A recent New York Times op-ed page article by Frank Bruni applauded Pope Francis for remarks he made a few weeks ago on women where he called for equal pay for equal work. But the cheers didn’t last long. “He left out the part about women in the Roman Catholic Church not even getting a shot at equal work,” the columnist wrote.
Bruni works for a newspaper that paid its first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, considerably less than the male editor who preceded her, Bill Keller; she was also compensated less than Keller in pay and pension benefits when she succeeded him as managing editor. She was fired last year and replaced by a man.
It was Bruni, not the pope, who omitted things. Immediately after that part of the pope’s address where he cited pay equality, he spoke about the need to recognize “women’s motherhood and men’s fatherhood,” a direct refutation of Bruni’s favorite subject, gay marriage. Indeed, earlier in his speech, the pope said that “Jesus teaches us that the masterpiece of society is the family: a man and a woman who love each other! This is the masterpiece!” The masterpiece has no role for two guys.
Bruni called on U.S. bishops to sponsor abortion. He chided the bishops for objecting to Obamacare’s mandate that Catholic entities “include contraception in workers’ health insurance.” He left out the fact that these same institutions would also have to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.
Finally, Bruni thought it would be wise for the Church to “follow some other Christian denominations and ordain women.” There’s another glaring omission: the mainline Protestant denominations—which take their teachings from the New York Times—are in free fall. Meanwhile, the numbers in the Catholic Church keep going up. So why would we want to copy failure?
