In his many homilies and statements (archived on the Buenos Aires archdiocesan website), he attacked government corruption, wealth inequities, and human sex trafficking, but he said nothing about sexual violence by priests.
In On Heaven and Earth (first published in Spanish in 2010), a wide-ranging collection of conversations with Argentine rabbi Abraham Skorka, he suggested in fact that the problem did not exist in his archdiocese: “In my diocese it never happened to me, but a bishop called me once by phone to ask me what to do in a situation like this and I told him to take away the priest’s faculties, not to permit him to exercise his priestly ministry again, and to initiate a canonical trial.”
Bergoglio’s implication, that he handled no abusive priests, is implausible. Buenos Aires is Argentina’s largest diocese, and Bergoglio was one of its top executives from 1992 to 2013—a period when tens of thousands of victims worldwide reported their abuse to the Church. Based on data disclosed in dioceses in the US and Europe, we estimate conservatively that from 1950 to 2013, more than 100 Buenos Aires archdiocesan priests offended against children and that dozens of them were known to archdiocesan supervisors, including Bergoglio.44
Since assuming the papacy, Bergoglio has made numerous statements about sexual abuse, but he continues to show a blind spot on the issue, as Vatican correspondent John Allen has reported:
Pope Francis’ response to the sexual abuse mess in the Church has come under mounting fire. Though the merits of any particular item in the bill of indictment may be debated, the overall effect has been to seed doubt as to whether the fight against child abuse is truly a priority for the pontiff.
To begin with, Francis continues to draw criticism for his 2015 appointment of Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid to the diocese of Osorno, Chile, despite his reputation as an apologist for that country’s most notorious abuser priest, Fernando Karadima.
The one-year anniversary of Barros’ installation was marked on March 21, and one of Karadima’s victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, publicly complained that “the Church does not listen to the people” and added that Pope Francis “is a sadness because he doesn’t care what has happened in Osorno.”
Adding insult to injury, Francis was captured on an iPhone video last year telling a Chilean Catholic that opposition to the Barros was being whipped up by “leftists” guilty of “foolishness.”
On another front, one of the two survivors named to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Peter Saunders of the U.K., was recently given an involuntary leave of absence by other commission members because of his outspoken criticism of Pope Francis, including on the Barros dispute.45
The only group of Catholics whom Archbishop Bergoglio treated severely were conservative Catholics, whose interest in the traditional Latin Mass he blocked. “He has persecuted every single priest who made an effort to wear a cassock, preach with firmness, or that was simply interested in Summorum Pontificum [Pope Benedict’s authorization for wider use of the traditional Latin Mass],” Argentine journalist Marcelo González has written.46 Bergoglio referred to conservative religious orders as “restorationist factions” and decried their “rigid religiosity.”
To many observers of Bergoglio’s time as both a provincial within the Jesuit order and archbishop of Buenos Aires, his elevation to the papacy was mystifying. Pope Francis biographer Paul Vallely has quoted “senior Jesuits” in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots who feared a Bergoglio papacy:
I was really shocked when I began to contact the people I knew in the Jesuits to say, “Who is this man, Bergoglio?” And one of them passed on to me an email, which he’d had a few days before the election, and it was from a very senior priest who was the current leader of the Jesuits in another Latin American country, serving provincial, and he wrote this:
Yes, I know Bergoglio. He’s a person who’s caused a lot of problems in the society and is highly controversial in his own country. In addition to being accused of having allowed the arrest of the two Jesuits during the time of the dictatorship, as provincial, he generated divided loyalties. Some groups almost worshipped him, while others would have nothing to do with him, and he would hardly speak to them. It was an absurd situation. He’s well-trained and very capable, but he’s surrounded by this personality cult, which is extremely divisive. It will be a catastrophe for the Church to have someone like him in the Apostolic see. He left the Society of Jesus in Argentina in ruins, with Jesuits divided, institutions destroyed, and financially broken. We have spent two decades trying to fix the chaos this man left us.
“This was an extraordinary thing to read, and it wasn’t a lone voice,” Vallely said. “Three other very senior Jesuits told me similar things.”47
But Bergoglio’s dubious résumé didn’t give others in the liberal media any pause. They overlooked his failures as a provincial and archbishop and looked forward to the “mess” that he promised to create in the Church. Their skepticism gave way to gratitude. They had at long last found a pope to their ideological liking—a liberal Jesuit from Latin America for whom the “spirit” of Vatican II served as his primary compass.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Unholy Alliance
The election of a liberal Jesuit to the papacy thrilled Democrats in the United States, whose unholy alliance with the Catholic left goes back many decades. Barack Obama, one of the pope’s most prominent supporters, has long been a beneficiary of that alliance. The faculty at Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, DC, ranked as one of the top donors to his campaign.1
In a grim irony, Obama, whose presidency substantially eroded religious freedom in America, rose to power not in spite of the Catholic Church but because of it. The archdiocese of Chicago helped bankroll his radicalism in the 1980s. As he recounts in his memoirs, he began his work as a community organizer in the rectory rooms of Holy Rosary parish on Chicago’s South Side. The Alinskyite organization for which he worked—the Developing Communities Project—received tens of thousands of dollars from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Obama was close to the late Chicago cardinal Joseph Bernardin. A proponent of the seamless garment movement within the Catholic Church in the 1980s, a movement that downplayed abortion and emphasized political liberalism, Bernardin was drawn to the socialism and relativism of the liberal elite. He was so gay-friendly that he requested that the Windy City Gay Chorus perform at his funeral. He embodied Obama’s conception of a “good” bishop, and one can see in his admixture of left-wing politics and relativistic nonjudgmental theology a foreshadowing of the rise of Pope Francis.
Cardinal Bernardin put pressure on his priests to work with Obama and even paid for Obama’s plane fare out to a 1980 training session in Los Angeles organized by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.2 The conference was held at a Catholic college in Southern California, Mount St. Mary’s, which has long been associated with Alinsky’s group.
This alliance between the Catholic left and the Democratic left explains the honorary degree Obama received from the University of Notre Dame in 2009, even as he plotted to persecute the Church under Obamacare’s contraceptive and abortifacient mandate. Notre Dame’s former president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who supported honoring Obama, had been close to Monsignor John Egan, the socialist who started the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and sat on Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation board.
The unholy alliance also explains how the Democratic Party, despite its support for abortion and gay marriage, won a majority of the Catholic vote in Obama’s two presidential elections. At the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, nuns such as Sister Simone Campbell shared the stage with abortion activists from Planned Parenthood. A liberal dean of a Catholic university, Sister Marguerite Kloos, even got caught in an act of voter fraud that year, forging the signature of a deceased nun on a ballot.3 As Thomas Pauken writes in The Thirty Years War, “the radicalization of elements of the Catholic clergy turned out to be one of Saul Alinsky’s most signifi
cant accomplishments.”
The election of Pope Francis was seen by Alinskyite activists as a dream come true. “I think that Pope Francis is quite an inspiring figure,” Al Gore said at UC Berkeley in early 2015. The former vice president turned radical environmental activist called Pope Francis a “phenomenon” and laughed at his liberalism: “Is the pope Catholic?” Gore said that he is so “inspiring to me” that “I could become a Catholic.”4
Leftists frequently turn up at the Vatican, often invited by one of Pope Francis’s closest advisers, the socialist Honduran cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga. Before the pope’s visit to the United States, a group of left-wing activists and officials from unions and organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and PICO National Network (an Alinskyite group founded by the liberal Jesuit father John Baumann) descended on the Vatican to confer with curial officials about the trip.5 Around the same time, more than ninety members of the U.S. Congress sent Pope Francis a letter, urging him to focus upon politically liberal themes. The leader of this group was Rosa DeLauro, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.6
In 2016, it was revealed through disclosures by WikiLeaks that the billionaire socialist George Soros bankrolled much of this lobbying. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to shape the pope’s visit to the United States. According to the leaked documents, Soros’s Open Society Foundations sought to create a “critical mass” of American bishops and lay Catholics supportive of the pope’s priorities. The documents made special mention of Rodríguez, a champion of PICO, as a useful ally for ensuring that the pope’s speeches in the United States pushed socialism.7
The hacked emails exposed the depth of the plotting:
Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States in September will include a historic address to Congress, a speech at the United Nations, and a visit to Philadelphia for the “World Meeting of Families.” In order to seize this moment, we (Open Society) will support PICO’s organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using the influence of Cardinal Rodriguez, the Pope’s senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.
In the emails, the Soros operatives make it explicitly clear that they view Pope Francis as a propagandist for their causes:
At the end of the day, our visit affirmed an overall strategy: Pope Francis, as a leader of global stature, will challenge the “idolatry of the marketplace” in the U.S. and offer a clarion call to change the policies that promote exclusion and indifference to those most marginalized. We believe that this generational moment can launch extraordinary organizing that promotes moral choices and helps establish a moral compass. We believe that the papal visit, and the work we are collectively doing around it, can help many in our country move beyond the stale ideological conflicts that dominate our policy debates and embrace new opportunities to advance the common good.
After the meeting, they rejoiced at its success, informing John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign:
Our visits were dialogues. We conveyed our view that the Pope is a World leader of historical significance; that his message of exclusion, alarm over rising inequality and concern about globalized indifference is important for the U.S. to hear and see animated during his visit; and that we intend to amplify his remarks so that we have a more profound moral dialogue about policy choices through the election cycle of 2016. In our meetings with relevant officials, we strongly recommended that the Pope emphasize—in words and deeds—the need to confront racism and racial hierarchy in the US…
Conversations that were originally scheduled for thirty minutes stretched into two hour dialogues. As in our breakfast conversation with Cardinal Rodríguez, senior Vatican officials shared profound insights demonstrating an awareness of the moral, economic and political climate in America. We were encouraged to believe that the Pope will confront race through a moral frame.8
Further disclosures from WikiLeaks confirmed the plotting of Democratic officials to infiltrate the Catholic Church in order to “foment revolution” beneficial to their radical causes. In 2012, in the midst of Catholic backlash over Obama’s contraceptive mandate, John Podesta received a note from Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress.
“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church,” Newman wrote to Podesta. “I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would ‘plant the seeds of revolution,’ or who would plant them.” Podesta replied that the Democrats had set up Catholic front groups to plant those seeds: “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring moments, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”9 Podesta was wrong. It would come from the top down, as the following year Francis rose to the papacy and began politicizing the Church in the exact manner that the progressives had envisioned. Indeed, Podesta would later encourage Hillary Clinton to enlist the pope’s leftism in her campaign. In one hacked email, he advised that she send out a tweet to “thank him for pointing out that the people at the bottom will get clobbered the most by climate change.”10
Podesta and his aides also discussed how they could exploit Pope Francis’s support for Obama’s Iran deal. Podesta was sent a report in which Christopher Hale of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good proposes getting bishops and cardinals to lean on senators temporizing about the deal.
In another email, which underscores how the media and the Democrats teamed up to enlist Pope Francis in their politics, a liberal columnist, Brent Budowsky, counsels Podesta: “John, HRC should get ahead of the progressive curve before the pope’s trip to the U.S. in September, which will be big deal for a week, saturation coverage, heavy progressive populist, impact after he leaves affecting the trajectory of the campaign. Here’s my take, written more in news analysis style… Brent” In the attached column, Budowsky writes, “The visit of such a popular pope will almost certainly give a lift in principle to Democrats and liberals who cheer Francis and rededicate themselves to the values and visions he stands for.”11
Bernie Sanders Goes to the Vatican
Pope Francis has been influenced by Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that sought to spread Marxism among the peasants of Latin America. The Alinskyite left in America regards that book as a classic. The author of the book is the late Paulo Freire, and Pope Francis has made a point of visiting with Freire’s widow. The meeting was set up by Cardinal Hummes, the Brazilian whom Francis credits with inspiring him to name himself after St. Francis. Pope Francis “considered the meeting with me because of the writings of Paulo, because of the importance of Paulo for the education of oppressed people, poor people, black people, for women, for minorities,” Ana Freire said.12
The politicians in America most associated with the Alinskyite left, such as New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio, have bragged about the utility of Pope Francis to their causes.
After the Vatican invited him to speak at a conference in 2015 about environmentalism, de Blasio said: “This is a leader such as we haven’t seen before, really. He is saying things so clearly and so powerfully all over the world that need to be said. He’s moving people on an extraordinary level. And we have few truly international leaders in any sense. What he is doing is, he’s creating an international voice of conscience that I can’t think of any previous parallel for.”13
“Maybe I have given the impression of being a little bit to the left,” allowed Pope Francis in a 2015 understatement. It is more than just an impression for socialists like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 Democratic primaries. In an interview with Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica, which a Catholic television
station in Canada aired in 2015, Sanders spoke about Pope Francis as a fellow socialist.
“Well, what it means to be a socialist, in the sense of what the pope is talking about, what I’m talking about, is to say that we have got to do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering, that does not accelerate the disparities of income and wealth,” Sanders said. It pleased Sanders to see Pope Francis inveigh against the “idolatry of money, and to say maybe that’s not what human life should be about, and that is a very, very radical critique of the hypercapitalist system, world system, that we’re living in today.”14
In April 2016, at the height of the Democratic primaries, Sanders accepted an invitation from the Holy See to lecture at the Vatican and meet Pope Francis. No other presidential candidate received an invitation. “We invited the candidate who cites the pope the most in his campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders,” said Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The New York Times describes Sánchez Sorondo as an “Argentine who is close to the pope” and quotes him as saying that the concerns of Sanders are “very analogous to that of the pope.”15
In an interview with the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica during his visit to Rome, Sanders praised the pope’s socialist commitments: “Look, I believe that the reason for which I was invited to participate in this conference is that many of the issues which the pope tackles are similar to mine.”
While in 2016 Francis’s Vatican rolled out the red carpet for a socialist who famously honeymooned in the Soviet Union, it adopted a decidedly frosty tone toward Republicans. Pope Francis denounced the GOP’s nominee, Donald Trump, for opposing open borders. Offending large numbers of religious conservatives who support the enforcement of just immigration laws, Pope Francis said that Trump is “not Christian” as he intends to build a “wall” between the United States and Mexico.16
The Political Pope Page 8
