College Fix founder and executive director John J. Miller praised Pope Francis’s legacy of standing up for the unborn in an opinion piece for the Boston Globe this morning.
Miller called Pope Francis the “most powerful voice for the unborn” and said his views “disrupted the easy narratives of each side, whether it was Francis the liberal reformer or Francis the threat to orthodoxy,” referring to how different factions might view his legacy.
As the opinion piece argued:
Both his progressive allies and his conservative critics in the United States may overlook this simple fact as they think about how to commemorate the man who has served as the head of the Catholic Church for the last dozen years.
Progressives will probably eulogize Francis’s concern for the poor and for refugees. They’ll praise his overtures to LGBTQ people. They’ll cheer his recent rebuke of the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
Many conservatives, by contrast, will probably grumble about his legacy. They’ll say he tried to weaken the church’s teachings on everything from divorce to priestly celibacy. They’ll complain about his fixation on climate change. They’ll condemn his restrictions on the Latin Mass.
Miller, who is also the journalism chair at Hillsdale College, pointed out that the pope saw the issue in a larger picture beyond simple politics. “May we learn, like [Mary], to discover God’s greatness in the little things of life,” he said on January 1 this year. “May we learn to care for every child born of a woman, above all by protecting, like Mary, the precious gift of life: life in the womb, the lives of children, the lives of the suffering, the poor, the elderly, the lonely, and the dying.”
“This was Francis’s usual way of defending human life,” Miller wrote. “Rather than singling out abortion as an isolated policy topic — something to be settled with an election or a legal ruling — he spoke about the value of life in its grand sweep, from conception to natural death.”
Read the full Boston Globe essay here.
MORE: Grad student demands university rebuke Pope Francis for trans criticism
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Pope Francis smiling; CasaRosada/WMC
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