Welcome back to Shemis Popperi. I'm Joe Heschmire. And Pope Leo just released his first magisterial document, Delexi Tay, an exhortation on Christian love for the poor. It's beautiful, rich, filled with quotations from Scripture and from the Church fathers. And honestly, the 2000-year history of the Church is really brought out in a bold way. It's also spiritually challenging for those of us who live in comfort and in luxury, but unfortunately,

it seems that many Catholics have greeted his exportation with skepticism or outright rejection

based on the belief the Pope can't be trusted because he's a liberal Pope.

Now, I know a lot of you had high hopes for the new Pope after the incessant leftist activism of his predecessor,

but I try to warn you, Pope Leo is cut from the same cloth.

This reaction isn't totally surprising. For one thing, by every metric, Americans live in a politically

partisan age, and I think this is true throughout the West. We're more likely to regard people from

other political parties as immoral, dishonest, and closed-minded people than we used to be, and we're less likely to do things like marry someone from an opposing political party. So naturally, we in the West are absolutely primed to put one of the most influential figures in the world into this political paradigm to see if we can trust him or not. Now, I get that that's our first inclination, particularly in an age where trust in institutions

is at the lowest it's been in recent memory, and we've just come out of a pontificate in

which the Pope regularly opined on political issues in ways that were often controversial.

But I do think it's worth pausing for a moment, reconsidering the evidence, and we're calling

church teaching.

Because Jesus Christ doesn't call us to be Republicans or Democrats or some other political party. He calls us to be faithful servants to the Father. And I think Leo is doing the same thing. I don't think he's trying to get us to attach to a specific party affiliation. I think he's calling us to be better disciples. By the way, if you'll permit me to call your attention over shamestjo.com, we'd be grateful for your support. For as little as $5 a month, you can get access to exclusive Q&A live streams, this new thing we've got called Joe Notes, which is a PDF digest of each episode covering the major points, including a sheet of resources. You don't have to go, you know, searching through the episode again before you share the faith with your loved ones. And additionally, your support is really important for this channel's growth, particularly

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Okay, so this idea of trying to peg the Pope as liberal or conservative or traditionalist

has grown to such an extent that at the press conference announcing the release of the new

document, Delexi Te, a Washington Post reporter asked Cardinal Sherney about it, to which he said,

I think as soon as you say a liberal pope, then we are pulling the Pope and the,

the ministry of Peter and his successors into a very partial platform.

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