Go Ahead, Make …
Continuing our theme for the week (which isn’t “Catholic Church/Pope Bashing” as some have accused me of, by any means) I give you my own introductary opinion as usual, before turning us over to Matthew Vadum and his piece from yesterday’s FrontPageMag. My reason for squeezing as much out of this Pope’s behavior and forward inclinations, is because of his incessant intrusion into the prevailing political agenda of the world, as opposed to taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ into a fallen world and making it better, by tethering it to Judeo-Christian precepts.
Catholicism has always been an ideology imposed upon the Gospel, as opposed to declaring the Gospel; they aren’t compatible. One is political, the other spiritual. There are no legitimate teachings of Jesus that support the need for a Pope or give priests the power of intercession, absolution of sins, etc. As a matter of biblical fact, Jesus was vehemently opposed to those who followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit; he also opposed vain repetition. Jesus to this day, is not on record as declaring the path to God was through the saints, or Mary; nowhere in scripture did he say that. Yet the Catholic Church has promulgated that contrary belief for centuries.
The Reformation happened for very good reasons and brought great liberty and enlightenment with it, and was the origin of the Enlightenment and political liberty. Pope Francis on the other hand, is presiding over The Deformation, and with Obama’s help, the release of every destructive force on Earth; it’s just that plain and simple to witness for every evangelical believer on Jesus Christ.
Marxists have been fascinated with the Roman Catholic Church power structure for decades. Gramsci studied the Catholic Church and considered it a prime target for infiltration by leftist priests. As a religious organisation ruled by one man, with that man and his army of priests possessing the power of intercession before God, the opportunities for abuse of that power would appeal to Marxists like honey to bears. Priests are believed to have the ability to absolve sinners of their sin, and in the past, excommunicate sinners from God. That is the exact thing the “Global Warmunists” are doing with Global Warming. They want “Deniers” punished by social ostracization, prison, and no doubt death, but they don’t dare say that – well, not yet anyway. Now the Left has succeeded in getting control of the largest Christian church and the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth. Evil will for sure follow.
Good to see Vadum give this Marxist Pope the excoriation he deserves. What were the Cardinals who elected him thinking? How could he be so much worse than his immediate predecessor? Good points to consider as we go to Matthew Vadum and his excellent piece…
Two years into his reign, Pope Francis has emerged as an extreme socialist obsessed with the usual phony leftist problems such as manmade global warming, American institutional racism, and income inequality.
Muslims are indiscriminately slaughtering Christians around the world while Christianity itself seems on the verge of being eclipsed globally by Islam, but these things barely register with this pope.
This pseudo-intellectual pope keeps on spouting the same misanthropic Marxist platitudes as he hitches his papacy to global warming, the new international totalitarian cause. Sounding like Mao Zedong, Francis said a “bold cultural revolution” was needed to save the planet.
The pope ignores the keen insight of former Czech President Vaclav Klaus who likened environmentalists to watermelons: they are green on the outside and red on the inside. After the collapse of the Soviet Union leftists the world over migrated to the environmentalist movement and began regurgitating the party line, which is that human activity, and in particular, capitalism, is killing the planet. Mocking the Enlightenment, Francis accepts their unscientific drivel on faith and in the process transports the papacy back to the Dark Ages.
Christians and communists are the same, Francis maintains. Communists are closeted Christians who “have stolen our flag,” he says. Why the pope would want to be associated in any way with communists is unclear. He ought to know that it was V.I. Lenin who said, “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy we manage to shoot, the better.”
Lenin and his successors in the U.S.S.R. followed through. Priests, monks, and nuns were scalped, crucified, given Communion with molten lead, drowned, strangled, and thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar. In Republican Spain, nuns were raped before being shot, and people associated with the church were forced to swallow rosary beads, thrown down mine shafts, and made to dig their own graves before being buried alive in them.
Anyone with eyes knows that the proliferation of capitalism over the past two decades has lifted a billion people out of dire poverty — and in coming decades is projected to rescue another billion from pauperism — but Francis robotically slams global capitalism, or “globalization” as the Left calls it, foolishly blaming markets for poverty. Markets, not handouts, accomplish humanitarian feats that the Roman Catholic Church could never, ever hope to match.
It’s one thing to preach charity and warn against becoming preoccupied with worldly things, but the pope’s harangues suggest he actually believes capitalism, a system of abundance and uplift that is the greatest eliminator of poverty the world has ever known, exploits and punishes the poor.
Some of Pope Francis’s statements sound like they could have come from the deranged late dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The pope condemns technology, including air conditioning and automobiles, along with consumerism, markets, inequality, waste, modernity, ideologies, urbanization, suburbs,multinational corporations, and financial speculation. Presumably he agrees with Bernie Sanders who said there are hungry children in the world because we have too many different varieties of deodorants.
The pope sometimes says things one might expect to hear coming from Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. In one interview Francis ranted against capitalism like a rabid community organizer.
We are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up any more, a system that to survive, must make war, as all great empires have done. But as a third world war can’t be waged, they make regional wars … they produce and sell weapons, and with this, the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, are resolved …
V.I. Lenin, of course, shared this view that capitalism creates warfare states.
And if he were alive today, Lenin would no doubt rush to join the global warming cult in order to get communism on the march again.He would be manning the barricades at an Occupy Wall Street rally while the pope passionately embraces the boneheaded idea that so-called anthropogenic climate change disproportionately affects the poor and is certain to hurt impoverished people in the long run. He ignorantly opines in his new encyclical titled Laudato Si’ (Praised Be) that “[t]he earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” smearing those who disagree that mankind is ruining the planet by claiming they suffer from “obstructionist attitudes.” This rhetorical tack seems much like the Marxist refrain that when the exploited masses fail to recognize their true plight they are beset by a “false consciousness.”
Republican officeholders don’t agree with the pope’s big government solutions.
As National Journal reports, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a practicing Catholic, questioned the pope’s activism. “When you talk about unpredictable science, I have to ask where’s the nexus between that and the theology of the Vatican?” King said. “I’ve studied the science … and I doubt the pope is going to embrace my position. But this is science, not theology.”
Another Catholic GOPer, Ohio Gov. John Kasich said:
The environment was given to us by the Lord and it needs to be taken care of. It shouldn’t be worshiped; that’s called pantheism. So I think the pope pointing out the fact that we need to take care of this environment is good. I don’t agree with his conclusion that all of it is bad because of free enterprise because it’s lifted people out of poverty and he cares about the poor and so do I.
Roman Catholics are not, strictly speaking, required to obey papal encyclicals, but such high-profile communiques are supposed to carry great moral authority given their source. Even if they disagree with scientific or political statements in the document, Catholics are expected to consider what the pope has to say. “I think people need to accept that with an open and docile heart,” Father Thomas Petri, vice president and academic dean at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., told the Catholic News Agency.
Saul Alinsky, prophet of Satan…
By accepting the patently absurd theory that carbon dioxide, the gas we all expel from our lungs that is also essential to life on earth, is a pollutant, Francis is using his office to help environmentalists argue for stricter regulations over industry. Carbon-emission restrictions shrink economic output, leaving everyone including the poor with even less money.
But unlike most popes, Francis doesn’t just preach; he organizes.
Saul Alinsky, a hardened atheist idolized by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, would have loved this pope. Alinsky built his community-organizing empire by infiltrating Catholic congregations. His Holiness is infiltrating the U.S. government — but President Obama isn’t worried because the two are ideological soulmates.
In March Holy See officials met with the far-left EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, to plot and scheme. Just this week McCarthy implied global warming skeptics were subhuman. “Normal people,” as opposed to “climate deniers,” have not placed “politics above science” and “want us to do the right thing,” she said.
In April the pope convened a summit that examined the relationship between poverty, economic development, and climate change. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was the keynote speaker.
The pope has been working with notable global warming alarmists, including left-wing American economist Jeffrey Sachs and German climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Sachs is the adviser who went to post-Soviet Russia to counsel officials on how to transition to a market economy. Instead of arguing for something even remotely resembling laissez-faire capitalism, he pushed for a mixed economy with a strong central government holding the upper hand. In other words, Sachs is one of the reasons Russia is now a fascist state, rife with cronyism and corruption.
Timothy E. Wirth of the United Nations Foundation delights in the pope’s radical enviro-activism. “We’ve never seen a pope do anything like this,” Wirth said. “No single individual has as much global sway as he does.”
At the First Things website, Maureen Mullarkey takes on Francis, saying he “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.” This pope, “an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist,” suffers from “megalomania” and “views man as a parasite.”
Francis is solidly plugged in to the American Left. Earlier this month community organizers and union thugs flew to Rome to collaborate with Vatican officials in advance of the pope’s scheduled visit to the U.S. in September.
As the National Catholic Reporter reported June 9:
A group of some 20 American community organizers and union leaders are holding meetings with Vatican officials this week to sway Pope Francis into addressing a number of lingering national social justice issues in his upcoming visit to the United States.
Organized by the national faith-based action network PICO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the leaders are meeting with four pontifical councils, the head of two pontifical academies, leadership of two global religious orders, and the executive director of Caritas Internationalis.
Among the key issues they are asking officials to advise the pope to consider discussing with President Barack Obama or during his address to Congress: immigration reform, economic injustice for low-wage workers, pervasive racism in U.S. institutions and society, and mass incarceration.
Not surprisingly, it seems like the spin doctors of Vatican City are coordinating with the Obama White House communications office to maximize the public impact of their misinformation campaigns.
This past weekend as Obama was ramping up his umpteenth anti-gun propaganda effort, Francis ridiculously asserted that those who make or invest in weapons cannot be considered good Christians.
Intoxicated With Babylon…
He condemned “people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit of distrust, doesn’t it?” This statement comes from a man whose predecessors commanded a real-life Papal Army up until 1870.
Pope Francis has been promoting Obama’s foreign policy monstrosities. Cuba’s Communist dictator Raul Castro thanked the pope last month for brokering the deal that set in motion the ongoing restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and that Caribbean island hellhole.
Last summer the pope condemned America. As wave after wave of unaccompanied minors washed over the U.S.-Mexico border, Francis whined, complaining that the illegal aliens’ “rights are violated … unfortunately, [they] continue to the subject of racist and xenophobic attitudes.”
Lately Francis started resembling President Obama. Obama doesn’t care much that Christians are being slaughtered overseas by Islamists and the pope, it seems, isn’t doing as much to help these Christians as he could. And like Obama, the pope has come to the rescue of homicidal Muslims on multiple occasions.
Late last year around the time Islamic State and other Muslim militants were busy torturing and killing Christians (often using grisly methods such as crucifixion) in Nigeria, Indonesia, Somalia, Libya, Central African Republic, Uganda, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan, and Iraq, Pope Francis gave Islam the seal of approval.
“Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence,” he said. On a separate occasion he said, “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
Jihadist violence is merely an offensive stereotype, according to the bishop of Rome. He called on Muslims to promote a “more authentic image of Islam, as so many of them desire.” This, of course, mirrors the stated dogma of President Barack Hussein Obama who speaks in monotone about his alleged Christianity but waxes poetic when reflecting on Islam.
And just as Obama ignores the never-ending “death to America” chants by senior Iranian officials, the pope doesn’t appear to take seriously the Islamic State’s threats to kill him and conquer Rome. In March the pope told reporters that if he is assassinated he hopes death will be quick. “I’m a real scaredy cat when it comes to physical pain.”
The pope is squandering his moral authority by pretending that Islam is a religion of peace and that cutting an unenforceable deal on nuclear weapons with the mullahs of Iran is a fine idea.
President Obama, obviously, buys into the same nonsense, but unlike the pope, he ran out of moral authority long ago.
In many ways, Pope Francis is the opposite of Pope John Paul II, who was canonized last year.
Saint John Paul the Great was the Polish-born former Karol Wojtyla. He was ordained after the U.S.S.R. took over Poland and made it a satellite state. While the Iron Curtain still existed, John Paul stood heroically against Communism, the great cancer of the twentieth century.
“Thou art weighed in the balances, and are found wanting..” Daniel 5:27
He miraculously survived a KGB-sanctioned assassination attempt in 1981 and an al-Qaeda-funded attack was foiled in the Philippines in 1995. Polish secret police tried in 1983 to embarrass John Paul by claiming he fathered an illegitimate child. The Soviet Union had wanted to eliminate this proud son of Poland because he supported the Solidarity trade union movement that gave his homeland’s dictatorship heartburn.
John Paul reportedly sent a letter in 1980 to then-Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev vowing to fight if the U.S.S.R. took action against Poland. If the Soviets acted, he said he would “lay down the crown of St. Peter and return to his homeland to stand shoulder to shoulder with his people.”
The defenders of Pope Francis try to paint him as above politics. They say, unconvincingly, that he rejects Marxism, liberation theology, and unrestrained capitalism.
It is clear the one thing this pope rejects the most is freedom.
Soli Deo Gloria!
