George Soros has been pouring money into groups such as the aforementioned Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to capitalize on the so-called Francis effect in U.S. politics. In 2016, that group, which was founded by an aide to Obama, put out a “Pope Francis Values Reflection Guide” to steer Catholics toward voting for Hillary Clinton. A coalition of Catholic front groups for the left disseminated the document, including the Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach, Conference of Major Superiors of Men, Faith in Public Life: Catholic Program, Franciscan Action Network, Leadership Conference of Women Religious, National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Pax Christi USA, Pax Christi International, and Extended Justice Team of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas.
The material in the guide isn’t even remotely Catholic. It is simply a regurgitated version of the Democratic Party platform. In the section titled “Questions to Consider When Reading about or Listening to Candidates,” the guide offers this guidance: “How does each candidate challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric?… How does each candidate respond to questions about the wealth gap in this country? What ideas does she or he have for addressing this?… How does each candidate talk about climate change? Does he or she have any policies for addressing this issue… What is each candidate’s position on voter identification laws and other restrictions that suppress voting among people of color?… How is each candidate talking about our Muslim neighbors and refugees from the Middle East?”17
For such Soros-funded Catholic front groups, the pontificate of Francis has been a shot in the arm. They have used it to jump-start the politicization of Catholicism that had begun to fade under his predecessor’s pontificate. Pope Benedict had urged priests to stay out of politics unless it touched upon “non-negotiable” moral positions of the Church. No one could imagine Soros-style liberals putting out a “Pope Benedict XVI Values Reflection Guide.”
“As Catholics, we are called by our faith to engage in this election. Pope Francis says that ‘a good Catholic meddles in politics, offering the best of one’s self so that those who govern can govern well,’” they piously say in their voting guide. Never mind that the good Catholics whom they extol, such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, support positions diametrically opposed to centuries of Catholic teaching on abortion and the traditional family.
Pope Francis Democrats
Indeed, it has now become chic for pro-abortion, pro–gay marriage Catholic officeholders to invoke Francis as an inspiration for their left-wing politics, including their cultural liberalism. He is “starting to sound like a nun,” Pelosi has said. “He challenged us to rescue our planet from the climate crisis that threatens the future of our children.”18
Joe Biden has long supported abortion rights and gay marriage in defiance of Church teaching. He has even officiated at gay weddings. Yet he boasts of his cozy relationship with Pope Francis. He said that he knew Pope Francis “as well as anybody” and that they share a socialist interpretation of Catholicism.
“I was raised in a tradition called Catholic social doctrine,” Biden has said. “It is that is legitimate to look out for yourself, but never at the expense of someone else. It is legitimate to do well, but never at the expense of not looking at what’s behind you. We need to create a culture which, as Pope Francis reminds us, cannot just be based on the worship of money. We cannot accept a nation in which billionaires compete as to the size of their super-yachts…”19
Despite Biden’s support for making scientific use of aborted embryos, he has been invited to speak at the Vatican on the subject of medicine.20 Such invites have undercut the efforts of conservative Catholic bishops who chastise secularized Catholic politicians.
“According to published reports, Vice-President Joseph Biden, a Catholic, has joined Vatican officials in promoting health care for the poor, a noble idea to be sure,” commented Rhode Island bishop Thomas Tobin. “But I wonder if the pro-abortion Biden wants to include abortion and contraception in that health care he wants to provide for the poor.”21
In 2013, the Chicago Tribune pointed to the liberalized atmosphere under Pope Francis as one of the factors explaining the passage of gay marriage in Illinois. The relaxed attitude of Pope Francis had emboldened Catholic Democrats to support the legislation, the paper observed:
Advocates soon received additional help from Pope Francis, who warned that the Catholic Church could lose its way by focusing too much on social stances, including opposition to homosexuality.
“If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” Francis said in July.
The comments sparked a wave of soul-searching by several Catholic lawmakers who had battled to reconcile their religious beliefs with their sworn duty to represent their constituents who were increasingly supportive of gay rights even as Cardinal Francis George remained opposed.
“As a Catholic follower of Jesus and the pope, Pope Francis, I am clear that our Catholic religious doctrine has at its core love, compassion and justice for all people,” said Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia, a Democrat from Aurora who voted for the bill after spending much of the summer undecided.
House Speaker Michael Madigan also cited the pope’s comments in explaining his support for the measure.
“For those that just happen to be gay—living in a very harmonious, productive relationship but illegal—who am I to judge that they should be illegal?” the speaker said.22
Nancy Pelosi has taken to using Pope Francis as a foil against Republican opponents. Referring to a former GOP presidential candidate’s opposition to gay marriage, she said that she didn’t “think that Pope Francis would subscribe to what Marco Rubio just said.”23
Jack Conway, Kentucky’s attorney general, who supports gay marriage, hid behind Pope Francis’s relativistic remarks too, saying, “Our new pope recently said on an airplane ‘Who am I to judge.’ The new pope has said a lot of things that Catholics like me really like. I have, as someone who grew up as a Catholic listened to some of the words of the new pope and found them inspirational.”24
In 2016, Tim Kaine, a Catholic senator from Virginia, cited Pope Francis’s support for contraceptive use in cases involving the Zika virus during a debate over the promotion of Planned Parenthood funding. Later that year, Hillary Clinton made Kaine her vice presidential running mate. Kaine is a poster boy for the close ties between the Church and the Democratic Party. Educated by Jesuits, Kaine supports abortion rights and gay marriage while passing off his economic leftism as “Catholic social justice.” He calls Pope Francis his “hero.”25
Like the pope, Kaine was influenced by Latin American liberation theology. Kaine has spoken of his respect for the late Marxist priest Fr. James Carney, to whom Kaine made a special visit in Central America in the 1980s during Carney’s time as a chaplain to communist guerillas.26 Hillary Clinton correctly assumed that the U.S. bishops would offer little criticism of her addition of a heterodox Catholic to her ticket or criticism of her campaign in general. Several of the Francis-friendly bishops even ran interference for her. San Jose’s bishop, Patrick McGrath, wrote a letter to his flock in which he said that Donald Trump’s complaint of a rigged system “borders on the seditious.”27 Even after it came out that Clinton’s aides had engaged in anti-Catholic bigotry (in exposed emails, they called conservative Catholics “severely backwards”), few bishops complained.
Just days before the presidential election, Pope Francis denounced politicians who speak about erecting “walls,” prompting Slate and other publications to run such headlines as “It Sure Sounds Like Pope Francis Doesn’t Think Americans Should Vote for Trump.”28 He made no similarly voluble criticism of Hillary Clinton’s policies. Yet in the end the pope’s influence proved hollow. The “people’s pontiff” looked more like the liberal elite’s pontiff as Clinton went down to defeat, with Trump even winning the Catholic vote fifty-two to forty-five. According to the Italian press, many of Pope Francis’s aides viewed the election as a “bitter defeat.”29
Liberals Suddenly Wrap Themselves in the Papal Flag
When Pope Francis made his visit to the United States in 2015, he made no direct mention of the Obama administration’s assault on Christianity or questioned the legion of pro-abortion Catholic politicians like Tim Kaine who have aided and abetted it.
In 2016, all of the Democratic presidential candidates wrapped themselves in the papal flag. Normally, they argue for the “separation of church and state” and warn against “priests in politics.” But they desperately wanted Pope Francis to intervene in their politics. “Democrats certainly love Pope Francis,” wrote the Atlantic’s Emma Green. On the eve of his 2015 visit to the United States, they lined up to praise him, she noted. Hillary Clinton took to the pages of the National Catholic Reporter to say, “I am deeply moved by Pope Francis’s recent teachings on climate change.” So too did former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.30
(Later, Hillary Clinton, exploiting the confusion Pope Francis has caused in the Church, cited his liberal stances in her remarks at the Al Smith Dinner hosted by the archdiocese of New York City shortly before the election. She placed his politics next to hers, urging Catholics to “embrace his message,” which she identified as “calls to reduce [economic] inequality, his warnings about climate change, his appeal that we build bridges, not walls.”)
Bernie Sanders was impressed to hear Pope Francis quote the long-time Marxist Dorothy Day during his speech before Congress. “The name Dorothy Day has not been used in the United States Congress terribly often,” Sanders said to the Washington Post. “She was a valiant fighter for workers, was very strong in her belief for social justice… This would be one of the very, very few times that somebody as radical as Dorothy Day was mentioned.”31
Under Pope Francis, the movement to canonize Day has picked up speed, despite opposition from conservatives who draw attention to her defense of communist regimes. The Huffington Post calls her the perfect saint for the Francis era since she “fused socialist ideas with Catholic social teaching.”32
The other Catholic figure to whom Pope Francis referred in his speech before the U.S. Congress was the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, another controversial figure within the Church. In the 1960s, Merton had toyed with leaving the religious life after having an affair with a nurse and grew increasingly more radical in his politics.33 “Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions,” Pope Francis said in the address. In fact, Merton had become so leftist and lapsed from orthodox Catholic norms by the end of his life that the U.S. bishops dropped any mention of him from their 2006 United States Catholic Catechism for Adults.34
Sister Simone Campbell, whose Soros-funded Nuns on the Bus campaign epitomizes the cozy relationship between the Catholic left and the Democrats, has predicted that Pope Francis will push American politics to the left.
“In this, the first presidential election in the era of Pope Francis, attempts to control the ‘Catholic vote’ through issues of personal sexuality—often nothing more than a crass political calculation—will no longer work as well, if at all,” she has written. “Instead, those who seek to divide our nation will find themselves up against a spiritual leader who has taken the teachings of our faith that have resided for many in the dusty tomes of Catholic scholarship and philosophy and made them breathing realities in our daily lives. In doing so, he has energized Catholics to embody the center of our faith—active concern for the common good and attention to the needs of those around us.”35
Campbell hit the campaign trail again for Democrats in 2016. Nuns on the Bus, she said, would galvanize “Pope Francis voters” to support progressive candidates.
Under Pope Benedict XVI, Catholic Democrats faced growing criticism from Church officials for their stances in favor of abortion and gay marriage. That pressure has disappeared under Pope Francis. When Notre Dame conferred an honorary degree upon Obama, almost a hundred bishops condemned that decision. When Notre Dame conferred one on Joe Biden, whose status as a Catholic makes his anti-Catholic stances even more egregious, only a handful of bishops criticized the decision. “The new Francis atmosphere had a lot to do with their silence,” says a Church insider interviewed for this book.
Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican told U.S. bishops to withhold Communion from Catholic politicians who defy magisterial teaching. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican now tells them to give it to them. A measure of this changed atmosphere is that the U.S. bishops no longer even debate the matter. “In a way, I like to think it’s an issue that served us well in forcing us to do a serious examination of conscience about how we can best teach our people about their political responsibilities,” New York City cardinal Timothy Dolan has said. “But by now that inflammatory issue is in the past. I don’t hear too many bishops saying it’s something that we need to debate nationally, or that we have to decide collegially. I think most bishops have said, ‘We trust individual bishops in individual cases.’ Most don’t think it’s something for which we have to go to the mat.”36
The Pope’s Gift to the Democrats
Pope Francis’s address before Congress lived up to the left’s expectations. He made no explicit mention of Church teaching. He focused instead on many of the ideological priorities of the left.
As he entered Congress, Pope Francis embraced John Kerry, Obama’s Catholic secretary of state, who has made the promotion of gay marriage a “priority” of the State Department. The pope’s speech could have been written by Kerry himself. Pope Francis called for open borders, telling Americans not to be “fearful of foreigners.” He called for the abolition of the death penalty and the end of the “arms trade.” He spoke of governmental wealth redistribution and urged Congress to support climate change activism.
The address delighted the left while leaving the right cold. Progressives noted that the only example he gave of an attack on the sanctity of life was not abortion but the death penalty. After the speech, two leftists from the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist organization, gushed: “His clear call to end the death penalty was the only example he gave of protecting the sanctity of life: Even amid a raging congressional debate over Planned Parenthood, he never mentioned abortion.”37
In a measure of the alienation that Catholic Republicans felt about the pope’s visit, Congressman Paul Gosar chose not to attend the speech. “If the Pope stuck to standard Christian theology, I would be the first in line. If the Pope spoke out with moral authority against violent Islam, I would be there cheering him on. If the Pope urged the Western nations to rescue persecuted Christians in the Middle East, I would back him wholeheartedly. But when the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one,” Gosar explained.38
Conservatives noticed how little religion figured into his visit. “During his remarks, which were regularly interrupted by rounds of applause from the assembled lawmakers, Pope Francis condemned the death penalty, called for better environmental stewardship, and even talked about the ills of political polarization. He did not, however, mention Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection form the very foundation of the Christian faith,” commented the Federalist in an editorial.39
In his talk at the White House, he also omitted any mention of Jesus Christ. He did, however, find time to endorse Obama’s climate change proposals. Obama invited to that White House event a who’s who of dissident Catholics and progressive Protestants, from radical nuns to gay Anglican bishops to transgender activists. This upset conservative Catholics, but not Pope Francis.
One of his press aides, Fr. Thomas Rosica, scolded an unnamed Vatican official, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, for criticizing Obama’s guest list: “If some Vatican officials unnamed have expressed concern, that’s their issue and they should come forward and give their name.” Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earne
st, responded to critics by pointing out that Francis’s Vatican didn’t care about the guest list: “I would point you to the wide variety of comments we’ve seen from senior Vatican officials, including from Father Rosica over the weekend.”40
Pope Francis’s speech to the United Nations during the trip to the United States also avoided any mention of unfashionable Church teachings. The speech was a sustained tribute to the political program of the left, presented in platitudinous language and laced with dubious generalizations.
“A selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and the disadvantaged,” he said. He endorsed the Iranian nuclear deal, touted trendy global-warming claims, pushed the cause of debt forgiveness, denounced weapon manufacturers, and lavished praise upon UN diplomats. That they routinely advance proposals at odds with Church teaching went unmentioned. The speech had no distinctively Catholic content to it at all.
It is clear that Francis’s Vatican has few friends to the right and almost no enemies to the left. He has entrusted the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences to Margaret Archer, a British sociologist who has written that she identifies with the “Marxian left,” reports Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute. She was made president in 2014. Hichborn reports that other members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences include Joseph Stiglitz, who is “chairman of the Socialist International Commission on Global Finance Issues” and “Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, a major proponent of contraception and population control.”41
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