“I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for,” he said. “If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers.”

Paul is a convert. He and his four siblings were all baptized in the Episcopal Church, but Paul has said that he became a Christian as a teenager and he converted when he moved with his wife to Bowling Green, Ky., in 1993 and started attending the Presbyterian Church, where his wife is a deacon.

Paul has spoken of the Presbyterian Church and Christianity on the whole as a safeguard for morality, saying that Christianity is the basis of American society and values, and that "it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. ... I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral compass or a moral basis for their day-to-day life." He has also said, "I personally think you could probably have prayer in public school."

Pope Francis on Tuesday sharply criticized growing economic inequality and unfettered markets in a wide-ranging and decidedly populist teaching that revealed how he plans to reshape the Catholic Church.

In his most authoritative writings as pontiff, Francis decried an “idolatry of money” in secular culture and warned that it would lead to “a new tyranny.” But he reserved a large part of his critique for what he sees as an excessively top-down Catholic Church hierarchy, calling for more local governance and greater inclusiveness — including “broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church.”

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;

Not such kind words for the free market, however. In his recent apostolic exhortation he slammed unfettered capitalism, calling it ‘a new tyranny.’

Apart from the fact that there is no major nation practicing unfettered capitalism (like Obama, Francis loves attacking straw men) there is more real tyranny in socialist cesspools like Francis’ home of Argentina than in places where capitalism is predominant.

In the document he rejects the free market and calls for governments to overhaul financial systems so they attack inequality. In doing so he shows himself painfully misguided on economics, failing to see that free markets have consistently lifted the poor out of poverty, while socialism merely entrenches them in it, or kills them outright.

Like Obama, Francis is unable to see the problems that are really endangering his people. Like Obama he mistakes the faithful for the enemy, the enemy for his friend, condescension for respect, socialism for justice and capitalism for tyranny.

The impulse to boil everything down to a liberal vs. conservative, for-or-against sound bite is ill suited to theological discourse. Sometimes the pope sounds more like Catholic politician U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), except when Ryan is in his fiscal conservative, Ayn Rand-admiring mode. Other times, he’s more Barack Obama, except when the president is affirming abortion rights.

“You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul,” he said last week at the Heritage forum. “Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people.”

It started when Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney described a $15 an hour minimum wage as the "emotional" part of a social justice narrative, and was more concerned with the economics. Stewart reacted to the position as comically heartless: "That is the kind of statement that is usually followed by a dead business partner and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future."

Varney only made things worse when he asked for a "moral judgment" whether someone with minimal education should "really deserve $15 an hour."

"Oh, I'm making one," Stewart retorted.

But the Fox hosts started to enter Rush Limbaugh territory when they criticized Pope Francis for his recent comments denouncing trickle-down economics as unfair to the poor.

"You're going up against the pope?!" Stewart exclaimed. "Pope doesn't go to where you work and slap Jamie Dimon's d*ck out of your mouth!"