Glenn opened the radio show this morning discussing the election of Pope Francis and what it means not just for the Catholic Church but for the world.
“I want to say hello to Francis the new Pope,” Glenn said. “I will tell you that a lot of people are very excited about him. And I don't know. I don't really know about him.”
Last night on The Glenn Beck Program, Glenn spoke of how taken he was with Pope Francis’ humility, a sentiment he echoed again this morning. “I thought he was really humble,” Glenn said. “I don't remember a Pope coming out before saying, ‘please I ask you to pray for me,’ and stopping and not giving his blessing. I thought that was amazing. I thought that was really good.”
But like many conservatives and libertarians, Glenn’s primary concern with Pope Francis is some of the language he has used in the past when discussing the poor and economic inequality. Francis is an obvious advocate of social justice, and it remains to be seen if he sees social justice in sense of personal service as taught in the Bible or in the redistributive sense often touted by the left.
“He does speak about unjust distribution of goods,” Pat said. “He's all about the poor. That's not a bad thing, however, what we've been beaten with lately…”
“If this is truly about the poor, and he is going to help us look and say we need to look at our own life, and getaway from stuff by choice, not by force, and we should help the poor by choice, not by force, then this guy is going to be a dream come true,” Glenn continued.
Furthermore, Glenn found it interesting that news outlets like CNN and MSNBC immediately began heaping praise on Pope Francis just moments after he appeared before the world for the first time. “You know what my biggest concern is. Everybody on the MSNBC and everybody on CNN love him,” Glenn observed. “I heard he was a saint from CNN maybe a minute and a half into it. They didn't call him a Pope. They called him a saint.”
At this point, it is too early to say just what the future will hold for the leader of the nearly 1.7 billion Catholics worldwide, but Glenn hopes to learn more about Pope Francis in the coming weeks. “It's too early to tell, at least for an outsider who is not a Catholic, what this Pope is going to do. We'll just have to watch him,” Glenn said. “We're trying to put a special together for next week – a little bit about who he is as a man and what he's done.”
“The surface seems really, really good. There are some red flags that make me concerned,” Glenn concluded. “If he's a guy that says, ‘live your faith,’ that is fantastic because he does seem very, very humble, and he seems good.”
