Marco Rubio put on a clinic Tuesday on how conservatives, who might differ with Pope Francis on economic issues, should talk about him. After all, the eyes of a billion Catholics (some of whom are literally sleeping in the streets of DC, hoping for a glimpse of Francis) are on us.

Rubio, in my estimation, struck the perfect tone on Fox News’ Special Report.

Although most of the headlines latched onto Rubio’s comments about the pope being infallible on theological issues, not political ones, this is the graf that really deserves attention:

I see in the pope’s comments a fundamental misunderstanding about the difference of free enterprise and corporatism. In much of Latin America, where he’s deeply rooted, the word capitalism basically means corporatism — which is these large corporations, connected to government, dominate the society and dominate the economy. In America, free enterprise is something very different. It is a place where it doesn’t matter if you have buddies that work in government, or not. If you have a good idea and you’re willing to work hard, you can get ahead. And the evidence is stark. Look around the world. Poor people do better in open societies with free enterprise than they do in societies where government dominates the economy. And so I have a difference of opinion with him on economic models. We have the same goal of providing more prosperity and upward mobility. I just honestly believe free enterprise is a better way of doing it.

This was a much more generous rebuke than the one issued by George Will the other day — even though many of the same points were made. I think Will, Rubio, and yours truly would all agree that capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than any other economic system in the world. These are points that need to be made, but why go out of our way to alienate people who agree with conservatives on a myriad of cultural issues — at a time when many of those cultural issues are quite countercultural?

Conservatives should take a page from Rubio, and be a little less defensive about Francis’s comments. For example, Will writes that “Francis deplores ‘compulsive consumerism,’ a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire.”

This is a clever, if biting, sentence. But does the fact that much of the world lives in poverty — and the concession that free markets are the best way to lift them out of it — negate the fact that moderns living in the prosperous First World struggle with consumerism, materialism, and greed?

Could it not be that the economic message leaders of poor countries ought to hear is slightly different from the spiritual message people living in prosperity need to be reminded of? I suspect that at least some of the time when Francis is talking about spiritual matters, we attribute political motivations.