Anthony Stevens-Arroyo dissects Roman Catholic pundits who love the Bishop of Rome when he speaks their creed and who cast him into a corner when they disagree. True, the Pope can and does err, and Roman Catholic dogmas never declared the Pope infallible in his personal pronouncements, his personal political views, or even his personal theological perspective. That said, he does speak for the Church and is charged with teaching things consistent with the Catholic faith. Sometimes he teaches things people just don’t like. A person’s personal likes and dislikes matter little in the face of such teaching.

From Mr. Stevens-Arroyo’s Washington Post column: Vatican Insiders and Outsiders

Like most large organizations, the Catholic Church experiences both insiders and outsiders… The insider role to the Vatican has been played for more than a decade by George Weigel, the official biographer of Pope John Paul II and a trusted spokesperson for the conservative right-wing in U.S. politics. But in the law of political changes, today’s insider can become tomorrow’s outsider. That, I think, has been the turnaround for Weigel.

Named official biographer for Pope John Paul II, Wiegel was given unparalleled access to the Vatican and to the persons and places surrounding the pontiff. But Weigel was not content in producing a quality biography (Witness to Hope, 1999): he decided to parlay his access with the church into an influential role among neo-conservatives. His insider status with the Vatican allowed him to wax expansively in the conservative media about “what the pope really meant.” Almost without exception, Weigel considered the pope’s thinking to be in line with Republican Party politics.

Weigel then set up shop at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, one of many “think tanks” within the Beltway. His opinions were regularly posted by the National Review, the birthplace of “Mater, Sí­; Magistra, No!” While no doubt his political job paid the bills, it also aligned him with the authors of the classic Cafeteria Catholic dismissal of papal authority in matters of social justice. The compromise was painfully evident when first John Paul II and then his successor, Benedict XVI, condemned the invasion of Iraq. Weigel voiced the line that “abortion was an intrinsic evil” which meant no deviation was possible, but that waging an unjust war or supporting the death penalty were areas where good Catholics like himself could openly differ with papal teaching. Weigel’s postings became more ideological and less insightful, I think. Clearly, with the majority of Catholic voters supporting Barack Obama for president in 2008, Weigel had been turned into an outsider in Washington. Then Weigel’s response to Pope Benedict’s social justice encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, revealed that he had been turned into an outsider for Vatican goings-on as well.

Weigel apparently believed that he could accept the parts of the encyclical with which he agreed politically and dismiss the rest of the pope’s teaching. He inferred that Pope Benedict had not been honest with the world’s Catholics but instead had succumbed to ideas foisted on him by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace According to Weigel, Pope Benedict produced a document in which certain passages were “golden” (as in GOP) and others were “red” (as in Communist). When discussing the pope’s call to lessen world poverty through international cooperation, Weigel opined that “it may mean something naïve or dumb.” Weigel concluded that rather than an expression of the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church, Caritas in Veritate was “an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus.” One wonders if the inability to find coherence in a papal document is the fault of the pope or of prejudgments from analysts like George Weigel…

The mixing of politics and faith leads to an internal dichotomy and eventually to self-serving philosophies and theologies. Perhaps Mr. Weigel and those similarly situated should reconsider what it means to be Catholic, and particularly Roman Catholic. Catholicism often entails hard choices and a reordering of perspectives.