At the Washington Post:
Pope Francis will visit Washington, D.C. Sept. 22 to Sept. 25, the Archdiocese of Washington confirmed on Tuesday. President Obama hinted at what he expects to speak with Pope Francis when they meet in September at the White House, including poverty, climate change and conflict in the Middle East.
Conflict in the Middle East? Maybe Pope Francis will ask the President to stop creating it.
Obama said they will likely talk about reducing conflict and reducing war in the Middle East “where Christians have been viciously attacked.” Pope Francis has become a force in foreign policy, regularly speaking out against the persecution of Christians.
Yes, but what has this accomplished? He runs on a lot about dialogue and pacifism, coddles dictators, UN Tyrants, and terrorists, and blasts free markets too.
The leaders will also likely talk about climate change, Obama said in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal. Pope Francis is poised to weigh in on climate change with an encyclical this summer.
The following section is from the Journal’s interview released today.
Seib: What are you going to tell him? What do you expect he’s going to want to tell you?
Obama: Well, I’ve had the honor of meeting him already once, an extraordinary individual, I think, a transformative leader, not just within the Catholic Church but globally.
Why are liberals always being transformative? Aren’t they happy with the nasty ways they already are? And why is everything always global? Isn’t ruining their own families and neighborhoods and running their own cities into the ground enough? When will leftist world leaders stop celebrating how Pope Francis is turning Christianity into their vehicle to ride the globe into Hell? Don’t they see how they give themselves away?
And excluding the pervasive hype, what is so extraordinary about Pope Francis, other than the fact that he can awkwardly blend bits of vague sentiment into something wishful thinkers can pretend is Catholic teaching? (He does have a unique way with words.) What is extraordinary though, is that an anti-Christian like Obama, who is never loose with his praise, can gush over the Vicar of Christ today.
That’s rare in the extreme.