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When President Obama meets with Pope Benedict XVI today, no right-wing Catholic demonstrators will be upbraiding the pontiff, as they did Notre Dame for conferring the church's legitimacy upon this liberal politician.
Whether he is the beneficiary of providence or merely good luck, Obama will have his audience with Benedict just three days after the release of a papal encyclical on social justice that places the pope well to Obama's left on economics. What a delightful surprise it would be for a pope to tell our president that he's just too conservative.
The disjunction between Vatican attitudes toward Obama and those of the most conservative forces in the U.S. Catholic Church is obvious.
The conservative minority among the bishops as well as political activists on the Catholic right insist on judging Obama only on his support for legal abortion and stem cell research.
The Vatican clearly views Obama through a broader prism. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Washington, has privately warned U.S. bishops that harsh attacks on Obama threaten to make the church look partisan.
The Vatican press has been largely sympathetic to Obama. In a recent article, Cardinal Georges Cottier praised Obama's “humble realism” on abortion.
No one pretends the Vatican is at peace with Obama's views on the life issues. Benedict mentioned the church's resistance to abortion at three different points in this week's economic encyclical, “Charity in Truth.”
But the pope and many of his advisers also see Obama as a potential ally on such questions as development in the Third World, their shared approach to a quest for peace in the Middle East, and the opening of a dialogue with Islam.
The Vatican's stance and the broadly positive response to Obama's Notre Dame speech have at least temporarily quelled the vocal opposition to the president among more conservative American bishops. Now, parts of the hierarchy are working closely with the administration on health care reform, immigration and climate change legislation.
Benedict's encyclical may provide the best perspective for understanding why a pope seen as a conservative views Obama more favorably than do most U.S. Catholic conservatives.
While American conservatives, including most Catholics, see capitalism in an almost entirely positive light, Benedict – following a long tradition of church teaching – is more skeptical of a system rooted in materialist values.
Benedict's letter had some good things to say about the market system, but only if it is tempered by both “distributive justice and social justice.” He spoke approvingly of “the redistribution of wealth” and caused free market conservatives to blanch with his call for a “world political authority” to oversee the global economy in the name of “the common good.”
He condemned “corruption and illegality” in “the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries.”
Yet Benedict is more a left-of-center Christian Democrat than a socialist. His radical critique of capitalism is also a conservative critique of permissive societies. He made the case for a specifically “Christian humanism,” arguing that only “a humanism open to the Absolute” could avoid “exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment.”
No one will accuse Benedict of being fashionable, which is why his views run crosswise to important currents in both American conservatism and American liberalism.
This gives the pope a perspective on Obama that conventional American conservatives lack, and it's why he is far more inclined to work with the man in the White House than they are. But Benedict is also more disposed than American liberals to disagree with the president – and, yes, on some issues, he may prod Obama from the left.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group. Write him at ejdionne@washpost.com.
