Who Is Afraid of Pope Francis?

Gary Wills at the New York Review of Books, asks who is afraid of Pope Francis.  His answer is

. . .as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued

Francis, in the brief time he has been pope has made his devotion to the poor a watchword, which is why Wills (and Eli) believe that they will not succeed, indeed why this attack should be hung about their necks when they dare to show their faces in public.

They do not know exactly what the pope is going to say in his forthcoming encyclical on preserving God’s creation, but they know what he will not say. He will not deny that the poor suffer from actions that despoil the earth. Everything he has said and done so far shows that Francis always stands for the poor. 

Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears. They must not only discredit the pope’s words (whatever they turn out to be), they must block them, ridicule them, destroy them.

Indeed the reaction today to a leaked draft of the encyclical has been furious, so Eli would like to do some record keeping for Steve Milloy who is indeed frothing.  In keeping with the good Sou, Eli has archived the froth for posterity or hilarity

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There is a lot more and they make about as much sense.  While Eli most assuredly will not agree with everything that Pope Francis writes or does, he will not claim that Francis is a people hater, or adolescent or insipid.  Eli certainly will defend the proposition that Steve Milloy is all of these.