That's what conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh suggests, calling the Pope's latest document "pure Marxism."

Limbaugh blasted the pontiff on Wednesday, a day after Francis released "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), a 50,000-word statement that calls for church reform and castigates elements of modern capitalism.

Limbaugh's segment, now online and entitled "It's Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It's a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)," takes direct aim at the pope's economic views, calling them "dramatically, embarrassingly, puzzlingly wrong."

The Vatican issued the English translation of "Evangelii," which is officially known as an apostolic exhortation.

Francis - the first pope ever to hail from Latin America, where he worked on behalf of the poor in his native Argentina - warned in "Evangelii" that the "idolatry of money" would lead to a "new tyranny."

The Pope also blasted "trickle-down economics," saying the theory "expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power." Continue reading

Last week, Rush Limbaugh, popular voice of far-right politics, used his position on the airwaves to insult, label and pronounce on the sexual motivations of a young Georgetown law school student who testified on behalf of the coverage of contraceptive medicine in national health care insurance plans.

And he did it not once, but at least three times. It was not, obviously, a slip of the tongue. This was a personal attack of precise aim.

Then this week, on another subject but with a similar tone, students at Columbia University, Barnard College's sister school and one of the country's premier educational institutions, raged online at Newsweek's "The Daily Beast" about the unworthiness of the women of Barnard to have the honor of President Barack Obama as their graduation speaker. The insults hurled at Barnard, a woman's college since 1889 and a partner school of Columbia, were every bit as sexual and sexist, as degrading and as vehement as Limbaugh's.

At least Limbaugh didn't hide behind false screen names as did the respondents to the Barnard issue, who chose to be vile rather than accountable for their free speech.

Like Limbaugh, the students of Columbia — many of them women — who resent the fact that President Obama agreed to do the graduation address at Barnard rather than accept similar invitations to Columbia chose invective rather than analysis to register their reactions to the situation. They and the screaming respondents who answered their tirades with tirades of their own simply abandoned all pretense of intellectual development or rational response.

It is clear in both cases that "free speech" has reached a new low. The question is, Whose fault is that, really?

And the answer is that there are culprits aplenty, it seems. Read more

Sources

• Joan Chittister in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: MassLive.com