The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  The chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, is given to intemperate attacks on critics of climate change activism. To a pro-lifer who questioned why his academy has hosted proponents of abortion and population control, he offered the rawly polemical reply: “The Tea Party and all those whose income derives from oil have criticized us, but not my superiors, who instead authorized me, and several of them participated.”42

  The Cupich Appointment

  Pope Francis’s first major appointment in America was Blase Cupich, whom he sent to the archdiocese of Chicago. The appointment spoke volumes about Pope Francis’s desire for a politicized Church. Cupich is as, or even more, liberal as Joseph Bernardin, the late cardinal of Chicago, and he has used his status as one of Francis’s prized prelates to push political liberalism unapologetically. “Pope Francis doesn’t want cultural warriors,” said Cupich, explaining his appointment.43

  Cupich sounds more like a spokesman for the Democratic Party than for the Catholic Church. He is notorious for downplaying the issue of abortion, for prioritizing the wish list of the progressive left, and for his loud ecumenical gestures, such as holding “Catholic-Muslim Iftar” dinners. After undercover videos of grisly activities at Planned Parenthood appeared in 2016, Cupich lectured pro-lifers on the importance of other “issues”: “we should be no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice.”44

  Cupich frequently bashes the free market, touts extreme environmentalism, and soft-pedals the Church’s teachings at odds with a relativistic culture. At the Synod on the Family, he told members of the press that he had distributed to every priest of the archdiocese of Chicago Cardinal Kasper’s proposal to grant Communion to adulterers. Defending the logic of situation ethics, Cupich said that conscience is more important to him than Church teaching: “The conscience is inviolable. And we have to respect that when they make decisions and I’ve always done that.”45 Democrats have also cheered him for his policy of giving Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion and gay marriage.

  While he respects the consciences of the heterodox, he has considerably less respect for the consciences of conservative Catholics. He has browbeaten them for not accepting his liberal interpretation of Vatican II, pouting that “eventually” they will have to accept it. The archdiocese of Chicago under his leadership has become an engine of left-wing activism, with church officials serving as advocates for amnesty and gun control. A report on CBS called him “America’s Pope Francis” and he lived up to the billing by telling the liberal interviewer what she wanted to hear, that homosexuals can be “good parents.”46

  Cupich has teamed up with Illinois senator Dick Durbin, a pro-abortion Catholic Democrat, to push amnesty. They appeared together in 2015 at an event at which Cupich described opposition to amnesty as racism and Durbin purred about the political benefits of adding millions of new voters to the Democratic ledger.47

  Cupich is also thick with Chicago’s Democratic labor movement. Speaking before the Chicago Federation of Labor, he denounced “right to work” laws. The speech was so tendentiously liberal Hillary Clinton could have given it. Making no distinction between his personal politics and Church teaching, he said, “In view of present day attempts to enact so-called right-to-work laws, the church is duty bound to challenge such efforts by raising questions based on longstanding principles. We have to ask, ‘Do these measures undermine the capacity of unions to organize, to represent workers and to negotiate contracts? Do such laws protect the weak and vulnerable? Do they promote the dignity of work and the rights of workers? Do they promote a more just society and a more fair economy? Do they advance the common good?’” he said. Above all, he wanted to assure the union activists that “Pope Francis is with you.”48

  That Pope Francis gave one of the most important archdioceses in America to Cupich contained unmistakable meaning for U.S. Democrats. Pope Francis had been advised by conservative Vatican officials not to select Cupich, but he brushed off that advice. Cupich represented for Francis the prototypical bishop: a left-wing political activist who energizes the Church’s critics while leaving conservative Catholics out in the cold. In 2016, Pope Francis augmented Cupich’s power by adding him to the Congregation for Bishops, which makes him, along with the liberal Cardinal Wuerl, the chief bishop-maker for the United States.49 Not long thereafter, Pope Francis elevated Cupich to the rank of cardinal.50 Another revealing appointment cheered by Democrats was Pope Francis’s selection of Robert McElroy for the diocese of San Diego, California, in 2014. McElroy is a protégé of the former archbishop John Quinn. McElroy served under Quinn in San Francisco. The liberal Catholic press hailed the McElroy appointment as “the latest sign that Pope Francis intends to make his mark on the Church in America.”51 McElroy has since made headlines by supporting gay rights and sacramental laxity. He has called the catechism’s description of homosexual acts as disordered “very destructive” and urged his priests to give Communion to people living in a state of sin. On political matters, he has sounded predictable themes, such as that all parishes in San Diego should install solar-powered systems to counteract global warming and Catholics should support “pathways to citizenship” for illegal immigrants.52

  “Through his activism, Francis has significantly raised the Church’s profile on issues with which it wasn’t previously associated in American politics—issues chiefly championed by Democrats,” commented the Atlantic. “Francis is not an American politician, but his perspective on the state’s role in these issues lines up pretty well with that of most American Democrats.”53

  Under the lead of Pope Francis, liberal bishops aren’t even bothering to conceal their support for the policies of the left, even on the most neuralgic cultural matters. Retired Washington, DC, cardinal Theodore McCarrick has endorsed gay civil unions, which has only elevated his standing under Francis. “McCarrick is one of a number of senior churchmen who were more or less put out to pasture during the eight-year pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. But now Francis is pope, and prelates like Cardinal Walter Kasper (another old friend of McCarrick’s) and McCarrick himself are back in the mix and busier than ever,” writes David Gibson.54 Indeed, Pope Francis made a McCarrick protégé, Bishop Kevin Farrell, the head of the newly formed Vatican department called the Discatery for the Laity, the Family, and Life in 2016, and later made him a cardinal.

  Cardinal Timothy Dolan, asked about the pope’s support for gay civil unions on NBC’s Meet the Press, said Francis was telling Catholics that “we need to think about that and look into it and see the reasons that have driven” the public to accept them. In the wake of the gay-marriage movement’s successes, Cardinal Kasper, speaking for many of the Francis-friendly bishops, said, “A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights.”55 Pope Francis has called on the bishops to incorporate leftist groups into their chanceries in the form of “social justice” offices. Addressing socialists at a meeting of “popular movements” in 2015, he reassured them that the bishops stand ready to help them: “I am pleased to see the Church opening her doors to all of you, embracing you, accompanying you, and establishing in each diocese, in every justice and peace commission, a genuine, ongoing, and serious cooperation with popular movements. I ask everyone, bishops, priests, and laity, as well as the social organizations of the urban and rural peripheries, to deepen this encounter.”

  “The Left has its pope,” wrote the Stanford economist Thomas Sowell. “Pope Francis is part of a larger trend of the rise of the political left among Catholic intellectuals. He is, in a sense, the culmi
nation of that trend.”56

  “I am not a Catholic nor even a Christian, and I know many American Protestants who, shall we say, were never deeply invested in the moral authority of the pope,” writes Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, spelling out the stakes for non-Catholics if Pope Francis succeeds in liberalizing the Church. “So what does it matter to us whether or not this pope is surrendering the Church to the left? Historically, it does matter, because in the 20th century the Church helped change the course of history, vastly for the better, by offering ideological and material resistance to Communism. It mattered that there was a large institution with deep historical roots that was independent from the socialist state and politically correct orthodoxy, driven a different set of values. And it’s discomforting to think what might happen if that’s no longer true.”57

  The implications of this unholy alliance are serious for the world, but they are even more dire for Catholics. Under the left’s gradual absorption of the Church, her freedom will continue to wither, as secularists subject the Church to coercive mandates. Owing to the alliance, the left has gained power at the expense of the Church without having to compromise on any of its anti-Catholic positions.

  “To f—k your enemies, you must first seduce your allies,” Saul Alinsky once bragged to Playboy about his political exploitation of the Church.58 His disciples, such as the late Edward Chambers (a former Catholic seminarian), made it plain that they intended to hijack the Church for political gain: “The Industrial Areas Foundation has been in the field of organizing for nearly forty years. We believe that the best hope for change and social justice is the Church. The churches have the networks, the relationship of loyalty and trust, the money, the values and the untapped talent of the people.”

  Had Alinsky lived to see the papacy of Francis, he would have laughed at the ease with which his devious work has been advanced in the Church.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The First Radical Green Pope

  The Vatican under the frenetic political activism of Pope Francis has become a nest of extreme environmentalists. Operating almost like an annex of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, Francis’s Vatican has held a series of conferences and events that promote the rawest and most aggressive theories of climate change. As the ultra-left Nation has pointed out, even the Democrats are “to the right” of Pope Francis on the issue of climate change.1

  His predecessors kept a prudent distance from day-to-day politics, especially on issues wholly unrelated to faith and morals. But Pope Francis has plunged into them on all matters environmental. He sees himself as a lobbyist for the left’s anti–fossil fuels agenda. In this role, he had no reservations about using his papal office to promote a climate change treaty at the UN’s Paris conference in 2015.

  “In a few days’ time an important meeting on climate change will be held in Paris, where the international community as such will once again confront these issues. It would be sad, and I dare say even catastrophic, were particular interests to prevail over the common good and lead to manipulating information in order to protect their own plans and projects,” he said.2

  He mocked a previous UN conference on the environment for not adopting more extreme plans to combat climate change. “Let’s hope that governments will be more courageous in Paris than they were in Lima,” Pope Francis complained to reporters on his plane during a 2015 trip to the Philippines.3

  In December 2015, Catholics didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the Vatican used the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica as a movie screen for a propagandistic “climate change awareness” film—and did so on a holy day, no less.4

  “Many enjoyed the spectacle, but equally many others found it highly inappropriate. What caused most of the consternation was that one of Christianity’s most sacred and iconic buildings was used as the backdrop to climate change advocacy—a science that remains highly contested—on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception,” reported Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin. “The event was part-sponsored by the World Bank, well known for its promotion of abortion and contraception.”

  Archbishop Rino Fisichella, a Vatican official, acknowledged that climate change activists had asked to use St. Peter’s Basilica as a backdrop for the film in order to push the UN’s climate change conference in Paris.

  “The evening of December 8th will conclude in Saint Peter’s Piazza with a meaningful and unique presentation entitled ‘Fiat lux: Illuminating Our Common Home.’ It will be a projection of photographs onto the façade and cupola of Saint Peter’s, taken from a repertoire of some of the world’s great photographers. These illuminations will present images inspired of mercy, of humanity, of the natural world, and of climate changes,” Fisichella told the press.

  “The show is sponsored by the World Bank Group (Connect4Climate), by Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions, by the Li Ka-shing Foundation and by Okeanos. This event, inspired by the most recent encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato si’, is intended to present the beauty of creation, especially on the occasion of the Twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop 21), which began in Paris last Monday, November 30, and ends on December 11. The show will begin at 19:00. I can assure everyone that it is a unique event for its genre and for the fact that it is being displayed for the first time on such a significant backdrop.”5

  Never had the global left’s use of the Vatican as a propaganda tool been more blatant. Once wary of the Vatican, environmentalists now rejoice openly at their unprecedented access to it and the bully pulpit that Pope Francis has offered them. Many of these environmentalists are anti-Catholic Marxists who support aggressive forms of population control.

  Angering the faithful, Pope Francis consulted with the rabid environmentalist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber before writing his environmental encyclical Laudato Si’.6 Despite pushing radical population control advocacy to “protect the Earth,” Schellnhuber was appointed by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Schellnhuber has said that if climate change goes unchecked, the “carrying capacity of the planet” will fall “below 1 billion.” Among his many controversial positions is one that calls for a world government with an “Earth Constitution,” a “Global Council,” and a “Planetary Court.” Schellnhuber was selected by Pope Francis to be one of four presenters at the press conference for the release of Laudato Si’.

  The Canadian socialist activist Naomi Klein was also tapped by Pope Francis for advice. She said, “When I was first asked to speak at a Vatican press conference on Pope Francis’s recently published climate-change encyclical, Laudato Si’, I was convinced that the invitation would soon be rescinded.” But she discovered that Francis’s Vatican agreed with her view that “climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model.”

  Klein has marveled at how Pope Francis “is overturning centuries of theological interpretation,” and she has bragged about all the radicals like her now happily ensconced within the walls of the Vatican. In the pages of the New Yorker, she described how fun it was to hang out at the Vatican with fellow radicals who had helped Pope Francis draft Laudato Si’:

  My dinner companions have been some of biggest troublemakers within the Church for years, the ones taking Christ’s proto-socialist teachings seriously. Patrick Carolan, the Washington, D.C.-based executive director of the Franciscan Action Network, is one of them. Smiling broadly, he tells me that, at the end of his life, Vladimir Lenin supposedly said that what the Russian Revolution had really needed was not more Bolsheviks but ten St. Francises of Assisi.

  Now, all of a sudden, these outsiders share many of their views with the most powerful Catholic in the world, the leader of a flock of 1.2 billion people. Not only did this Pope surprise everyone by calling himself Francis, as no Pope ever had before him, but he appears to be determined to revive the most radical Franciscan teachings. Moema de Miranda, a powerful Brazilian social leader, who was wearing a wooden Franciscan cross, says that it feels “as if we are finally being heard.”

/>   For [Fr. Sean] McDonagh, the changes at the Vatican are even more striking. “The last time I had a Papal audience was 1963,” he tells me over spaghetti vongole. “I let three Popes go by.” And yet here he is, back in Rome, having helped draft the most talked-about encyclical anyone can remember.7

  Another radical leftist to whom Pope Francis turned for advice on the environment is Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading cheerleaders for abortion and government-run contraceptive programs.8 Sachs, an adviser to the United Nations, has written that killing unborn children is a “lower-risk and lower-cost option” than population growth. The chancellor for the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorono, sits on the Leadership Council of Sachs’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In 2016, Sánchez Sorono invited Sachs to accompany Bernie Sanders to the Vatican.9

  The once-condemned liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has said that Pope Francis turned to him for advice on how to redesign the United Nations to fight climate change. Boff said that the pope asked for his input in a unique way: “Indirectly, through the ambassador of Argentina to the Vatican, I was asked by the Pope to send him material about ecology. He said: ‘Do not send it to the Vatican, because they will not deliver it to me. Send it to the ambassador who will place it in my hands. Otherwise they will make a sotto sedere, they will sit on it and forget to deliver it.’”10

  Boff said that the pope “asked for a document that I helped to write, which would be a new configuration of the United Nations,” in which he “elaborated a whole conception of a unified planet that distributes the few resources we have in a decent and egalitarian way.”

  Pope Francis also consulted with Timothy Wirth, an undersecretary of state under President Bill Clinton who was famous for decorating his Christmas trees with condoms, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, an advocate for population control measures. “We’ve never seen a pope do anything like this,” Wirth enthused. “No single individual has as much global sway as he does.”11