"Time" and "The Advovcate" may well actually have chosen the right person, but almost certainly not for the right reasons.

Why “Person of the Year”?

by Kenneth D. Whitehead

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Pope Francis is not the first pontiff to be granted the year’s designation by Time, Blessed John XXIII having been so honored in 1962, and Blessed John Paul II in 1994. It may even be a little surprising that Pope Francis should have been chosen after less than a year in Peter’s chair; indeed it becomes somewhat questionable how much of an honor the award really is when we consider what the pope’s competition was. His runner-up was none other than Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who exposed America’s vast anti-terrorist surveillance system by leaking documents that he had illegally obtained. Regardless of what we might think about this surveillance system itself, the fact is that it was authorized by Congress and has functioned under at least a degree of judicial scrutiny. Edward Snowden is thus a law-breaker and a fugitive from justice regardless of his “impact” on our lives and on the news.

Another one of the pope’s competitors for the Person of the Year award was the proud lesbian, Edith Windsor, who successfully sued the U.S. government to avoid paying the inheritance tax on a bequest from her late “spouse,” another woman. Her lawsuit prompted one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, a decision in which a majority of the justices on the high court officially recognized same-sex relationships to be “marriages” if a jurisdiction somewhere has legally declared them to be such. But again, we cannot deny the “impact” of this decision on our lives and on the news.

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Yet the question still persists of how the special version of “hope and change” conjured up by some on the basis of words and actions of Pope Francis, and even present to some extent inTime’s account, is ultimately going to pan out. What is all too likely is a degree of widespread disillusionment when this particular version of “hope and change” turns out to be illusory. And the same result is especially likely for expectations aroused by yet another publication besides Time. For in mid-December, an LGBT publication with the title of The Advocate, also, amazingly, named Pope Francis as its Person of the Year. This choice appeared to be based on the Argentine pope’s famous remarks tossed off in the interview on his flight back to Rome from his World Youth Day appearances in Brazil. On that occasion the pope said that “if someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?”

The pope’s disclaimer here of not being able to render a moral judgment has rocketed around the world; it is vastly more widely quoted and acclaimed than his accompanying condition that the homosexual person who is thus not going to be judged needs to be “seeking the Lord”—in other words, needs to berepenting of any immoral actions that may have arisen out of same-sex attractions and relationships. This condition typically goes unmentioned, but it is nevertheless an integral and necessary part of the pope’s position when he declines to be a “judge.”

It is hardly likely, however, that this is the stance of The Advocate. Rather, the stance of this publication would seem to be that of the gay rights movement generally, namely, that homosexual acts and behavior need to be accepted, normalized, and legitimized—need to be seen simply as “different strokes for different folks” with no moral dimension that necessarily applies to them.

That Pope Francis or the Catholic Church might ever agree with such a notion as this is quite beyond anything imaginable. In choosing Pope Francis as its Person of the Year, The Advocate plainly moves far beyond Time in the realm of creating false expectations inevitably bound to lead to disillusionment. The publication admits that “Pope Francis did not articulate a change in the church’s teaching today, but he spoke compassionately, and in doing so he has encouraged an already lively conversation that may one day make it possible for the church to fully embrace gay and lesbian Catholics.”

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