By sheer coincidence – or not – three commentaries have appeared in the past couple of days looking into the blatant and always
exuberantly manifested political ideology of Jorge Bergoglio. A relentlessly voluble blatancy that is in stark contrast to his grudging
lip service to the Catholicism he is supposed to uphold, protect and defend, but which he is increasingly rejecting in favor of preaching
a generic global religion that sees no differences among the different faiths.
For Jorge Bergoglio, carrying out his political ideology - which he thinks will bring about the utopia Jesus never promised nor even
theorized - ought to be the immediate concern of everyone, blithely ignoring Jesus’s admonition to “Seek first the kingdom of God, and
everything else will follow”.
Jorge Bergoglio’s Communist mentor
Excerpt from ‘THE POLITICAL POPE’
By George Neumayr
May 1, 2017
After Pope Francis early in his papacy decried capitalism as “trickle-down economics” — a polemical phrase coined by the left during the Reagan years that Francis frequently borrows — radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh commented, “This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope.” Talk show host Michael Savage called him “Lenin’s pope.” Pope Francis took such comments as a compliment. “I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended,” he told the Italian press.
Pope Francis grew up in socialist Argentina, an experience that left a deep impression on his thinking. He told the Latin American journalists Javier Camara and Sebastian Pfaffen that as a young man he “read books of the Communist Party that my boss in the laboratory gave me” and that “there was a period where I would wait anxiously for the newspaper
La Vanguardia, which was not allowed to be sold with the other newspapers and was brought to us by the socialist militants.”
The “boss” to whom Pope Francis referred is Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. He has described her as a “Paraguayan woman” and a “fervent communist.” He considers her one of his most important mentors. “I owe a huge amount to that great woman,” he has said, saying that she “taught me so much about politics.” (He worked for her as an assistant at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aires.)
“She often read Communist Party texts to me and gave them to me to read. So I also got to know that very materialistic conception. I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death,” he has said.
Learning about communism, he said, “through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church.” As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he took pride in helping her hide the family’s Marxist literature from the authorities who were investigating her. According to the author James Carroll, Bergoglio smuggled her communist books, including Marx’s Das Kapital, into a “Jesuit library.”
“Tragically, Ballestrino herself ‘disappeared’ at the hands of security forces in 1977,” reported Vatican correspondent John Allen. “Almost three decades later, when her remains were discovered and identified, Bergoglio gave permission for her to be buried in the garden of a Buenos Aires church called Santa Cruz, the spot where she had been abducted. Her daughter requested that her mother and several other women be buried there because ‘it was the last place they had been as free people.’ Despite knowing full well that Ballestrino was not a believing Catholic, the future pope readily consented.”
These biographical details throw light on the pope’s ideological instincts. Yet many commentators have ignored them, breezily casting his leftism as a bit confused but basically harmless.
“I must say that communists have stolen our flag. The flag of the poor is Christian,” he said in 2014. Such a comment would have startled his predecessors. They didn’t see communism as a benign exaggeration. They saw it as a grave threat to God-given freedom, as it proposes that governments eliminate large swaths of individual freedom, private property and business in order to produce the “equality” of a society without economic classes.
In the early twentieth century, as Marx’s socialism spread across the world, Pope Pius XI declared the theory anathema. “No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” he said. To hear Pope Francis speak today, one might conclude the reverse: that no can be at the same time a good Catholic and an opponent of socialism.
“Inequality is the root of all evil,” Pope Francis wrote on his Twitter account in 2014. One can imagine Karl Marx blurting that out, but none of Francis’s predecessors would have made such an outrageous claim.
According to traditional Catholic teaching, the root of all evil was not inequality but Satan’s refusal to accept inequality. Out of envy of God’s superiority, Satan rebelled. He could not bear his lesser status.
He was in effect the first revolutionary, which is why the socialist agitator Saul Alinsky — a mentor to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (who did her senior thesis at Wellesley on his thought) — offered an “acknowledgment” in his book,
Rules for Radicals, to Satan. Alinsky saw him as the first champion of the “have nots.”
Were the 20th-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the “gift” of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Francis’s visit to Bolivia in July 2015.
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s proudly Marxist president, offered the pontiff that sacrilegious image of Jesus Christ. Morales described the gift as a copy of a crucifix designed by a late priest, Fr. Luis Espinal, who belonged to the Jesuit order (as does Pope Francis) and had committed his life to melding Marxism with religion. Pope Francis had honored Espinal’s memory upon his arrival in Bolivia.
Had John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI seen such a grotesque cross, they might have broken it over their knees. Not Pope Francis. He accepted the hammer-and-sickle cross warmly, telling the press on the plane ride back to Rome that “I understand this work” and that “for me it wasn’t an offense.” After the visit, Morales gushed, “I feel like now I have a Pope. I didn’t feel that before.”
The fascist pope
He mistakes libertarianism for radical individualism
By Thomas DiLorenzo
May 1, 2017
Fresh off a hate-filled rant against populism (a.k.a. consent of the governed), Pope Francis recently delivered another mean-spirited, hateful diatribe about the “grave risks associated with the invasion of . . . libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in university education.” He said this in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on April 28 (full text in English here):
http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/04/28/170428h.html
This is exactly the opposite of reality regarding university education: University education has been almost completely taken over by the pope’s fellow leftists whose true “religion” is cultural Marxism, or left-wing political correctness. He must be the only person on the planet who thinks universities are hotbeds of libertarianism. When it comes to spewing hatred toward free markets, economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and other non-socialist ideas, reality apparently has no relevance to Pope Francis.
The pope is an Argentinian Peronist, which is to say, he is a fascist. Juan Peron was the fascist ruler of Argentina whose brand of national socialism involved restricted international trade, wage-and-price controls, seizure of private property, nationalized industries, and spending lavishly in fine Keynesian fashion by printing mountains of currency. The inevitable economic ruination led to his being deposed by a military coup in 1955, after which Argentina continued to print money for decades to bail out its disastrous government regime, creating 12,000 percent hyper-inflation by the 1980s.
Only the “libertarian” ideas of the virtues of private property, markets, and economic freedom – the ideas that the pope routinely denounces with a passionate hatred – could have prevented the destruction of the Argentinian economy. He seems to think that the only problem with Peron was that he didn’t go far enough with his brand of socialism (fascism – “national” socialism in the twentieth-century German variety — being just another variety of socialism, as Friedrich Hayek explained in detail in his book
The Road to Serfdom).
In his latest attack on free societies the pope denounced libertarianism as a “selfish ideal” and a “fallacious paradigm that minimizes the common good.” Libertarianism teaches that “only the individual gives value to things,” said the Argentinian fascist. He then repeated every collectivist’s mantra that “the libertarian individual denies the value of the common good.” For good measure, he also threw in the standard leftist line that freedom supposedly causes the “marginalization of the more vulnerable majority.” Unlike the fate of the “vulnerable majority” in that Latin American socialist utopia of Venezuela, for instance.
Of course, “the common good” is a completely meaningless phrase since it implies that there exists some kind of unanimous agreement on what it is. In reality, it is simply the opinion of totalitarian-minded statists like Pope Francis who use such language in an attempt to bully others into acquiescing in their statist ideology. It is an attempt at censorship, in other words. If you disagree with them, you are an enemy of society because you oppose “the common good,” as they define it, for allegedly selfish reasons.\
The notion that the “common good” should supersede all else was the hallmark idea of twentieth-century fascism. The “25-Point Program of the Nazi Party, published in 1925, proclaimed that the whole Nazi program was based on the principle, printed in all capital letters, of ‘COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD'.
“The Aryan is not the greatest in his mental qualities,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf, “but in his noblest form he willingly subordinates his own ego to the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it”
(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin 1943 edition, p. 126). Contemporary fascists like Pope Francis continue to repeat this evil mantra.
The twentieth-century fascists understood that they must first discredit the ideas of libertarianism, which were known as “classical liberalism,” before they could get a large portion of the public to embrace their brand of socialism. In his book,
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (p. 10), Benito Mussolini wrote that
“The fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denies the State in the name of the individual” .
This is identical to what Pope Francis said in his latest attack on the free society.
Mussolini also pontificated that it was “unnatural” for government to protect individual rights, as classical liberalism, or libertarianism, contends.
“The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans… If classical liberalism spells individualism, then Fascism spells government”.
In
The Road to Serfdom , Hayek discusses the age-old collectivist hatred of “individualism” by reminding his readers that, historically, all classical liberals ever meant by “individualism” is simply respect for the individual, for individual human life in general, period. One would think that that is something a pope would embrace instead of denouncing in a speech in which he sounds more like a Vladimir Lenin or a Fidel Castro than the Vicar of Christ.
The German fascists also fully understood that libertarianism, or classical liberalism, was their mortal enemy. One of the intellectual inspirations of German fascism was Paul Lensch, author of
Three Years of World Revolution In it he explained that the “problem” with too many Germans of his day was that they “unconsciously reason from English standards.” By that he meant that too many Germans had embraced the philosophy of classical liberalism. Lensch sneered at such ideas as
“their political notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘civic right,’ of constitutionalism and parliamentarianism, derived from that individualistic conception of the world, of which English liberalism is a classical embodiment . . .”
These ideas of “old-fashioned [classical] liberalism” have been “shattered,” the Nazi theorist gloated. What “has to be done now is to get rid of these inherited political ideas . . . . Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism.” Pope Francis would undoubtedly agree.
Pope Francis,
a populist ideologue
By José A. Friedl Zapata
Translated from
LA PRENSA (Panama)
May 1, 2017
The honeymoon with Pope Francis is coming to an end worldwide. The cycle of paolatry, fortunately, has ended. His most head-on critics are found today in his native Argentina and in Europe, especially in Italy, where there is fear about the danger he poses to the Catholic Church in bringing her to a sad and potentially tragic internal confrontation.
[From his pen to God’s ears, but I am skeptical, of course, of Friedl Zapata’s conclusions, because from all that I am able to see so far, what he sees is not what appears to be the case.]
Recently, the UK
Economist published an article entitled
“Is the pope Catholic?’” colore=#0026ff]
[ [When this once-rhetorical question becomes a headline in major international publications more than once, you know there is a problem!] The magazine questioned the political manipulations from the Vatican and the pope’s appointment of dozens of new bishops to backstop his populist ideology. The criticisms in his native country have turned lapidary
[carved in stone, as it were] because of the immoral support he has given to the corrupt ex-President Cristina Kirchner while waging war against the current President Mauricio Macri because the latter advocates free-market economy and opposes populism.
Elisa Carrio, an Argentine political leader who is also a fervent Catholic, has said that
“The pope instigates violence in Argentina with his political interventions”. And in Italy, a most remarkable protest by street posters was launched against him last February criticizing his most salient actions purported to be ‘acts of mercy’.
Last year, best-selling Catholic author and journalist Antonio Socci published the best-selling
Non e Francesco [He is not Francis] in which, using documented facts, he presents a near-thriller of the complots and manipulations that led to Bergoglio’s election as pope that Socci believes could be a basis to invalidate his election.
[ [Theoretically and based on a lot of ‘ifs’, but with no realistic probability of happening!] On the other hand, one of the leaders of Italy’s political parties, Matteo Salvini of Lega Nord, habitually appears in his meetings and rallies wearing a T-shirt that reads
“Il mio Papa e Benedetto”
Globally, the criticisms are growing about Bergoglio’s ‘inaction’ on cases of clerical sex abuse in the Church. In recent weeks, he silently commuted the penalties against a group of pedophile priests in keeping with his projection of a ‘merciful’ Church.
In terms of his ‘foreign policy’, this pope’s populist ideology has resulted in a rosary of dangerous mistakes, starting with his hostility towards the new government in Argentina.
- When he visited Cuba, he failed to meet with the opposition to the Castro regime, and he gained absolutely nothing in advancing human rights for the suffering Cuban people.
- His policy in the Middle East is decidedly scandalous in failing to support persecuted Christians, but seeking instead a rapprochement with Islam without getting anything in return.
- And his policy in Venezuela - his intervention there in which he has lent himself to President Maduro’s blackmail by not making a clear and frontal critique of his ruling criminal system - is a mistake that is politically serious and morally despicable.
Finally, there is his dangerous economic thinking.
- His odium for the free-market economy and capitalism is well known, as is his morbid addiction to statism (‘let the government do everything’).
- He has made brutal statements such as that
b] ‘capitalism kills’ which he says in his exhortation
Evangelii gaudium. - He has never hidden his sympathy for populist governments because they fit with his simplistic view of the ‘poor’ whom he considers the repository of all Christian vitues.
- If the poor ever stop being poor and raise themselves to the middle class, for which Bergoglio feels contempt, would they then lose their Christian virtues?
[ [A question I always ask – because the bleeding hearts do have a vested interest in keeping the poor poor, otherwise what cause would they bleed for?] That is why his addresses are always addressed to ‘the poor’ never to the middle class
[as if they do not exist. In fact, he once admitted candidly that yes, he does tend to forget about the middle class, even if it is the next step up for his beloved ‘poor’, and the rise of the middle class globally in the past several decades following the Second World War has been one of the markers for the relative decline in global poverty!]
- He ignores, hypocritically, that populist economies are factories of poverty run in the name of ‘the poor’, denying the complexirty of modern societies. - He ignores that competitive capitalism and the free market are – why not sya it? – the best option we have to return freedom and merit to our under-developed societies.
- His idea of ‘people’ is never linked to the word freedom or democracy. In his visits so far to Latin America, Africa and the United States, some interesting statistics emerge that are very suggestive of his ideology: In his speeches, he cumulatively used the word ‘people’ 356 times, the word ‘individual’ 14 times, and democracy 10 times.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/05/2017 06:49]