Pope Francis, your honeymoon with the Western press is over. Of course, media accolades and praise were never his motivation. In fact, he has directly warned against the cult of celebrity, which is in danger of missing the point: the Gospel of Christ that he affirms in gesture, word, and deed.
But when Rolling Stone put him on its cover earlier this year, the piece inside was actually a secularist libertine warning: Don’t disappoint us. Don’t be another one of those guys reading from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And now the Holy See will be appearing before a United Nations committee on torture. The appearance is voluntary on the part of the Holy See and normal for anyone who has signed the Convention against Torture. And yet there is a disturbing ideological push on the U.N.’s part where the Catholic Church is concerned. This is the second sign this year that the United Nations, in the name of human dignity, is actually on a crusade against the foremost protector of human life and flourishing.
