My question, I read the Timmer piece and could not care to take much time with the Kersten diatribe. So I did a surrogate to reading - word search.
In her lengthy op-ed Kersten argues the Church has had wisdom over the ages. I did a word scan of her item for "encyclical" and the word is missing. As if Francis never wrote it while Kersten appears to believe in infallibility.
There was even a rally. Kersten missed it. Avoided it is the more likely explanation, looking in from outside the murky confines between those two ears.
Well, the encyclical was longer than the Kersten op-ed, and cutting her slack, the lengthier presentations of ideas beyond her own might have little resonance, subliminally, and not as a matter of willing choice to avoid.
So, can we look forward to Kersten on the Father of Fathers thoughts of stewardship of our earth? Or is she simply more impassioned over child abuse, too much so, to have read the encyclical?
WWFP - What would Francis perfer?
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Seizing upon a single paragraph from the Kersten item among those that Timmer quotes:
But there’s a deeper, ideological reason for the lopsided media focus on the Catholic Church. The church disagrees strongly with elite opinionmakers — our new priestly class — on the social/sexual issues at ground zero in the culture wars, including abortion, contraception, premarital chastity and same-sex marriage. It is one of the last and strongest institutions to oppose today’s fashionable catechism of political correctness, which holds that truth is relative and that freedom means living as we please and making up rules that are “true for us.”
So help me in my confusion, does this mean the Francis encyclical reaches beyond "today’s fashionable catechism of political correctness, which holds that truth is relative and that freedom means living as we please and making up rules that are 'true for us.'"? Or is the Kersten blind-eye to the encyclical just her "rule," "true for her?" Surely consistency of thought would not, after that quote, characterize Francis as "elite opinionmaker" of the kind she disparges. Perhaps poisoning the earth and threatening the continuation of all life upon it is no "culture war" issue to the gentlelady? Who knows? Between those ears ... mystery.