In an opinion piece at The Week on January 13 entitled “The Republican Party’s War with the Pope has finally started,” Damon Linker states, “It looks like 2015 is shaping up to be the year when Catholic Conservatives declare war on Pope Francis.”  Pope Francis’s soon to be released encyclical on the environment, says Linker, will touch off the war. Linker goes on to say that Ross Douthat’s op-ed in the NY Times late last year about the possibility of schism within the Church (following the Synod on the Family) started the rumblings of war, but conservative Catholic writers managed to avert it by putting a positive spin on “papal announcements.”  However, says Linker, recent essays at First Things by Robert P. George and Maureen Mullarkey, and one in Forbes by Steve Moore, are indicators that the war is on in 2015.  The latest controversy, Francis’s comments on the radical Islamists’ attack on Charlie...(Read Full Article)