WaPo | When Steve Skojec heard
that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected pope, he got a queasy
feeling in the pit of his stomach. He can’t say why, exactly — though he
follows Vatican politics closely, he didn’t know much about Francis
then. But as he watched the new Catholic leader greet the crowds on his
office television in Manassas, Va., he was filled with dread.
“I felt a discontinuity,” he said. “A disruption.”
At first, he didn’t want to make too big a deal of it. Though Skojec
blogs regularly about Catholicism at the Web site he founded,
OnePeterFive (tag line: Rebuilding Catholic culture. Restoring Catholic
tradition.), he mostly avoided the subject. “I wanted to withhold
judgement,” he said.
Six months later, he was ready to judge. What really turned Skojec
against Francis was the pope’s October 2013 interview in the Jesuit
magazine America. Buried in the transcript was a comment, by Francis,
that the world’s biggest evils are youth unemployment and loneliness.
“That’s a jarring statement . . . when you’re on the front lines of
the culture wars, looking at the death toll of abortion,” Skojec said.
“There was definitely a sense that this could be trouble.”
Among Americans Catholics, Francis is wildly popular, with an
approval rating hovering near 90 percent. The faithful are drawn by the
pope’s humility and inclusive message. But a growing number in the
church’s conservative wing don’t feel so welcome. Just 45 percent of
conservative Catholics have a favorable opinion of Francis, down from 72
percent a year ago.
They worry that Francis is loosening the church’s strict teachings on
morality (he famously told a prominent Italian atheist that “everyone
has his own idea of good and evil” and has said “who am I to judge” when
asked about gay priests). They accuse him of deserting them on issues
such as abortion and contraception (he has said he avoids those issues
because the church has become too “obsessed” with them).
And they say his attacks on capitalism are ill-conceived and amount to a plea for redistribution of wealth — or worse.
