evidence for their case.

Of course no such country exists, and none of this could happen in a real nation. In real countries all politicians are honest and straightforward about their beliefs, and no one would ever think of their pretending to believe anything they didn’t  for political reasons. 

I don’t  have a definite opinion about Obama’s religious sentiments. (I also don’t care. If he turned out to be lying about his religion, it might make him out  a little more of a scoundrel, but it would be pretty insignificant compared to all the other things.)    However  I can see that the skeptics have reasons for their skepticism.  In fact if a  completely neutral  and apolitical  observer  were a contestant on a quiz show and asked to guess Obama’s  actual religion to win a $25,000 prize, and if he based his answer on evidence rather than protestations,  he’d probably  bet with the doubters.