In the early twentieth century, as Marx’s socialism spread across the world, Pope Pius XI declared the theory anathema. “No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” he said. To hear Pope Francis speak today, one might conclude the reverse: that no can be at the same time a good Catholic and an opponent of socialism.
“Inequality is the root of all evil,” Pope Francis wrote on his Twitter account in 2014.28 One can imagine Karl Marx blurting that out, but none of Francis’s predecessors would have made such an outrageous claim. According to traditional Catholic theology, the root of all evil came not from inequality but from Satan’s refusal to accept inequality. Out of envy of God’s superiority, Satan rebelled. He could not bear his lesser status.
He was in effect the first revolutionary, which is why the socialist agitator Saul Alinsky—a mentor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (who did her senior thesis at Wellesley on his thought)—offered an “acknowledgment” in his book, Rules for Radicals, to Satan. Alinsky saw him as the first champion of the “have-nots.”29
Were the twentieth-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the “gift” of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Francis’s visit to Bolivia in July 2015.
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s proudly Marxist president, offered the pontiff that sacrilegious image of Jesus Christ. Morales described the gift as a copy of a crucifix designed by a late priest, Fr. Luís Espinal, who belonged to the Jesuit order (as does Pope Francis) and had committed his life to melding Marxism with religion. Pope Francis had honored Espinal’s memory upon his arrival in Bolivia.30
Had John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI seen such a grotesque cross, they might have broken it over their knees. Not Pope Francis. He accepted the hammer-and-sickle cross warmly, telling the press on the plane ride back to Rome that “I understand this work” and that “for me it wasn’t an offense.” After the visit, Morales gushed, “I feel like now I have a Pope. I didn’t feel that before.”31
Under Francis, the papacy has become a collage of such politicized images: friendly papal meetings with communist thugs like the Castro brothers, a papal Mass conducted under the shadow of the mass murderer Che Guevara’s mural in Havana, papal audiences with a steady stream of crude Marxist theoreticians and anti-capitalist celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, “selfies” while holding up an anti-fracking T-shirt, a pro-amnesty Mass said on the border between Mexico and America, a succession of sermons, speeches, and writings that rip into capitalism and tout greater government control over private property and business.
By pushing the papacy in such a “progressive” direction, Francis has become a darling of the global left. His program of promoting left-wing politics while downplaying and undermining doctrine on faith and morals has turned him into the ecclesiastical equivalent of Barack Obama. “Pope Francis is a gift from heaven,” the radical academic Cornel West said to Rolling Stone. “I love who he is, in terms of what he says, and the impact of his words on progressive forces around the world.”32
Pope Francis, as liberals once said of Barack Obama, is the “one they have been waiting for.” The world is witnessing nothing less than a liberal revolution in the Catholic Church—a revolution that is emboldening the Church’s enemies and alienating her friends.
CHAPTER TWO
“Who Am I to Judge?”
In one of his last speeches before leaving office in 2013, Pope Benedict XVI dissected the destructive liberalism that spread within the Church after the council of Vatican II. The secularism of Western culture and the media elite had seeped into the Church, he lamented.
“[T]here was the council of the Fathers—the true council—but there was also the council of the media. It was almost a council in and of itself, and the world perceived the council through them, through the media. So the council that immediately, effectively, got through to the people was that of the media, not that of the Fathers,” said Pope Benedict XVI. “[It] did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics.”
To this liberal influence, Pope Benedict XVI traced much of the crisis in the Church. The absorption of modern liberalism into Catholicism had produced, he said, “so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, the liturgy was trivialized.”1
Little did Pope Benedict XVI realize that his mysterious resignation would pave the way for the very liberal Church he feared and for a successor who embodies the very “hermeneutic of politics” he decried.
As the cardinals met to decide on a new pope in March 2013, the Western liberal elite began beating the drum for the selection of a “progressive” and “pastoral” churchman, by which editorialists and activists meant a politically liberal and doctrinally lax one. James Salt of Catholics United, a front group Democrats set up in 2005 to infiltrate the Church, seized on the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and demanded that the Church elect a pope from the “global south” who would “radically shift the agenda of the Church,” away from “issues of human sexuality” and toward the “imminent threat of global climate change and its effect on the poorest.”
Jorge Mario Bergoglio exceeded their expectations. From the first moment of his appearance on the Vatican balcony, left-wing Western journalists, intellectuals, and politicians showered him in praise. Customarily skeptical of the papacy, they suddenly became cheerleaders for it.
Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has explained the liberal obsession with the papacy by writing that “the struggle within the church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.”2 The liberal elite immediately sized up Pope Francis, with his transparent political liberalism and his distaste for doctrine, as falling on the right side of its self-serving understanding of that “struggle.”
That he selected Francis as his papal name was the first act to charm liberals, as they opportunistically portray St. Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of socialism, pacifism, and environmentalism. Instead of challenging this liberal caricature, Bergoglio reinforced it. He told reporters that he adopted Francis as his name because Francis of Assisi was a “man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation.”3 In truth, St. Francis of Assisi was a rigorously orthodox medieval churchman who would have regarded the liberalism of this pope with horror.
Pope Francis explained that the inspiration to name himself Francis came to him when Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, archbishop emeritus of São Paulo, Brazil, whispered in his ear moments after his election, “Don’t forget the poor.” His mention of Hummes was music to the ears of the media. Hummes has long been known to reporters as a critic of the free market with friendly ties to socialist organizations in Brazil.4 (He is also known for saying that he “didn’t know” if Jesus Christ would have disapproved of gay marriage.)
The Western media was also charmed by the opening gestures of Bergoglio, which amounted to a carefully choreographed casualness at the expense of Catholic tradition. Bergoglio declined the traditional vestments a new pope wears upon his election—a red velvet cape—and instead wore a white cassock. Before blessing the crowd, he asked the crowd for a blessing and he pointedly referred to himself not as the pope but merely as the “bishop of Rome.” As Bergoglio explained later, his use of that reduced title and his modest description of the meaning of his election (“the diocesan community of Rome has its bishop”) were intended to make non-Catholics comfortable with his papacy. “Placing emphasis on the number one title, that is, Bishop of Rome, favors ecumenism,” he said.5
Less than a year before Berg
oglio became pope, in a foreshadowing of the liberal direction of his pontificate, he ran into John Quinn, the ultra-progressive former archbishop of San Francisco, at a coffee shop in Rome. Quinn is the author of The Reform of the Papacy, a book that explicitly rejects traditional teaching on the papacy, calls for Protestant-style “collegiality,” and urges the Church to adopt the politics and morals of the modern Western world. “I’ve read your book and I’m hoping what it proposes will be implemented,” Bergoglio told a pleased Quinn.6 In retrospect, Pope Francis has largely implemented it and the left-wing American churchmen that Quinn represents—the so-called seamless garment bishops—have enjoyed a return to power.
All of Pope Francis’s heterodox opening gestures after his election caused murmuring among Pope Benedict XVI’s former aides and confusion among the faithful, but it excited members of the liberal wing of the Church. The former cardinal of Los Angeles and Cesar Chavez acolyte Roger Mahony tweeted to his followers, “So long papal ermine and fancy lace!” and gushed about the left-wing political orientation of the new pope.7
Ernesto Cardenal, the Marxist activist whom Pope John Paul II rebuked, was excited by the emergence of Pope Francis. “We are seeing a true revolution in the Vatican,” he wrote.8
The openly heretical German theologian Hans Küng said he “was overwhelmed by joy” at the news of Bergoglio’s election. “There is hope in this man,” said Küng, who correctly predicted that Francis would deviate from the “line of the two popes from Poland and Germany.” It has since been reported that Pope Francis and Küng have been exchanging friendly letters and that Francis has signaled an openness to hearing Küng’s criticism of papal infallibility.9
Formerly condemned liberation theologians immediately grasped the significance of Bergoglio’s election, too. Leonardo Boff was quoted in the German press as gloating that Francis is “more liberal” than the college of cardinals realized. “I am encouraged by this choice, viewing it as a pledge for a church of simplicity and of ecological ideals,” he said.10
It didn’t take long for Boff’s confidence in this pontificate to deepen. After hearing several of Pope Francis’s first speeches and homilies, Boff put his finger on one of the most revolutionary tendencies of this pontificate: “[He] has signaled that everything is up for discussion, which not long ago would have been unthinkable for any pope to say.”11
The notoriously heterodox German theologian Cardinal Walter Kasper was also energized by the news of Bergoglio’s election. As one of the most illuminating figures of this pontificate, Kasper deserves special attention. Kasper had occupied the room across from Bergoglio at the Vatican’s hotel during the papal conclave. He gave Bergoglio one of his books, a book on mercy that argued for a loosening of Church teaching and discipline. Pope Francis said that he read it happily.12 The theme of the book fit with the speech that Bergoglio gave at the conclave, which was a mishmash of progressive complaints about a “self-referential” Church unwilling to “come out of herself” and reach out to the “peripheries.”13
Under previous pontificates, Kasper’s fortunes had fallen and his dissents went largely ignored. But Pope Francis, within the first days of his papacy, rehabilitated Kasper’s checkered reputation. During his first appearance from the papal window, Pope Francis pronounced Kasper a theologian whom he admires. Not long thereafter, Pope Francis gave Kasper the green light to revive his campaign, blocked under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, to liberalize the Church’s sacramental discipline.
According to Vanity Fair, “Kasper meets with Francis every few weeks, and their conversations are casual and straight to the point.” “It was once a rule that when you went to see the Pope you had to be vested up in your cassock and sash,” Kasper told the magazine. “It’s more normal now. He picks up the phone and asks, ‘Please, can you come over?,’ and then he says, ‘Please, no cassock—come as a clergyman.’”14
After Kasper urged his fellow bishops to open up Communion lines to adulterers, Pope Francis praised his “profound theology.” The Catholic left has taken to calling Kasper the “pope’s theologian.” Kasper has long argued that the Church should democratize her teachings. Pope Francis agrees with his approach, Kasper told the press:
On the other hand when we discuss marriage and family we have to listen to people who are living this reality. There’s a ‘sensus fidelium’ (‘sense of the faithful’). It cannot be decided only from above, from the church hierarchy, and especially you cannot just quote old texts of the last century, you have to look at the situation today, and then you make a discernment of the spirits and come to concrete results. I think this is the approach of Pope Francis, whereas many others start from doctrine and then use a mere deductive method.15
Liberal Promotions, Conservative Demotions
Many liberal churchmen in the mold of Kasper enjoyed promotions after the election of Pope Francis. But conservative churchmen such as Raymond Burke quickly found themselves marginalized. In his first year, as the outlines of his liberal pontificate became more visible, Pope Francis dropped Burke not only from the top position on the Vatican’s highest court but also from his powerful position on the Congregation for Bishops, which vets ecclesiastical picks for the pope. In what many Church observers saw as an unprecedented slight, Burke was reduced to a ceremonial role overseeing the Knights of Malta.
Giving the demotion even more significance, Pope Francis replaced Burke on the Congregation for Bishops with one of Burke’s enemies, Donald Wuerl, the liberal cardinal of Washington, DC, who had long criticized Burke’s traditional defense of canon law. (Wuerl has become the face of the “humble” Church of Pope Francis, despite living like a vain Borgia prince. Wuerl has had a high school in Pittsburgh named after himself and resides in a palatial penthouse on Embassy Row in Washington, DC.16) The New York Times, among other publications, purred over this act of in-your-face papal politics, seeing it correctly as a major snub of conservative Catholics and a sign that Pope Francis was determined to liberalize the episcopate.17
“The pope’s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive,” the New York Times reported. “‘He is saying that you don’t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,’ said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute.”
In an interview for this book, one American priest said that the snubbing of Cardinal Burke had a shattering effect on morale within conservative priestly circles. “From then on we knew that we would have targets on our backs under this pontificate. The pope hates American conservatives,” he said.
Liberal European media outlets, for their part, rejoiced at the demotions of conservative prelates such as Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, who lost his key position as prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy. They cheered the promotion of Archbishop Carlos Osoro Sierra, dubbed “Little Francis,” to the important post of archbishop of Madrid. The German left was pleased when Pope Francis gave the large archdiocese of Berlin to Heiner Koch, who has criticized the Church’s “hurtful” approach to homosexuals and endorsed Communion for adulterers. Pope Francis made a proponent of sacramental laxity, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, secretary general of the Italian bishops’ conference. “My wish for the Italian Church is that it is able to listen without any taboo to the arguments in favor of married priests, the Eucharist for the divorced, and homosexuality,” Galantino has said, earning him a reputation as the “prototypical” Pope Francis bishop.18
The liberal media also noticed that Francis, in keeping with his claim that the Church isn’t sufficiently focused on the third world, has given appointments to liberal churchmen from obscure dioceses in developing countries with minuscule Catholic populations. In 2015, he gave, for example, a cardinal’s hat to Soane Patita Paini Mafi, an environmentalist and critic of globalization
from the tiny island of Tonga near New Zealand.19 In 2016, he elevated to cardinal John Riat of Papua New Guinea, an advocate for a “low-carbon lifestyle.”20
The pope’s remaking of the episcopate in his own liberal image delighted the left, which understands the adage that “personnel is policy.” Shortly before the November 2016 election, to the applause of the liberal media, he gave a red hat to Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph Tobin. Indianapolis, an archdiocese with fewer than 250,000 parishioners, has never had a cardinal. The Associated Press called it a “surprise pick” and said that it sent a “political message” to his colleagues, given Tobin’s reputation for political liberalism: “Tobin has openly opposed efforts by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, now Donald Trump’s running mate, to bar Syrian refugees from being resettled in the state.”21
In a 2016 interview with a friendly reporter, Pope Francis acknowledged that he has been getting rid of conservative bishops by taking advantage of canon law’s requirement that bishops submit resignation papers at the age of seventy-five. Even though the pope is not canonically required to accept their resignation, Francis has promptly accepted resignations in the case of conservative bishops while letting liberal bishops linger on. With what his interviewer described as a “wide smile” on his face, Pope Francis said, “Nails are removed by applying pressure to the top… or, you set them aside to rest when the age of retirement arrives.”22
In the first year of his pontificate, Pope Francis repeatedly telegraphed to the left that he intended to reshape the Church according to its modernist expectations. At his first press conference, he delighted reporters by dispensing with the traditional blessing, explaining that he wanted to “respect the consciences” of the non-Catholics in attendance. He generated more enthusiastic headlines by using a foot-washing ceremony at his first Holy Thursday Mass in Rome to demonstrate his pro-Islamic, pro-feminist leanings. In a clear violation of the Church’s canon law—which instructs priests that Jesus Christ only washed the feet of men whom he ordained to the priesthood—Francis made a show of cleansing the feet of Muslim women at an Italian prison.23 (In 2015, he would officially change the rubrics of the Holy Thursday Mass to include the washing of the feet of women and any member of the “people of the God,” which he defines, contrary to his predecessors, as including Muslims.)
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