[Developments in the church of Bergoglio are now taking place at a seemingly fast and furious pace that pretty soon, few of us, even the most eagle-eyed and alert of heresy/apostasy-sniffing Catholic experts, will be able to keep track, and the less we are able to, the bolder ‘Jesus II’ will be in dismantling – or seeking to dismantle and replace – the one true Church of Christ. Ideally, one should keep a daily log of all these developments in order to have a quick go-to reference for the now-countless outrages wrought by Bergoglio and his minions to the Body of the Church.]
The Communists dear and near
to the Pope – it’s mutual admiration
October 11, 2017
In recent days, a couple of surprising things [in the church of Bergoglio and among the Bergoglian faithful – those that we know of, at any rate] have happened in Rome. And they are instructive in their way.
The first is that
Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, has taken on satirical comics author Sergio Staino with a Sunday strip entitled “Hello, Jesus!”
Staino is an unwavering communist, once a “flower child” and a champion of free love, and until a few months ago, the editor of
L'Unità (once the newspaper of the Italian communist party that was subsequently continued by the parties that succeeded it), as well as honorary president of the Italian UAAR, the Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics.
The absentminded Jesus in his strips still lives in Nazareth with Joseph and Mary, gives his father a hand in the woodshop, but his head is already elsewhere, looking to the time when he will leave to finally become - in Staino’s words –
“the first of the socialists, the first to fight for the poor.”
Interviewed in
Avvenire on the day he debuted with them, Staino recounted that some time ago, when Pope Francis, during a “long telephone conversation” with Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, was told that back in 1948 Staino’s mother had been denied sacramental absolution for having voted for the communist party, the pope burst out laughing and said: “Tell the mother of this friend of yours that I will give her that absolution.”
Nonetheless, Staino’s arrival at
Avvenire has provoked a deluge of protests. Including that of the newspaper’s titular publisher, in the person of the secretary general of the CEI, Italian episcopal conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, whose disapproval was reported to by
Avvenire’s own editor Marco Tarquinio: “I do not agree, because I do not understand just what added value comes to our newspaper from Staino’s strips.”
And this is where the episode is also instructive of power politics within the Bergoglian court. It confirms recent suspicion that Galantino’s power over the CEI and its newspaper is no longer what it was when Pope Francis appointed him secretary general at the CEI, his one and only de facto lieutenant there, which means that every word and decision of Galantino came down as if from the pope himself.
But the CEI has since had a new president - Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, who very close to Francis and said to be much more skillful in understanding and seconding his wishes, leading to Galantino’s fall from the pope’s graces.
Tarquinio evidently decided to hire Staino on his own, without having “asked for authorization beforehand from the publisher,” but demonstrated his defiance of Galantino by publishing the latter’s words of disapproval for the new hire.
The second episode also had a newspaper as protagonist:
Il Manifesto, the only organ in Italy that proclaims itself as “Communist daily” in its masthead.
On Thursday, October 5, not coincidentally on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution that brought Soviet Communism to Russia,
Il Manifesto went to the newsstands with a free supplement in the form of a booklet containing three speeches by Pope Francis to the “popular movements,” which he convened for the first time in Rome in 2014, then in Bolivia in 2015, and then again in Rome in 2016.
Interviewed by
Avvenire, Manifesto editor Norma Rangeri explained the decision: “We feel these messages of the pope to be our own, and we want to bring to our readers the radicality and simplicity of these words of his. […] They contain a new idea of politics… The pope also cites Esther Ballestrin the young Bergoglio’s high school chemistry teacher, and he met with her two daughters during his visit to Paraguay, in July of 2015).
Our readers of Settimo Cielo are already extensively informed about Francis’s speeches to the "popular movements" and his political vision:
> Bergoglio, Politician. The Myth of the Chosen People
But further information can be gleaned from the Manifesto booklet. In addition to the speeches, there is an interview with Argentine Juan Grabois and a postscript by the Italian scholar Alessandro Santagata – both
enhance the overall picture [of Bergoglio’s unabashed advocacy of socialist/communist ideals that conform to his own social and political agenda].
Grabois, 34, the son of anistoric Peronist official, today heads Argentina’s Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular and has been close to Bergoglio since 2005, since the time that the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires was head of the Argentine episcopal conference. After he became pope, Francis appointed Grabois as a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, since absorbed into the new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Grabois has been the most active agent in tying together the threads of all the “popular movement’ convocations revolving around Bergoglio.
The idea for these convocations began to take shape immediately after Francis’s election. After the inaugural Mass as pope - at which, along with heads of state seated in the front row, there was the Argentine Sergio Sánchez, head of the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos - Grabois says that he was contacted by fellow Argentine, Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, who has been hovering at the edges of the Bergoglio favorites clique and can’t wait to get into it.
Sorondo asked Grabois to help him organize a seminar at the Vatican entitled “Emergenza esclusi” (Emergency of the excluded), which was held in December of 2013 and attended by Joao Pedro Stédile, leader of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) in Brazil.
This seminar was the preview of the subsequent first convocation of the ‘popular movements’ called by the Pope in Rome - a network of a hundred organizations from all over the world but mostly from Latin America, to a large extent, the same organizations responsible for significant anti-capitalist and anti-globalization gatherings in Seattle and Porto Alegre.
To organize this and the subsequent meetings, a committee was created made up of Grabois, Stédile, and two other activists: Jockin Arputham of the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Charo Castelló of the Mouvement Mondial des Travailleurs Chrétiens. Plus the Jesuit Michael Czerny, now the undersecretary of the Department of Migrants and Refugees at the human development dicastery, a department that the pope decided he himself, Bergoglio, would head. Grabois thinks that Fr. Czerny has so far been “of vital importance for connecting with the various popular organizations.”
In the Manifesto booklet, both Grabois and Santagata point out that
many of the “popular movements” on which the pope relies are critical toward the Church as an institution and opposed to Catholic dogmas on questions like abortion or homosexual rights. But “such contradictions do not affect the work of the meetings too much, because this is focused on specific issues related to the struggle for land, housing, and work.”
A fourth convocation of the “popular movements” was scheduled for Caracas in October of this year, but had to be postponed because of Venezuela’s current catastrophic crisis.
To make up for that, the movements have begun holding meetings not on a global but on a regional scale. The first was held in Modesto, California from February 16-19 of 2017 for the movements of the United States. Another was held from June 20-21 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the movements of Latin America.
Pope Francis took part in the Modesto meeting by videoconference, reading a speech perfectly in line with the three previous ones, but not at the Cochabamba meeting.
Santagata writes that at these regional meetings, “I was told by Vittorio Agnoletto that criticisms were raised over
a proposal to build more networks that, in his judgment, risk giving rise to a series of ‘empty boxes’ in competition with the organization of the World Social Forum.” [A very Communist tactic and strategy - 'organize to death' by self-asphyxiation!]
Agnoletto, elected in 2004 to a five-year term in the European Parliament running as a candidate of Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista, was for a long time an Italian representative on the international board of the World Social Forum created in Porto Alegre, and has taken part in various meetings at the Vatican on these issues.
Between the World Social Forum and the “popular movements” dear to Pope Francis, there is in fact increasing friction. In the judgment of Grabois, the former
“has betrayed its essence to transform itself into a sequence of rituals or tourist activities for militants, whereas the movements blessed by the pope “would today be the only ones capable of allowing the communal organization of the excluded to build from the bottom up the humane alternative to a marginalizing globalization”…even at the cost of straying from the “strict confines of official democracy” and adopting “practices that could be criminalized by states.”
Obviously, the booklet on Bergoglio’s pet ‘popular movements’ does not include a list of concrete achievement that they can cite so far, after four years, other than holding meetings and staging demonstrations! Magister would not have omitted citing these achievements if they were reported! What about this World Social Forum – what has it done?