And now we begin to see the Latin American Heart

Pope Francis is beginning to use the Council of Eight- and he starts by sending Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa to lecture the United States on "The State of the Church". Where I don't find his speech as disheartening as some conservatives do (and they should, as the focus shifts away from sexual sin to economic sin, something that conservatives and East Coast elite Liberals are even worse at than the sad state of marriage in the United States) I do see in it a note of exactly what I don't like about Latin American culture- specifically, the attitude that sin and the work of the devil aren't important, that material poverty is the overriding mission of the Church. It should be the other way around; if we win more hearts to Christ, and fewer to mammon, generosity and charity will win out over material poverty. The problem is we're not doing that, if anything, the economic man has been beaten, robbed, and left for dead- and the Catholic Church is very, very late to that party, the best we poor Samaritans can do is bind his wounds the best we can and get him to the inn for healing. We can't do that if the focus remains on the war of the free market- the continual harm done to human relationships in the name of business.