The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  “Violence is not answered with violence, death is not answered with the language of death,” he has said. “In the silence of the Cross, the uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue, and peace is spoken. This evening, I ask the Lord that we Christians, and our brothers and sisters of other religions, and every man and woman of good will, cry out forcefully: violence and war are never the way to peace!”2

  The Pope Opposes Lifetime Imprisonment

  Even a concept as uncontroversial as lifetime imprisonment for serial killers has been rejected by this pope. Not even the most liberal of liberal Democrats in the United States take his absolutist stance against lifetime imprisonment. Indeed, most of them argue against the death penalty on the grounds that lifetime imprisonment provides an adequate means of protecting society from violent criminals.

  Some opponents of the death penalty have expressed unease about the pope’s opposition to lifetime imprisonment. They fear that it could end up strengthening public support for the death penalty, which already enjoys strong majority approval in the United States, including from Catholics.

  Undaunted, Pope Francis has said to murderers and other capital offenders that they not only don’t deserve the death penalty but that states owe them freedom from lifetime imprisonment. He has become a crusader for “prisoners’ rights,” casting lifetime imprisonment as a “form of torture” and a “hidden death penalty.”3

  He has made the quirky proposal that more prisons be run by female wardens. “When I go to a city, I like to visit prisons; I have already visited a number of them. Without wishing to detract from anyone, I would say that my general impression is that prisons run by women are better run,” he said to a group of judges in 2016. “When it comes to reinsertion, women have a particular, almost natural, knack for putting people in the right place; some might think it is because they are mothers. But it is curious. I mention it as a personal experience which may be worth thinking about. Here in Italy, many prisons are run by women. Many of them are young; they are respected and enjoy a good rapport with the prisoners.”4

  In November 2016, he held a “jubilee of prisoners” at St. Peter’s Basilica. Other popes have visited prisoners and said Masses at prisons. But Pope Francis, displaying his love of novel and provocative gestures, is the first pope to ask prisons to release prisoners for an outing to the Vatican. “For the first time it will be possible for a large number of detainees from different parts of Italy and other countries to be present in St. Peter’s Basilica to live the Jubilee with Pope Francis,” Archbishop Rino Fisichella told the press.5 At the event, which included a Mass, Pope Francis called for prisoner amnesty and criticized a lock-them-up mentality among the public: “Sometimes, a certain hypocrisy leads to people considering you only as wrongdoers, for whom prison is the sole answer. We don’t think about the possibility that people can change their lives. We put little trust in rehabilitation… into society. But in this way we forget that we are all sinners and often, without being aware of it, we too are prisoners.”6

  The Church has long justified the death penalty on the grounds of “retributive justice.” But Pope Francis insists on describing retributive justice as “vengeance.” He regularly maligns the motives of those who support the death penalty, which is a condemnation that falls as much on his predecessors as contemporary supporters of the death penalty.

  “No matter how grave the crime committed,” the death penalty is never justified, he said to an anti-death penalty congress in Norway.7

  This view contradicts the constant teaching of the Church on this issue. The late cardinal Avery Dulles did a study of this question and found that the Church “never” morally opposed the death penalty and that all the way up until the twentieth century the Vatican state had the death penalty on its books. Wrote Dulles:

  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the consensus of Catholic theologians in favor of capital punishment in extreme cases remained solid, as may be seen from approved textbooks and encyclopedia articles of the day. The Vatican City State from 1929 until 1969 had a penal code that included the death penalty for anyone who might attempt to assassinate the pope. Pope Pius XII, in an important allocution to medical experts, declared that it was reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life in expiation of their crimes.8

  Rejecting this tradition, Pope Francis, in a speech to delegates from the International Association of Penal Law, spoke about opposition to the death penalty as a Christian duty:

  All Christians and people of good will are called today to struggle not only for abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also to improve prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their liberty. And this I connect with life imprisonment. Life imprisonment is a hidden death penalty.9

  Under the Vatican state’s penal code, as Pope Francis likes to say, lifetime imprisonment no longer exists. Similar to his extreme stance on the issue of climate change, the pope, on issues of crime and punishment, has gone beyond even the conventionally liberal position to the most radical one. This explains the over-the-top praise that he receives from the European left, which has succeeded in convincing judges to outlaw lifetime imprisonment. It never dreamed a pope would so perfectly conform to their agenda.

  At times the pope almost sounds like a parody of a 1960s-style pacifist. He once sweepingly condemned the arms trade by saying, “It is hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons.” Even as oversimplifications in today’s vapid political discourse go, that oversimplification staggered conservatives.10 Just as the pope casually equates capitalism with greed, so he equates weaponry with blind violence. He has called the arms trade an “industry of death” and said that it is “furthering a cycle of hate, fratricide, violence.” That weapons protect innocent people from the violent rarely figures into his analysis.

  The day after an Islamic terrorist fired upon hundreds of people at a homosexual nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, causing the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, the pope condemned the arms trade.11 He preferred to engage that subject rather than the spread of radical Islam. (A Francis-friendly bishop in America, Robert Lynch, meanwhile blamed “our own” religion for the violence, saying that Catholicism bred “contempt” for the “LGBT” community.)

  “Now the Pope is lashing out at guns, not Islamism. He says guns circulate too freely. Doesn’t he know that ISIS hits soft targets, not hard ones like the Vatican?” said Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld. “If the Vatican were as unarmed as Pulse, the club, the pope would not be alive. But ISIS knows that the Pope is surrounded by a military force consisting of 100 plus ex-Swiss soldiers who carry muskets but also sub-machine guns, with heavily armed agents nearby. If that club, Pulse, had three percent of the Pope’s arms, he wouldn’t lecturing on guns. The Pope complained that aid and food in few support countries are often blocked, but guns are not. Doesn’t he see that if it weren’t for armed men from our country, most aid would get nowhere? He says he is pro-life, not here I’m afraid.”12

  So frequent are the pope’s denunciations of the arms trade that the gun-control lobby in the United States has turned him into a poster boy for their cause in fundraising letters. Following his lead, the U.S. bishops have backed President Obama’s gun control proposals. “It is time to heed the words of Pope Francis and take meaningful and swift action to address violence in our society. We must band together to call for gun-control legislation,” Chicago archbishop Blase Cupich wrote.13

  All Wars Are Unjust?

  In keeping with the pope’s oversimplified hostility to arms, the Vatican is now flirting with a plan to eliminate the Church’s centuries-old just war doctrine. That doctrine has been defended by countless popes and was carefully articulated by such doctors of the Church as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. But Pope Francis sees it as just one more disposable tradition.

  I
n 2016, his Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace teamed up with the pacifist organization Pax Christi International to hold a three-day conference trashing the Church’s traditional understanding of just war.14 “I came a long distance for this conference, with a very clear mind that violence is outlived,” said Archbishop John Baptist Odama of Gulu, Uganda. “It is out of date for our world of today.”

  The participants have called on Pope Francis to pen an encyclical endorsing pacifism. “There is no ‘just war,’” they declared in a statement. “Too often the ‘just war theory’ has been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war. Suggesting that a ‘just war’ is possible also undermines the moral imperative to develop tools and capacities for nonviolent transformation of conflict.”

  They want the Church to trade her just war teaching for a “just peace” one. “We need a new framework that is consistent with Gospel nonviolence,” they said. “We propose that the Catholic Church develop and consider shifting to a Just Peace approach based on Gospel nonviolence.”

  Officials close to Pope Francis have encouraged this talk. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who helped ghostwrite Francis’s environmentalist statements, has said that the position of the group is “very legitimate.”

  In fact, it is baldly heretical. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “it sometimes becomes necessary to use force to obtain the end of justice. This is the right, and the duty, of those who have responsibilities for others, such as civil leaders and police forces.”

  Coddling Dictators

  The pacifism of this pontificate is also seen in its diplomacy, which has been marked by the coddling of communist dictators and excuse-making for Islamic radicals. In 2015, Pope Francis perplexed many by rolling out the red carpet for Raúl Castro, the murderous leader of Cuba’s communist regime.

  “The warmth and hospitality that Pope Francis showed to Raúl Castro at the Vatican last week has baffled many Catholics—and for good reason. The dictator went to Rome for a PR boost. The pontiff obliged him,” wrote Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal. “The Holy Father is a native of 20th-century Argentina, ideologically defined by nationalism, socialism, corporatism and anti-Americanism. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that this influences his views toward the U.S. and the island 90 miles from its shores.”

  O’Grady argues that the pope’s much-ballyhooed role as a “broker” in hastening normalized relations between the United States and Cuba is a boon not to dissidents but to the Castro brothers, who desperately needed the U.S. embargo lifted in order to prolong their regime.

  “When the Cuban dictatorship lost its Soviet sugar daddy in the early 1990s, it nearly crumbled. Last year deep economic troubles again looked as if they might force change. As Venezuelan oil subsidies to Havana slowed, the rotting system teetered on the edge of collapse,” she wrote. “It was an opportunity for the church to show solidarity with the powerless Cuban people—or at least stand back. Instead the Vatican stepped in to help the Castros. In December we learned that Pope Francis brokered the Obama-Castro thaw, which while unlikely to spur improvements in human rights is already generating new interest in investing with the military government.”15

  Even the politically liberal Washington Post was appalled the following year by the pope’s feel-good visit to the brothers Castro in Cuba. In an editorial titled “Pope Francis Appeases the Castros in Repressive Cuba,” the Post ripped into his sycophantic diplomacy:

  The pope is spending four days in a country whose Communist dictatorship has remained unrelenting in its repression of free speech, political dissent and other human rights despite a warming of relations with the Vatican and the United States. Yet by the end of his third day, the pope had said or done absolutely nothing that might discomfit his official hosts.

  Pope Francis met with 89-year-old Fidel Castro, who holds no office in Cuba, but not with any members of the dissident community—in or outside of prison. According to the Web site 14ymedio.com, two opposition activists were invited to greet the pope at Havana’s cathedral Sunday but were arrested on the way. Dozens of other dissidents were detained when they attempted to attend an open air Mass. They needn’t have bothered: The pope said nothing in his homily about their cause, or even political freedom more generally.16

  Raúl Castro’s gift to Pope Francis—a crucifix made from the wooden oars of a “migrant’s” boat—grated on the dissidents, many of whom had seen relatives drown after fleeing communist Cuba.

  Liberation theologians friendly with the Castro brothers, such as the Brazilian Frei Betto, have met with Pope Francis and received encouragement from him. When Pope Francis gave a copy of Evangelii Gaudium (an apostolic exhortation in which he condemns “trickle-down” economics) to Raúl Castro, he said to him, “There are here some declarations that you will like!”

  Raúl Castro said to Pope Francis: “If you continue talking like this… I will return to the Catholic Church. I am not joking. I may convert again to Catholicism, even though I am a Communist.”17

  O’Grady argues that Pope Francis has been a morale boost for left-wing strongmen like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, who used the pope’s visit to his country to highlight the pope’s support for socialism. “This pope is very political and his politics, if we take him at his word, favor statist solutions to poverty. In terms of appearances that puts him on the same side of many policy debates as the region’s socialist tyrants,” she wrote. “The populist Mr. Correa smells opportunity. In the lead up to the visit, he posted billboards in Guayaquil and Quito featuring his government’s logo encircling a photo of the pontiff next to what appears to be a Francis quote that reads ‘one must demand the redistribution of wealth.’ State television and radio delivered a similar message.”18

  The pope’s support for left-wing Latin American populism has led the Economist to call him the “Peronist pope.” He routinely mistakes the Church’s insistence on charity toward the poor for an endorsement of socialism. “If you were to read one of the sermons of the first fathers of the church, from the second or third centuries, about how you should treat the poor, you’d say it was Maoist or Trotskyist,” he has mused absurdly.19 The church fathers were sermonizing about the corporal works of mercy, not advancing government-planned economies.

  The pope has said nothing about the plight of the poor under socialism in Latin America, preferring instead to attribute their problems to “unseen forces” that worship a “deified market.” The moral causes of poverty, such as rising illegitimacy, don’t appear to play any role in his analysis either.

  Pope Francis has also lent his prestige to the cause of Palestinian activists, many of whom have terrorist ties. Rankling Israelis, he has called Palestine’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, a “man of peace.” On another occasion, reporters heard him describe Abbas, a patron of terrorists, as an “angel of peace.”20

  Pope Francis’s 2014 visit to Palestine was seen by Palestinian activists as a remarkable propaganda victory. Befuddling even Vatican correspondents, the pope during his visit abruptly ordered his popemobile stopped so that he could go out and pray before a wall separating Jerusalem from the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

  “He got down from the Popemobile and walked up to the wall,” Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, explained to confused members of the press. “He remained there for some minutes, praying silently. He then touched the wall with his forehead.”

  Palestinian activists saw it as vindication of their grievances against the Israelis. Israeli government officials, who saw it in the same light, were not pleased. “[The Palestinians] are turning the visit into a whole propaganda stunt but that’s what they do and the Vatican plays along with it and so be it. We will find the time to speak with the Vatican through diplomatic channels about this,” said an Israeli foreign ministry official.

  One of the pope’s closest advisers, Cardinal Rodríguez, is a loud critic of Israel. He once cast the media’s coverage of the sex abuse scandal in the Church as payb
ack for the support that the Vatican has extended to Palestinians:

  It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago. Why? I think it’s also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?21

  The Pope Appeases Communist China

  In 2015, Pope Francis denied a private audience to the Dalai Lama, out of fear of offending Chinese communists in Bejiing. The Dalai Lama’s request was declined “for obvious reasons concerning the delicate situation,” said a Vatican spokesman.22

  The Chinese communists have long subjected the Catholic Church to brutal persecution and state control, a problem that has worsened under the pontificate of Francis. “Yes, the Chinese government’s control over the Church in China has absolutely increased since the beginning of Pope Francis’s pontificate,” says Joseph Kung, who monitors religious persecution in China, in an interview for this book.

  Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong has complained that Pope Francis is kowtowing to the communists, which has only made it easier for the Chinese government to dominate the Church.

  “I have searched at length for some good news, but have found none,” he wrote in January 2016. “I remember that at the beginning of last year the newspaper Wen Wei Po announced jubilantly that ‘relations between China and the Vatican will soon have a good development.’ Soon after, the Vatican Secretary of State said that ‘the prospects are promising, there is a desire for dialogue on both sides.’ I had my doubts about this unexpected wave of optimism, I saw no basis for this optimism.”