I agree with a good bit of Charlie’s post earlier today on Pope Francis’s comments about the Paris attacks. “The language he used was imprecise, poorly judged, and terribly, terribly timed” — I can’t really disagree. The pope is human. But that doesn’t mean the intent or content of his words was wrong.

The framing of Francis’s comments — killing in the name of religion is wrong, but — struck many as offensive, as it did when Bill Donohue of the Catholic League made more inflammatory comments last week.

But the legitimate criticism of the pope’s comments sheds light on his point: The moral right to speak, and say certain things, is much more circumscribed for most people, Catholics included, than the respective legal rights.

Charlie writes that “given its record in this area, it is nice to see the Catholic Church drawing a firm distinction between what it believes should be legal and what it believes is morally right,” a distinction that goes pretty darn far back and is made abundantly clear in Aquinas.

Its salience is clear here: Critics like Charlie think the pope shouldn’t have said what he said, and they’d like to punish him for it, with censure. But of course they don’t want the state to censure the pope, and don’t think he should come to any worse fate than verbal condemnation.

Charlie takes issue with Francis’s supposedly “proposing that insults against his mother would prompt him to “punch” the speaker — and that such violent responses are ‘normal,’” which strikes me as the wrong reading.

It does happen to be “normal” to be tempted to lash out when something of value to you is insulted, which says nothing about what is “normal” to actually do or what is right to do. Trying to take him literally here makes little sense, since surely the pope has felt insulted at some point recently and I don’t see any scabs on his knuckles.

But a number of his sentiments are unclear and just can’t be taken literally (as translated). He said, for instance, “everyone has the right to practice one’s religion, one’s own religion without giving offense,” where surely “offense” has to mean something more like actual harm.

Most important, the pope’s comments that one “cannot” make fun of religions clearly doesn’t mean “should not be legally allowed to do so” or “cannot if one wants to stay safe” — they mean simply “should not.”

So what about the particular case — does the pope’s warning mean Charlie Hebdo’s editors shouldn’t have published those offensive cartoons? That isn’t really the question here: Francis’s point is merely that one has to answer to God for one’s words. Vatican II’s statement of the Church’s view of religious liberty said the following:

In exercising their rights individuals and social groups are bound by the moral law to have regard for the rights of others, their own duties to others and the common good of all.

There’s certainly a coherent defense of how Charlie Hebdo’s actions in this context (though not their work generally) meet this standard. But most provocations and blasphemies do not meet it, so Francis related the general principle that such comments are wrong and people deserve respect. Inadvertently, surely, he dealt a bit of disrespect himself, and related this point when people probably least needed to hear it.

Kathryn writes of the pope’s comments, “I suggest that the full context is this: He is a Jesuit spiritual director to the world.” Unfortunately, that isn’t quite the “full” context in another sense — he is a great deal more than that, and so a good deal more care in his rhetoric would probably be helpful. Shouldn’t be too tough for a Jesuit.