I am a BIG Pope Francis fan.  And I like that he is coming to America and he’s going to do some papal spanking.

I noted this morning that Lindsey Graham tweeted about how the Pope has pro-life views.  Indeed, he does.  But he also has very strong views on sexual equality, climate change, and income disparity.  I wonder how many Republicans and Republican candidates will cozy up to those messages.  I expect a lot of Pope-bashing starting today, when he lands in the United States.

[UPDATE:  Yup, George Will has started it.]

Over at The Atlantic, Emma Green warns people like me that the Pope, although willing to stake out some doctrinal shifts, is not a progressive in the American sense:

Francis does not fit neatly into American categories. To understand him and his agenda, it’s more helpful to look at America through his eyes than to look at him through an American’s eyes, for even the most familiar U.S. issue may seem very different to this Argentinian Jesuit. As the pope makes his way from Cuba through Washington, D.C., New York City, and Philadelphia, here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the American political spectrum is truly idiosyncratic. This is a country where a Democratic congressman can loudly oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, but can’t risk really opposing abortion; a Republican might care a lot about the poor, but woe unto her campaign coffers if she suggests raising taxes on the rich. “Francis, like all the other popes, like the Catholic Church, simply doesn’t land comfortably on either side of the political divide in the U.S.,” said Vincent Miller, a professor of theology at the University of Dayton. “But it’s not simply that on questions of sexuality and human life he agrees with Republicans and on questions of economics he agrees with Democrats. The whole system is so skewed.”

Second, although some read this pope as a rebel within a broken Church, no pontiff can single-handedly overhaul Church teachings on any issue, nor has that ever been Francis’s intention. There is no doubt Francis is a reformer: He has cleaned up Church finances and reorganized the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy. In October, bishops will also gather in Rome for the second of two synods on the topic of family, which may yield changes in how the Church deals with married priests and divorcées. But as with anything in the Church, it’s reform in increments, always in continuity with what has come before. Francis’s style may be different from that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the two popes who preceded him. But this pope has made painstaking efforts to show how his work is a continuation of theirs, rather than something totally new.

Finally, Francis is fundamentally a global pope. He is not coming to the U.S. to address it as a voting bloc, like some politician traveling to a recalcitrant county to court constituents. The most vibrant and fastest growing parts of the Church are in Latin America and Africa, not North America and Europe. Moreover, the United States is sort of like the Death Star in Pope Francis’s understanding of global politics.

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In an American context, Francis is actually something of a traditionalist in his approach to family. Although he just about broke the Internet in 2013 when he said, “Who am I to judge?” in response to a pool reporter’squestion about a gay priest, he has not shifted Church doctrine on traditional marriage at all. In fact, at times, he has emphasized the male/female nature of marriage; at a Vatican summit in November, for example, he affirmed that marriages between husband and wife are “an anthropological fact, and consequently a social, cultural fact, etc.” He has consistently written that “marriage and the family are in crisis,” and that “the indispensible contribution of marriage to society transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple.”

I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but it’s a good read.