A little insight into the meeting between Pope Francis and President Obama that was overlooked or intentionally omitted by the mainstream media:
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... the March 27 meeting between Pope Francis and President Obama produced little in the way of hard news. It did, however, generate some confusion about just what happened. That confusion was instructive on several counts.
It was a reminder of just how poorly equipped most of the world media are to cover the Vatican and its ways — an incapacity that can often be blamed on the woeful state of Vatican communications, but not in this instance.
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And the meeting was a useful (if unnecessary) lesson in how, more than two years into the battle over Obamacare’s contraceptive/abortifacient mandate, the president continues to either misconstrue or misrepresent what is at stake in this argument.
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Catholicism is rich in symbols, and the habit of sending signals symbolically extends, sometimes, to the Holy See’s engagement with world leaders and world affairs. That was one of the dynamics of the Obama/Francis meeting, and more than a few of the symbolic messages were missed by the White House press corps.
The Holy See was entirely aware of the administration’s pre-meeting attempt to spin the post-meeting reporting. That pre-meeting spin took the form of repeating the agenda the White House defined in announcing the meeting on January 21: that the president looked forward to discussing with Francis their common concerns about economic inequality. Here, the White House was suggesting, was the “common ground” on which the two leaders would meet and agree — and here, as was obvious but unstated, was a theme the president and his supporters could deploy in this election cycle.
Now, to be sure, issues of poverty were discussed by the pope and the president, especially when the conversation was broadened to include the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin (the Vatican’s de facto prime minister), Archbishop Dominique Mamberti (the Vatican “foreign minister”), and U.S. secretary of state John Kerry. But that was certainly not all that was discussed; nor, one might reasonably conclude, was that the major part of what was discussed. Moreover, the discussion was organized and visually framed by the Holy See in ways that subtly suggested that, whatever the principals’ shared concerns about the underclass, “common ground” was not the central theme of this meeting.
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Pope Francis conducted his conversation with President Obama across a desk — a stage-setting exercise on the Vatican’s part that one canny media veteran thought “a tad aggressive” and another observer said resembled a school principal having a firm talk with a recalcitrant student. There was no attempt to embarrass here. But the arrangement nonetheless sent a signal, to the administration and to others: The Holy See was not interested in reinforcing the White House’s pre-meeting script, nor would it be interested in doing so for other public officials in the future.
Then there were the first photos released by the Holy See. Pope Francis is loath to be turned into a stage prop for politicians, and so he generally avoids offering photographers smiling shots when he is with heads of state or government. And while the photo used on the front page of the March 28 Washington Post showed Francis smiling at what appears to have been an Obama witticism, the first photo of the two men released by the Vatican offered a different image and message: a rather stern-looking pope beside a smiling president who seemed unaware of his conversation partner’s wish not to be used. The same was true of the official photo of the pope with the presidential party. Most of the Americans (including POTUS but not, instructively, Susan Rice) were cheerfully, almost blithely, grinning; Pope Francis, with guarded eyes and a flat expression, seemed discinclined to join the jollity.
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the Vatican, operating with something approaching miraculous speed, put out a post-meeting communiqué striking for its terseness — and for what it did not state, much less highlight:
This morning, 27 March 2014, the Hon. Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, was received in audience by His Holiness Pope Francis, after which he met with His Eminence, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, and Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, Secretary for Relations with States.
During the cordial meetings, views were exchanged on some current international themes and it was hoped that, in areas of conflict, there would be respect for humanitarian and international law and a negotiated solution between the parties involved.
In the context of bilateral relations and cooperation between Church and State, there was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the Church in that country [i.e., the United States], such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life, and conscientious objection, as well as the issue of immigration reform. Finally, the common commitment to the eradication of trafficking of human persons in the world was stated.
Translated: No one pounded the table. Everyone agreed that international disputes should be settled legally and by negotiation, that immigration reform is desirable, and that human trafficking is very bad. The Holy See underscored that it was very concerned about the HHS mandate and its impact on the religious freedom of all, about the administration’s radical pro-abortion policies, and about the effects of all this on the civil and legal position of Americans of conscience.
Thus, the White House’s wish for a statement of “common ground” on economic questions went completely unrequited, and the word “inequality,” the White House mantra for two months, was not used — deliberately, one must assume. Perhaps most significantly, the Vatican communiqué, by highlighting the HHS mandate and related life and conscience issues, signaled that there was not a millimeter of distance on these questions between Pope Francis and the Holy See, on the one hand, and the bishops of the United States, on the other.
Taken together, the symbols and the words suggested that neither the pope nor his closest associates were interested in having the discussions of March 27 read with the White House spin.
OBAMA AND THE HHS MANDATE
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As Vatican officials were not interested in debating the Affordable Care Act, one can imagine that these explanations were received politely — but also with appropriate skepticism. For the Holy See had been well briefed on certain facts that do not fit very comfortably within the president’s description of the HHS mandate. Such as the fact that only a narrow category of churches, religious orders, and their “exclusively religious activities” is “entirely exempt” from the mandate (and even that exemption was only grudgingly conceded after a struggle between the administration and its critics). Or the fact that religious nonprofits object to the “accommodation” offered by the administration on the grounds that the attestation to which the president referred triggers the provision of the “services” they find morally objectionable (which is to say that the administration’s vaunted “accommodation” fixes nothing). Or the fact that the administration has shown unremitting hostility to the conscience rights and religious freedom of employers, as the solicitor general’s argument in the Supreme Court two days before the Obama/Francis meeting underscored.
In brief, the president of the United States is either remarkably ignorant of the facts involved in a dispute that has caused the greatest rift between the Catholic Church and the United States government in the nation’s history, or he was, to put it gently, spinning to the point of dissembling. This was not lost on senior Vatican officials.
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(from a copy of Evangelium Gaudium, which the Pope gave to Obama:)
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Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question [i.e., the right to life from conception until natural death]. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations.” It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life. [214]
A healthy pluralism, one which genuinely respects differences and values them as such, does not entail privatizing religions in an attempt to reduce them to the quiet obscurity of the individual’s conscience or to relegate them to the enclosed precincts of churches, synagogues or mosques. This would represent, in effect, a new form of discrimination and authoritarianism. [255]
On the evening of the day that Pope Francis gave Evangelii Gaudium to President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, on receiving the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood, described pro-life people as “dumb.” ...
None of this makes for sharp headlines or crunchy sound-bites. Very little of it fits into the conventional media narrative about Pope Francis, which befogged too much reporting about the March 27 meeting. Still, challenging as it is, Methol Ferré’s intriguing analysis of postmodernity and its discontents gets us much closer to the reality of Pope Francis, his sense of our times, and his grand strategy for the Church than Rolling Stone cover stories or White House spin doctors.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...eigel/page/0/2