Pope Francis has said so many left-wing things it's possible to just dismiss him as a hopeless boob and focus on hoping the next pope won't be such a politicized loser. We've had bad popes before and the Church has endured, which is what Catholics, including yours truly, tell each other.

But then, then, he says something genuinely good. He did so this week, on abortion, with perfect timing. The fact that the New York Times catcalled him for it signals to the rest of us that it really was good:

ROME — Pope Francis said Saturday that abortion was always unacceptable, regardless of whether a fetus is fatally ill or has pathological disorders. He also urged doctors to help women bring to term even pregnancies likely to end in the death of a child at birth or soon after.

“Is it legitimate to take out a human life to solve a problem?” Francis asked attendees at a Vatican conference on the issue, repeating one of his most contentious remarks on the issue. “Is it permissible to contract a hitman to solve a problem?”

A decision to abort based on medical information about an ill fetus amounted to “inhuman eugenics,” he said, and denied families the chance to welcome the weakest of children. He argued that using abortion as a mode of “prevention” could never be condoned, and that such a position had “nothing to do” with faith.

“Human life is sacred and inviolable and the use of prenatal diagnosis for selective purposes should be discouraged with strength,” Francis said.

There it is: Hard, clear, immutable, a perfect rendition of long-established Church doctrine, and finally some leadership of the John Paul II variety coming out of the otherwise scandal-plagued Vatican.

Wow.

The Times of course couldn't have liked that message, and thus its headline focused on the 'hitman' comparison as a means of getting its pro-abortion readers all riled up.

But to its credit, tha paper's actual writer really did explain out what the pope said, rather than just take a quote out of context, which is pretty common otherwise among reporters covering the Vatican.

If abortion involves a human being, then there's no circumstance that would justify killing that person - not if the child is sick or full of birth defects, not if the child was conceived under terrible conditions such as rape, and certainly not if the child is inconvenient.

That's tough stuff for the left, but it's also the truth. You can't define a baby as a person under some circumstances and then shift the definition other others in that Alice in Wonderland way of the current abortion debate. It's either a baby or it's not a baby. The pope says there's a baby.

He pretty well put paid to the idea that the reasonable stance on abortion is to reduce it, with exceptions in the case of rape or incest or viability of the baby to remind everyone that ... it's a baby we are talking about here.

In other words, he redefined the issue to its very root, that abortion is a human rights issue, not a definition issue.

Which is pretty strong coming from him.

The other thing that made his statement powerful was his timing. The remarks came as the abortion debate is heating up in the U.S. and some states are extending abortion to include infanticide, while others are moving to end it -- and an election in the U.S. to decide the direction of the country is in the works. That's showing leadership, something that up until now, has been in pretty short supply from him.

It might even shift the debate favorably to the pro-life side for babies, in no small part because the pope is viewed as an ally to all the lefties out there. Righties can't stand him but lefties view him as their hero. So now will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Rep. Ilhan Omar continue to hide behind the pope for all their leftist positions now that the pope has come out strongly against the evils of abortion and redefined abortion as a human rights issue? One can hope that either they change their position or else be exposed as the hypocrites of political convenience that they currently are.

The pope did a good one here. Let's hope he's tired of all the political leftwingery he's been involved in and is now focusing on the importance of defending human life with this kind of moral clarity and backbone that befits a major leader of one of the world's great religions whose mission is to serve. He might actually start to matter with this important statement.

Image credit: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), via Wikimedia Commons  // CC BY-SA 2.0