Spinning the Pope

One thing that is very common with the institutional Catholic response to what the pope says—at least I have found it so from the US response—is to spin it as if the pope has supported your position and while this is clearly how politics operates and how much of the Church operates, it is not how it should operate.

Though the pope often speaks very compassionately about issues, he also speaks clearly and though careful attention ahs to be paid to the entirety of what he says, we Catholics are right to expect our institutional Church to expend that effort, but as George Weigel shows, some of them, in Catholic education circles, apparently will not.

This is an issue that also resonated around the first (1992) and second (1997) edition of the Catechism concerning capital punishment.

The first edition continued the clear traditional support of the Church for it while the second was quite a bit more subtle, though still continuing the traditional support.

The US institutional Church though, utilized this subtle change in words—which the Vatican official in charge, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, stated signaled no doctrinal change—to continue their attempt, still continuing, to change the doctrine.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia put this effort into very tidy context in First Things during the discussion.