The Pope’s Peculiar Take on the Council – and America, by Stephen P. White

I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, but we Americans can occasionally come off as brash, presumptuous, and entitled. Such qualities may have served us well when we were still settling the frontier. They might even have been endearing when we were just a precocious upstart of a nation, elbowing our way into the spotlight of world affairs. In a superpower, however, such traits tend to lose most of their charm.

Americans are much more than this caricature, of course. And we are not above self-criticism. (Or even occasional self-loathing.) …