I am thankful to 1Peter5 and the ever-diligent Ms. Hickson for this interview with George Neumayr - which is the next best thing right now
to reading his new book about Jorge Bergoglio. Obviously, Neumayr was never taken in by Bergoglio from the moment his election was made
known, and much of it has to do with what Neumayr, who was Jesuit-educated, knew about the Society of Jesus as it was in 2013 (and the
decades preceding that).
Nonetheless, Neumayr cites the research he chose to undertake for this book - and whereas one could say that because he started out with a
negative hypothesis about Bergoglio, then the 'evidence' he uncovers would tend to support that hypothesis. One will have to read his book,
and I hope, for Neumayr's own journalistic reputation, that he was wise enough to present his case objectively and fairly...
In any case, his conclusions - based on far more evidence than most of us have on hand or have access to - is exactly what we who protest
this pope so vehemently and wholeheartedly have long deduced...
Neumayr is currently a contributing editor at American Spectator. He was editor of the Catholic World Report before that. He is
co-author of an earlier book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.
An interview with George Neumayr,
author of 'The Political Pope'
by Maike Hickson
May 6, 2017
Editor’s Note: On 2 May, George Neumayr’s book, The Political Pope: How Pope Francis is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives, was published. OnePeterFive reached out to him, and he kindly gave us an interview. George Neumayr also gave us permission to publish Chapter One of his book, which we post here below, right after the interview itself. We strongly encourage our readers to support George Neumayr’s courageous book by buying it. It is available on Amazon.
What inspired you to write a book on Pope Francis?
From the first moment I saw him, I knew that he was going to be a Modernist wrecking ball, and he struck me from the beginning as the prototypical “progressive” Jesuit. I knew it was an extremely bad sign that the Church would name the first Jesuit pope at the very moment the Jesuit Order was in its most corrupt and heterodox condition.
I knew it was going to be a distressingly historic pontificate, and from the first moment of Francis’s papacy I began thinking that his pontificate would be a good subject for a book. As it unfolded, it became clearer and clearer that someone need to chronicle this consequentially chaotic pontificate.
You studied at the Jesuit University of San Francisco. What was your first response when you saw and heard Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in the Church’s history?
Having gone to a Jesuit university, I am very familiar with the flakes and frauds that populate that order. When I heard the pope, in the first few months of his pontificate, engage in non-stop left-wing babble, it reminded me of all the nonsense that I heard as a student from similar “progressive” Jesuits.
The program of Francis was so obviously set to promote political liberalism while downplaying doctrine; that was the formula of trendy and empty Catholicism that I saw on display at the Jesuit University of San Francisco.
What approach did you take in order to be able to make a proportionate characterization of Pope Francis as pope in his actions and words?
I went back and looked at his time at Buenos Aires, Argentina, at his formation in the Jesuit Order, I read all of his available speeches and writings – when he was a bishop, before he was pope; I read all the existing biographies about him; I talked to Latin American priests, I talked to Jesuits, I talked to Vatican officials, I talked to Catholic activists and Catholic academics and canon lawyers. Given the sensitivity of the topic, most of the people were only willing to speak anonymously with me. I tried to look at all the salient news items that relate to Bergoglio, before he was pope and when he was pope.
What is the main conclusion of your research?
The undeniable conclusion is that the Catholic Church is suffering under a bad pope and that the cardinals must address this crisis.
How do you describe in your book the political worldview of Pope Francis? In which fields of politics does he show his left-leaning tendencies?
Pope Francis is a product of political leftism and theological Modernism. His mind has been shaped by all of the post-enlightenment heresies and ideologies from Marx to Freud to Darwin. He is the realization of Cardinal Carlo Martini’s vision of a Modernist Church that conforms to the heresies of the Enlightenment.
On almost all intellectual fronts, Francis is a follower of the Modernist school. He is a student of Modernist Biblical Scholarship, which can be seen in his ludicrous interpretation of certain passages from the Gospel: such as the time when he described the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as a metaphor and not a miracle. On more than one occasion, he said that it was not a miracle but a lesson in sharing: “This is the miracle: rather than a multiplication it is a sharing, inspired by faith and prayer. Everyone eats and some is left over: it is the sign of Jesus, the Bread of God for humanity.”
Do you think that Pope Francis, in his more political statements, misuses his office as Head of the Catholic Church?
Yes, this pontificate is a blatant example of out-of-control clericalism. Pope Francis is using the pulpit of the papacy, not to present the teachings of the Church, but, rather, to promote his personal political agenda.
Are his political statements in line with Catholic teaching?
Many of his statements are not in line with the Church’s teaching, as I document in the book. Pope Francis is the worst teacher of the Faith in the history of the Catholic Church. One could not trust him to teach an elementary school religion class.
When describing Pope Francis as a more left-leaning man, could you give us evidence for that? Which Marxist authors for example did he admire or approve of? Which political figures of the left are admired by him?
I speak about this at the beginning of the book. His mentor was Esther Ballestrino de Careaga who was a very fervent Communist. Francis has acknowledged that he had teachers who were Communists who influenced him. I point out in my book that he also met with the widow of Paulo Freire, the author of the book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed which is a classic of the Socialist left in Latin America. [Of course, the meeting in itself would not be significant except in a specific context or if it then went on to have consequences that bear on the lives of many people and/or the teachings of Bergoglio as pope.]
Which practical acts as pope show that Pope Francis actively supports Marxist or revolutionary movements?
I document in the book all of the liberation theologians whom Pope Francis has rehabilitated. Leonardo Boff is at the top of the list. He is an openly Socialist priest who left the priesthood but who is now in the good graces of the Vatican so much so that he was a counselor to the papal encyclical Laudato si. He also reinstated to the priesthood the Communist priest Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann from Nicaragua who is still in touch with President Daniel Ortega. That priest has now resumed his Communist polemics.
How would you describe Pope Francis’s moral teaching in relation with his political teaching? Is there a parallel between his political and moral liberalism?
He pays homage to the moral relativism and socialism that are at the heart of the global left. It is no coincidence that his signature phrases have been “Who am I to judge” and “Inequality is the root of all evil.”
He is a darling of the global left because he is advancing many of the items of their agenda, such as climate-change activism, open borders, and abolition of lifetime imprisonment (a position still so far left that not even the U.S. Democrats take that position). He is a spokesman for gun control, for world government, for the redistribution of wealth by central planners.
The pope is pandering to the willfulness inherent in liberalism which takes both the form of moral relativism and a form of a “virtue signaling” socialism. He gratifies the liberals’ egos by offering them a pontificate of “virtue signaling” without any teaching of actual virtue. In other words, liberals like to appear good but not be good.
And a pontificate which combines political liberalism with moral or doctrinal relativism agrees with their self-indulgent politics. They also like a dash of non-threatening spirituality in their politics which a Jesuit dilettante from Latin America provides them with.
You talk in your book also about Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. Is this document in line with Catholic teaching as it has been always taught by the Catholic Church?
Amoris Laetitia is one of the most scandalous documents in the history of the Church. Pope Francis gives an obvious wink and a nod to adulterers in footnote 329 of that document (“In such situations, many [divorced and “remarried”] people, knowing and accepting the possibility of living ‘as brothers and sisters’ which the Church offers them, point out that if certain expressions of intimacy are lacking, it often happens that faithfulness is endangered and the good of the children suffers.”).
In my book, I speak about the intentional ambiguity of that document and that Archbishop Bruno Forte, who helped to write the draft of the 2014 Synod on the Family, had acknowledged the deviousness of the document and said that it was typical of a Jesuit; and that Pope Francis himself had told Forte at the time that, if they had explicitly endorsed adultery, it would have caused a backlash, and, so, they had to introduce this topic into the Synod document more subtly.
Are there other fields of Catholic teaching where you would say that Pope Francis departs from orthodoxy?
Pope Francis is subverting the Church’s teaching on divorce and thereby subverting teaching on many of the Sacraments such as Marriage, Penance, Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders.
He is subverting the Church’s sacramental theology. I chronicle in my book many of his subversions of Church teaching, from his support of the use of contraceptives with regard to the Zika virus, to his religious indifferentism and his antinomianism, which has become a hallmark of his pontificate. Pope Francis frequently pits the law against mercy which is the essence of the antinomian heresy.
What do you say about the response of the prelates of the Church, especially the cardinals, to some of the problematic parts of Amoris Laetitia?
The response has been feeble. Bishop Athanasius Schneider is an outstanding exception, he has spoken forthrightly about the heresy at work within that document.
What should the cardinals be doing now? Are there ways for the cardinals to correct a pope?
My position is that the cardinals should forthrightly confront the pope on this matter and make it clear to him that the heterodox position to which he is adhering is absolutely unacceptable.[They have, in their letter last September. They can't confront him any more directly since he refuses to give them an audience with him.] And then, if he fails to respond to the dubia, they must move to a formal correction. [Much good that would do, except to go on the record! If he can openly ignore and/or distort what Jesus himself says in the Gospels, everyone else is less-than-crap to him.]
What are the reasons for the silence of so many prelates of the Church in the face of heterodox teachings coming out of Rome?
One reason is their lack of conviction, another reason is shameful careerism, the third reason is that many of the bishops are cowards before the spirit of the age, and a lot of these “conservatives” are Modernists in slow motion.
How is it possible that such a revolutionary pope could be elected as head of the Catholic Church? Do you touch upon this matter in your book?
As I argue in the book, Pope Francis is the culmination of the Modernist movement which goes back over a hundred years. Modernism has been gathering strength in the Church since the Enlightenment, and it picked up speed in the 19th century and went into overdrive in the 20th century, producing the pontificate of Pope Francis.
Pope Pius X’s encyclical on Modernism reads almost like a clinical description of the relativistic pontificate of Francis. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were later speed bumps in that road, inasmuch as they realized that the “Spirit of Vatican II” was wreaking havoc within the Church. But, with Francis now at the wheel, those speed bumps have been completely disregarded, and he seeks to complete the Modernist revolution.
How would you describe Modernism, and what is fundamentally wrong with it?
The essence of Modernism is the absorption of modern liberalism into Catholicism.
So how should the Church find its way back to a strong and healthy response to any weakening and undermining of its teaching as it has been handed down to us from the Apostles?
All of the reforms can be reduced to one reform: a return to orthodoxy and holiness.
You are of the younger Catholic generation, born in 1972. What is and was your own response to the Catholic Church as it presented itself to you in the Novus Ordo Mass, but also in the Catechesis and in all the other aspects of Catholic life? What went wrong and what is missing?
I belong to a generation of Catholics that asked for bread and only received stones.
What do you intend to effect with your book, and what would you say that we Catholic authors and journalists should and could do in this current situation of confusion in order to help the faithful?
My hope is that a book like this would contribute to the restoration of orthodoxy and holiness in the Church, and I think it is the duty of journalists to speak the truth without fear or favor.
Excerpt from THE POLITICAL POPE
by George Neumayr
Chapter ONE
The Pope They Have Been Waiting For
"You must straighten out your position with the Church,” Pope John Paul II shouted at a cowering Ernesto Cardenal, a Catholic priest turned Marxist activist. In violation of his religious vows, Cardenal had joined the communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and Pope John Paul II was scolding him before the cameras of the entire world. That sensational scene in 1983 on a Managua airport runway provided one of the most startling images of Pope John Paul II’s anti-communist pontificate.
So strong were Pope John Paul II’s anti-communist credentials and so effective was his anti-Soviet advocacy that Kremlin leaders, according to historians, hired a Turkish gunman to assassinate him. That attempt failed, and Pope John Paul II continued to denounce the Soviets until their empire crumbled in 1991.
Joseph Ratzinger also opposed communism fiercely. After serving as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger succeeded John Paul II in 2005 and took as his papal name Benedict XVI. In his role as doctrinal guardian of the Church, Ratzinger repeatedly warned the faithful to reject “liberation theology,” a Marxist-inspired ideology disguised as concern for the poor that the Soviet Union’s KGB spies had helped smuggle into Latin America’s Catholic Church in the 1950s.
“The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: liberation theology,” according to Ion Mihai Pacepa, who served as a spymaster for Romania’s secret police in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Soviets had long eyed the Catholic Church for infiltration. In the 1950s, Bella Dodd, the former head of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party of America, testified before the U.S. Congress that communists occupied some of the “highest places” in the Catholic Church.
“We put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within,” she said. “The idea was for these men to be ordained, and then climb the ladder of influence and authority as monsignors and bishops.” As an active party member, Dodd said that she knew of “
four cardinals within the Vatican who were working for us.”
According to Pacepa, the KGB took “secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and used it as cover for converting liberation theology into a South American revolutionary tool.” Seeking to spread atheistic Marxism among the religious peasant
s of Latin America, Soviet leaders instructed the KGB to send agents into ecclesiastical circles. In 1968, Latin America’s bishops loudly endorsed liberation theology at a conference in Medellín, Colombia. The KGB served as a puppet master at the event, reported Pacepa.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo, and [Soviet premier Nikita] Khrushchev was confident they could be converted to communism through the judicious manipulation of religion,” he wrote.
“In 1968, the KGB was able to maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a conference in Medellín, Colombia. At the KGB’s request, my [spies] provided logistical assistance to the organizers. The official task of the conference was to help eliminate poverty in Latin America. Its undeclared goal was to legitimize a KGB-created religious movement dubbed ‘liberation theology,’ the secret task of which was to incite Latin America’s poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of poverty’ generated by the United States.”
Against this historical backdrop, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI viewed the spread of liberation theology in Latin America with alarm. They feared that a Marxist-influenced ideology, which progressive theologians within the Catholic Church were harnessing to their own long-percolating socialist politics, would corrupt the Catholic faith.
Pope Benedict XVI called liberation theology a “singular heresy.” He argued that it deceives the faithful by concealing “Marxist dialectics” within seemingly harmless advocacy for the lower classes. He drew attention to Marxism’s philosophical incompatibility with Christianity and disputed the claim of many churchmen that Christianity could purify the Marxist elements of socialist thought.
How shockingly different statements from the Holy See sound today under Pope Francis.
The first Latin American pope in Church history, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has generated headlines not for scolding Marxists but for supporting them, not for rebuking liberation theologians but for honoring them.
Under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, the Western media spoke disapprovingly of a “holy war against liberation theology.” Now media outlets eagerly run stories about Pope Francis’s sympathy for it. “Liberation Theology Rehabilitation Continues at Vatican,” ran a characteristic headline on a story from the Associated Press.
In one of his first major interviews, Pope Francis said that liberation theologians have a “high concept of humanity.” A few months after he became pope on March 13, 2013, Francis welcomed the founding father of liberation theology, the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, to the Vatican as an honored guest.
Gutiérrez had disappeared from high ecclesiastical circles under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI after making a Marxist appeal for “effective participation in the struggle which the exploited classes have undertaken against their oppressors.”
But after the elevation of Francis, Gutiérrez suddenly found himself basking in praise. Vatican officials pronounced him an impeccable thinker, responsible for one of “the most important currents in 20th century Catholic theology.”
The Vatican’s newspaper,
L’Osservatore Romano, asserted that the election of Pope Francis would bring liberation theology out of the “shadows to which it has been relegated for some years, at least in Europe.”
Leonardo Boff, who has long gloried in his status as a renegade liberation theologian from Brazil, also enjoyed a stunning change of fortune after the election of Pope Francis. Owing to his open Marxism, Boff was silenced by Pope John Paul II’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Boff was also condemned by the Vatican for his threatened hijinks at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, activism that eventually led Boff to leave the priesthood.
But these days Boff finds himself back in the Church’s good graces. Pope Francis recruited him to serve as an adviser for Laudato Si’, his 2015 encyclical endorsing the political agenda of climate change activists.
Taking advantage of the new wind blowing from the Vatican, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, whose role in Nicaragua’s Marxist revolutionary government in the 1970s led to his suspension from the priesthood, sent in 2014 a request to Pope Francis that his priestly faculties be reinstated. Pope Francis granted the request.
“The Holy Father has given his benevolent assent that Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann be absolved from the canonical censure inflicted upon him, and entrusts him to the superior general of the institute (Maryknoll) for the purpose of accompanying him in the process of reintegration into the ministerial priesthood,” announced the Vatican.
D’Escoto, among his other Marxist activities, had served as an official at the aforementioned KGB-controlled World Council of Churches.
No sooner had Pope Francis granted d’Escoto’s request than the recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize resumed his Marxist polemics, calling capitalism the “most un-Christian doctrine and practice ever devised by man to keep us separate and unequal in a kind of global apartheid.”
He condemned Pope John Paul II for an “abuse of authority” and rhapsodized about Fidel Castro as an inspired figure whose murderous regime heralded “the reign of God on this earth that is the alternative to the empire.”
Even now as a priest in good standing under Pope Francis, d’Escoto lobbies for the Libyans, remains a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and continues to serve as an adviser to Daniel Ortega, whom the Soviets planted in the presidency of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
According to Boff, Pope Francis will eventually rehabilitate all of the condemned liberation theologians from Latin America. Boff believes that Pope Francis is waiting until their old critic, Pope Benedict XVI, dies.
“I believe that as long as the retired pope lives, he will neither reconcile nor redeem these theologians,” according to Boff. “But, when he is by himself, he will rescue the 500 theologians whose heads were severed. I believe this pope is capable of dismantling this machine of punishment and control, and leave it to the local churches.”
After only four years of his pontificate, Francis has emerged as one of the most political popes in the history of the Church. His left-wing activism is relentless, ranging across causes from the promotion of global warming theory to support for amnesty and open borders to the abolition of lifetime imprisonment.
That alone would make this papacy historically significant. But the ambitions of Pope Francis go well beyond an unusually aggressive political dilettantism.
As this book will detail, he is not only championing the radical political agenda of the global left but also subverting centuries-old Catholic teaching on faith and morals, evident in his unprecedented support for granting the sacrament of Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried and in his drive to dilute the Church’s moral and theological commitments.
At a time of widespread moral relativism and assaults on marriage, his 2014–2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family served not to strengthen the Church’s stances but to weaken them. For the first time in the history of the Church, a pope approved of Catholics in a state of adultery. He also authorized his aides to float unprecedented proposals in favor of blessing the “positive aspects” of gay relationships and couples living together outside of marriage.
Amidst this doctrinal confusion, many cardinals are beginning to feel buyer’s remorse.
“The more he talks, the worse it gets,” says a Vatican official, who asked to remain anonymous, in an interview for this book. “Many bishops and cardinals are terrified to speak out, but they are in a state of apoplexy. The atmosphere is so politicized and skewed. The Church is becoming unrecognizable.”
“We haven’t hit bottom,” says an American priest interviewed for this book. He describes his parishioners as “distressed,” so much so that
he carries around a list of all the popes to remind them that “bad popes don’t live forever.”
“I have never been so discouraged about the prospects for the Church,” an unnamed prelate said to Traditionalist magazine in 2015. In an interview with the Spanish Catholic weekly Vida Nueva, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former head of the Vatican’s highest court who was removed from that position by Pope Francis in 2013, disclosed that “many have expressed their concerns to me” and that “at this very critical moment, there is a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder.”
These are “dark times,” Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan has said. The liberalism of this pontificate, he argues, is exposing the faithful to “spiritual danger” and creating the conditions for the “fast and easy spreading of heterodox doctrines.”
“There are evident manifestations of uneasiness,” according to the Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister in an interview with Italia Oggi. “It’s beginning to look as if the cardinals made a terrible mistake when they decided that this particular Catholic should be a pope,” wrote the British Catholic journalist Damian Thompson.
“In the Vatican, some people are already sighing: ‘Today, he has already again another different idea from yesterday,’” the German philosopher Robert Spaemann has said. “One does not fully get rid of the impression of chaos.”
In an interview for this book, Michael Hichborn, president of a Catholic watchdog organization in Virginia called the Lepanto Institute, recounted,
“I had a meeting with a bishop who turned to me and said, ‘How do you remain loyal to Peter when Peter is not loyal to the Church?’ He was genuinely confused and felt stuck.”
Such bewilderment leaves Pope Francis untroubled. He even romanticizes his reckless heterodox activism. “I want a mess,” he said at the 2013 World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro. “We knew that in Rio there would be a great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!” Many Catholics found this a puzzling goal to set for the Church. But his pontificate has undeniably lived up to it. “Mission accomplished,” quipped Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, in 2014.
Supremely confident in his chaotic course, Pope Francis is shrugging off the mounting concerns and delighting in his reputation as a socialist and modernist maverick.
[The rest of the chapter is the excerpt published earlier by the American Spectator - and reposted on this page - about Bergoglio's Communist mentor.
The Spectator has published another excerpt from THE POLITICAL POPE - in which the unholy alliance is not so much between this pope and George Soros but the Democratic Party which Soros bankrolls for its most insidious 'popular' mobilizations..]
The unholy alliance between
George Soros and Pope Francis
The election of a liberal Jesuit to the papacy thrilled Democrats in the United States, whose unholy alliance with the Catholic left goes back many decades. Barack Obama, one of the pope’s most prominent supporters, has long been a beneficiary of that alliance. The faculty at Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., ranked as one of the top donors to his campaign.
In a grim irony, Obama, whose presidency substantially eroded religious freedom in America,
rose to power not in spite of the Catholic Church but because of it. The archdiocese of Chicago helped bankroll his radicalism in the 1980s.
As he recounts in his memoirs, he began his work as a community organizer in the rectory rooms of Holy Rosary parish on Chicago’s South Side. The Alinskyite organization for which he worked — the Developing Communities Project — received tens of thousands of dollars from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Obama was close to the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. A proponent of the “Seamless Garment” movement within the Catholic Church in the 1980s, a movement that downplayed abortion and emphasized political liberalism, Bernardin was drawn to the socialism and relativism of the liberal elite.
He was so “gay-friendly” that he requested that the “Windy City Gay Chorus” perform at his funeral. He embodied Obama’s conception of a “good” bishop and
one can see in his admixture of left-wing politics and relativistic nonjudgmental theology a foreshadowing of the rise of Pope Francis.
Cardinal Bernardin put pressure on his priests to work with Obama and even paid for Obama’s plane fare out to a 1980 training session in Los Angeles organized by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. The conference was held at a Catholic college in Southern California, Mount St. Mary’s, which has long been associated with Alinsky’s group.
This alliance between the Catholic left and the Democratic left explains the honorary degree Obama received from Notre Dame in 2009, even as he plotted to persecute the Church under Obamacare’s contraceptive and abortifacient mandate.
Notre Dame’s former president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who supported honoring Obama, had been close to Monsignor John Egan, the socialist who started the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and sat on Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation board.
The unholy alliance also explains how the Democratic Party, despite its support for abortion and gay marriage, won a majority of the Catholic vote in Obama’s two presidential elections.
At the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, nuns such as Sister Simone Campbell shared the stage with abortion activists from Planned Parenthood. A liberal dean of a Catholic university, Sister Marguerite Kloos, even got caught in an act of voter fraud that year, forging the signature of a deceased nun on a ballot.
As Thomas Pauken writes in
The Thirty Years War,
“the radicalization of elements of the Catholic clergy turned out to be one of Saul Alinsky’s most significant accomplishments.”
The election of Pope Francis was seen by Alinskyite activists as a dream come true. “I think that Pope Francis is quite an inspiring figure,” Al Gore said at UC Berkeley in early 2015. The former vice president turned radical environmental activist called Pope Francis a “phenomenon” and laughed at his liberalism: “Is the pope Catholic?” Gore said that he is so “inspiring to me” that “I could become a Catholic.”
Leftists frequently turn up at the Vatican, often invited by one of Pope Francis’s closest advisers, the socialist Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.
Before the pope’s visit to the U.S., a group of left-wing activists and officials from unions and organizations such as the SEIU and PICO (an Alinskyite group founded by the liberal Jesuit Father John Baumann) descended on the Vatican to confer with curial officials about the trip.
Around the same time, over 90 members of the U.S. Congress sent Pope Francis a letter, urging him to focus upon politically liberal themes. The leader of this group was Rosa DeLauro, a Catholic who supports abortion rights.
In 2016, it was revealed through disclosures by WikiLeaks that the billionaire socialist George Soros bankrolled much of this lobbying. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to shape the pope’s visit to the U.S. According to the leaked documents, Soros’s Open Society Foundation sought to create a “critical mass” of American bishops and lay Catholics supportive of the pope’s priorities.
The documents made special mention of Maradiaga, a champion of PICO, as a useful ally for ensuring that the pope’s speeches in the U.S. pushed socialism
The hacked e-mails exposed the depth of the plotting:
Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States in September will include a historic address to Congress, a speech at the United Nations, and a visit to Philadelphia for the “World Meeting of Families.” In order to seize this moment, we (Open Society) will support PICO’s organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using the influence of Cardinal Rodriguez, the Pope’s senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.
In the e-mails, the Soros operatives make it explicitly clear that they view Pope Francis as a propagandist for their causes:
At the end of the day, our visit affirmed an overall strategy: Pope Francis, as a leader of global stature, will challenge the “idolatry of the marketplace” in the U.S. and offer a clarion call to change the policies that promote exclusion and indifference to those most marginalized. We believe that this generational moment can launch extraordinary organizing that promotes moral choices and helps establish a moral compass. We believe that the papal visit, and the work we are collectively doing around it, can help many in our country move beyond the stale ideological conflicts that dominate our policy debates and embrace new opportunities to advance the common good.
After the meeting, they rejoiced at the success of the meeting, informing John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign:
Our visits were dialogues. We conveyed our view that the Pope is a World leader of historical significance; that his message of exclusion, alarm over rising inequality and concern about globalized indifference is important for the U.S. to hear and see animated during his visit; and that we intend to amplify his remarks so that we have a more profound moral dialogue about policy choices through the election cycle of 2016. In our meetings with relevant officials, we strongly recommended that the Pope emphasize — in words and deeds — the need to confront racism and racial hierarchy in the US…
Conversations that were originally scheduled for thirty minutes stretched into two hour dialogues. As in our breakfast conversation with Cardinal Rodríguez, senior Vatican officials shared profound insights demonstrating an awareness of the moral, economic and political climate in America. We were encouraged to believe that the Pope will confront race through a moral frame.
Further disclosures from WikiLeaks confirmed the plotting of Democratic officials to infiltrate the Catholic Church in order to “foment revolution” beneficial to their radical causes. In 2012, in the midst of Catholic backlash over Obama’s contraceptive mandate, John Podesta received a note from Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress.
“There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church,” Newman wrote to Podesta. “I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would ‘plant the seeds of revolution,’ or who would plant them.”
Podesta replied that the Democrats had set up Catholic front groups to plant those seeds: “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring moments, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”
Podesta was wrong. It would come from the top down, as the following year Francis rose to the papacy and began politicizing the Church in the exact manner that the progressives had envisioned. Indeed, Podesta would later encourage Hillary Clinton to enlist the pope’s leftism in her campaign. In one hacked e-mail, he advised that she send out a tweet to “thank him for pointing out that the people at the bottom will get clobbered the most by climate change.”
Podesta and his aides also discussed how they could exploit Pope Francis’s support for Obama’s Iran deal. Podesta was sent a report in which Christopher Hale of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good proposes getting bishops and cardinals to lean on senators temporizing about the deal.
In another e-mail, which underscores how the media and the Democrats teamed up to enlist Pope Francis in their politics, a liberal columnist, Brent Budowsky, counsels Podesta: “John, HRC should get ahead of the progressive curve before the pope’s trip to the U.S. in September, which will be big deal for a week, saturation coverage, heavy progressive populist, impact after he leaves affecting the trajectory of the campaign. Here’s my take, written more in news analysis style……Brent”
In the attached column, Budowsky writes, “The visit of such a popular pope will almost certainly give a lift in principle to Democrats and liberals who cheer Francis and rededicate themselves to the values and visions he stands for.”
Pope Francis has been influenced by
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that sought to spread Marxism among the peasants of Latin America. The Alinskyite left in America regards that book as a classic.
The author of the book is the late Paulo Freire and Pope Francis has made a point of visiting with Freire’s widow. The meeting was set up by Cardinal Hummes, the Brazilian whom Francis credits with inspiring him to name himself after St. Francis.
Pope Francis “considered the meeting with me because of the writings of Paulo, because of the importance of Paulo for the education of oppressed people, poor people, black people, for women, for minorities,” Ana Freire said.
'The Church is becoming unrecognizable'! Excuse me, but 'the church' that Jorge Bergoglio is leading is most certainly
not 'the Church', not the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, not the one true Church of Christ, but this pope's very
own creation 'the church of Bergoglio', in which, of course, only some token features of the one true Church are
recognizable because they are only kept there to camouflage this Satanic monstrosity that is being imposed on the faithful.