Pope warns against white-gloved ‘coups d’etat’
Translated from
katholisches.info/2018/08/papst-warnt-vor-staatsstreich-mit-weissen-handschuhen
ROME – Pope Francis’s sympathies with leftist politicians is well-known. A few days ago, he compared the judicial process against ex-President Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, to the persecution suffered by Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and other martyrs, according to a Chilean official who spoke to the pope.
[Does Bergoglio have any common sense at all? First, he declares a leftist bishop who dies of a car accident a martyr so he can beatify him. And now, he likens a prison penalty for a corrupt politician – from all accounts, fair and just - to the persecution of Jesus?]
Lula was among the founders and most eminent representatives of the Brazilian Laborers’ Party founded in 1980 and which is in the mainstream of the socialist reform movement. He was head of state and of government from 2003-2011, and is a friend of Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who is one of Jorge Bergoglio’s closest friends.
In July 2017, Lula was sentenced to 9-1/2 years of imprisonment for corruption, a sentence confirmed by the Brazilian Court of Appeals in January 2018 which also increased the jail term to 12 years. He has been in jail since April 7, since when his friends and sympathizers have been trying to do everything to get him out.
On August 2, Pope Francis met privately with 3 leaders of the Latin-American Left who sought the audience in order to advocate Lula’s cause. The three were Celso Amorim, who was Lulka’s foreign minister; Alberto Fernandez, who was Cristina Fernandez Kirchner’s chief of staff when she was president of Argentina; and Carlos Ominami, a former Chilean cabinet minister now Senator who calls himself “a progressivist citizen, agnostic and Shintoist”.
The pope spent one hour with them – unusually long – during which his visitors denounced that a subtle ‘coup d’etat’ is taking place in Latin America where leftist officials are being persecuted by judicial means, what Bergoglio calls ‘a coup d’etat in white gloves’.
[Not too long ago, Bergoglio called present-day abortion ‘Marxism in white gloves’! What does he mean by 'white gloves'? That the operation - be it a coup d'etat or abortion - is thus 'sterile' in the sense of clean?]
Amorim, who was Defense Minister till 2015 of the government of Dilma Roussef, the Labour politician who succeeded Lula as president, presented the pope with an Italian edition of Lula’s book
La Verdad Vencera (Truth will triumph). Amorim told the media later that the pope “is following the developments about Lula with interest and concern”.
Last May 17, in his morning homilette from Casa Santa Marta, Bergoglio took a position when he expressed his concern over ‘false unity’ and the dangers of coups d’etat, speaking of “calumny and defamation” carried out through judicial processes via which make possible a subtle coup d’etat. Observers drew an allusion to events in Latin America and more specifically, Lula’s conviction in Brazil.
[The words also presage, almost verbatim, what was reportedly said at the meeting with the leftist leaders on August 2.]
On that day, the Argentine news agency AFN wrote, quoting from what Alberto Fernandez reported of the meeting:
“Pope Francis showed great concern for what he calls ‘a coup d’etat in white gloves’”, an expression also used by Amorim, and which Fernandez says is Bergoglio’s.
Papal support for the political left has its share of some comic relief. On January 12, Lula was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for corruption, and the pope was quoted to have expressed his concern over corruption in Latin America.
[That’s rich! As if corruption and Latin America have not become near-synonymous all these past decades!] But it was said that
the pope was not referring to Lula’s corruption but to the fact that a presumably corrupt system of justice had sentenced Lula for corruption!
The audience given by the pope to the three advocates for Lula must be seen in relation to the efforts of the Laborers’ Party to present Lula as a candidate in the October parliamentary elections despite his guilty verdict. The Party hopes thereby to get him parliamentary immunity if he wins, an immunity which would supposedly free him from imprisonment. But first, they have to make sure that as a convict, he qualifies to be a candidate. They already tried to run him as a presidential candidate in the elections last spring but the Brazilian Supreme Court denied their motion,
The political Left claims that judicial proceedings against their politicians are an occult form of political action aimed at damaging the politicians concerned. [If they are innocent, what do they have to fear? This way, they know what it's like not to be in power!]
On August 3, through the Internet, Lula let the world know that the pope, at the request of his three advocates, had sent him a ‘personal message’ on which he wrote:
“To Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, with my blessing and a request to pray for me- Francis.” [Bergoglio consistently asks everybody to pray for him, but prayers will not avail if he persists in his wrongheadedness!]
In the Sunday edition of the Chilean newspaper
La Tercera, Carlos Ominami wrote an article entitled “With Pope Francis at Casa Santa Marta”, in which he says that the pope had compared the situation of Lula to that of Jesus Christ:
On the occasion of this meeting which the 3 of us, representing Argentina, Brazil and Chile, had improvised, I wished to make clear that I was there not only out of my friendship and esteem for Lula but also out of my duty to defend democracy in Brazil and the entire region, which was won at great cost.
Actually, the pope did not seemed particularly surprised. To my great surprise, on the contrary, he said that Lula’s story was something very ancient, one that can be found in the Bible, because in different ways, it has happened to Jesus Christ, to John the Baptist, and to Susannah of Babylon…
He also recalled his homily on May 17, 2018, when he said very clearly that in politics, when a coup d’etat is attempted, the media start to talk about people, about national leaders, whom they drag in the mud with calumny and defamation… leading to a court trial which condemns them, and which ultimately results in a virtual coup d’etat”.