Yes, of course the Pope is Catholic — Roman Catholic, anyway. But while Pope Francis is the head of Rome and should be afforded due respect, he is theologically deficient — sometimes embarrassingly so.

The most recent example of this lack is when he claimed in a television interview, “We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.”

I speak as a Protestant, albeit one with more gratitude than most for the institutional longevity and diplomatic capabilities of Rome, which, for example, allow Christian missionaries of many denominations to do their soul-saving work worldwide.

Rome is the face of Western Christianity whether we Prots like it or not, so we have an interest in a pope’s word, no matter our feelings about the papacy as the ostensible progeny of Peter.

So it’s immensely frustrating when Pope Francis goes on 60 Minutes, his first-ever interview with an American network, and says things that seemingly contradict Christian doctrine — Jesuitical semantics or no.

In fact, he often strikes one as belonging more to some universalist offshoot of New England Baptists than the man helming the Roman Catholic Church — especially when one reviews the words of his predecessors.

John Paul II summarized man’s fallenness (anti-goodness) in 1986 in his Summary of Catechesis on Original Sin:

Man is driven forth from the state of original justice and finds himself in a state of sinfulness—status naturae lapsae.

It is a state in which sin exists and is marked by an inclination to sin. From that moment the whole history of humanity will be burdened by this state. In fact, the first human being (man and woman) received sanctifying grace from God not only for himself but as the founder of the human family for all his descendants. Therefore, through sin which set man in conflict with God, he forfeited grace (he fell into disgrace) even in regard to the inheritance for his descendants.

The most generous interpretation of Pope Francis’s words is that the translation is sloppy and that he’s commenting on the spark of the divine, or breath of God, within each of us. But this is difficult to believe, given Francis’s past and the fact that Rome hasn’t corrected the translation.

Then there’s Francis and his dismissal of the “suicidal” instincts of church conservatives.

Pope John Paul II was not an American conservative — one need only read a few paragraphs of Centesimus Annus to understand his pragmatic, rather than passionate, acceptance of capitalism to know this, a point Buckley bemoaned — but he was dispositionally conservative when it came to the maintenance of tradition while entertaining new developments in making a more just society.

John Paul writes in the third part of his introduction:

It was out of an awareness of his mission as the Successor of Peter that Pope Leo XIII proposed to speak out, and Peter’s Successor today is moved by that same awareness. Like Pope Leo and the Popes before and after him, I take my inspiration from the Gospel image of “the scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven”, whom the Lord compares to “a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52). The treasure is the great outpouring of the Church’s Tradition, which contains “what is old” — received and passed on from the very beginning — and which enables us to interpret the “new things” in the midst of which the life of the Church and the world unfolds.

Among the things which become “old” as a result of being incorporated into Tradition, and which offer opportunities and material for enriching both Tradition and the life of faith, there is the fruitful activity of many millions of people, who, spurred on by the social Magisterium, have sought to make that teaching the inspiration for their involvement in the world. Acting either as individuals or joined together in various groups, associations and organizations, these people represent a great movement for the defence of the human person and the safeguarding of human dignity. Amid changing historical circumstances, this movement has contributed to the building up of a more just society or at least to the curbing of injustice.

As an ecumenically inclined outsider interested in Rome’s unifying moral strength, I would venture to say that Francis has many more important things to criticize by name than American clergy who seek to uphold tradition.

The 60 Minutes episode, despite this pair of molar-grinding quips from the pope, was a reminder of just how good the Christian faith is. The humility and splendor displayed all at once have no equal outside Christianity. The pope is Catholic and a man with all the related fallenness — thank goodness that the Savior was and is God.