Said the scold from Rome, Pope Francis, to a joint session of Congress:

You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. …

There are more papal distortions about the American constitutional scheme, but it’s too dismaying to plumb. Feel free to read on.

Even President Barack Obama recognized, these are his own words, that “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” Obama has made it cleat that due to the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice,” community organizers like him have aimed at achieving extra-constitutional change.

The Pope should be told by Republican elected representatives, who lapped up his words and shed crocodile tears—that they are bound not “to satisfy common needs,” as this ignorant Pope put it, but to uphold a limited set of negative, individual rights: LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY.

If you care about freedom and the American way, explain to your children the principles explained so simply in “The Defunct Foundations Of The Republic,” by way of one example. (Search the Articles Archives under negative rights, individual rights, etc., for more.) Don’t raise your kids to confuse Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will with the American verities of republicanism and limited government.

UPDATE: Finally, our left-libertarian judge gets it Right:

… Comes now Pope Francis to use moral relativism to take the Church in two dangerous directions. The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market — two favorite political targets of the left.

In the past month, without consulting his fellow bishops, the pope has weakened the sacrament of matrimony by making annulments easier to obtain. The Church cannot grant divorces because Our Lord used his own words to declare valid marriages indissoluble. But it does grant annulments.

An annulment is a judicial finding that a valid marriage never existed. This generally requires a trial, at which the party seeking the annulment must prove the existence of the marital defect from the beginning.

Fair annulment trials are costly and time consuming, often taking years from the initial filing to the final appeal. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis arbitrarily ordered the entire process to be completed in 45 days or fewer. For contested matters, a fair trial in 45 days is impossible. So, to meet his deadline, more annulments will be granted administratively, not on the merits.

It gets worse.

The Church has taught for 400 years that abortion is murder. Because the victim of an abortion is always innocent, helpless and uniquely under the control of the mother, abortion removes the participants from access to the sacraments. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis, without consulting his fellow bishops, ordered that any priest may return those who have killed a baby in a womb to the communion of the faithful. He said he did this because he was moved by the anguished cries of mothers contemplating the murder of their babies.

In his papal exhortation on capitalism, Pope Francis spectacularly failed to appreciate the benefits of capitalism to the health, wealth and safety of the poor. Instead, he has reworked the Peronism of his youth to advocate government-mandated redistribution of wealth and to condemn those who work hard, employ others and achieve wealth — even when they give some of that wealth to the Church. …

A beautiful column. Read the rest.