The Political Pope

by George Neumayr

  He then detailed the persecution of the Church: “More than a thousand crosses were removed from the top of the churches (in some cases the churches themselves have been destroyed)… Several seminaries have been closed. Students of the National Seminary in Beijing were forced to sign a declaration of loyalty to the Independent Church, promising also to concelebrate with illegitimate bishops (otherwise they would not receive a diploma at the end of their studies). The Government is continuously strengthening a church that now objectively is already separated from the universal Catholic Church; with enticements and threats they induce the clergy to perform acts contrary to the doctrine and discipline of the Church, denying their conscience and their dignity.”

  Zen fears that Pope Francis is on the verge of letting the Chinese Communists select bishops for the Church. The Chinese communists, who exert control over the Church through a front called the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, are demanding “democratic” elections and Francis may grant them, wrote Zen: “Do our officials in Rome know what an election is in China? Do they know that the so-called Episcopal Conference is not only illegitimate, but simply does not exist? What exists is an organism that is called ‘One Association and One Conference,’ namely the Patriotic Association and the Bishops’ Conference always work together as one body, which is always chaired by government officials (there are pictures to prove it, the Government does not even try more to keep up appearances, it starkly flaunts the fact that they now manage religion!). Signing such an agreement means delivering the authority to appoint bishops into the hands of an atheist government.”23

  The Chinese communists have taken a keen interest in Pope Francis, sending spies to the Vatican to collect secrets on him. That practice was revealed in the course of a Vatican trial over leaks in which a Spanish monsignor was found to have offered a bogus medical report on Pope Francis to Chinese espionage agents.24

  Pope John Paul II biographer George Weigel also worries that the Vatican is capitulating to the Chinese Communists:

  This passion among Vatican diplomats for getting a deal done with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] has always puzzled me. It would almost certainly mean severing diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan, the first democracy in Chinese history. If Taiwan is thrown over the side for the sake of a deal with Beijing, what signal does that send to the world, and to Chinese democrats and human-rights activists on the mainland—including Christians—about the Catholic Church’s commitment to free societies? Moreover, one can’t draw a lot of satisfaction from recent Vatican attempts to get along by going along with dictators and authoritarians. Being nice to the brothers Castro has done nothing for a human-rights situation in Cuba that has actually gotten worse.25

  In July 2016, Reuters reported that Pope Francis was considering pardoning eight “bishops” appointed by the Chinese communists in bald violation of canon law (which reserves the appointment of bishops to the pope).26 Later that year, the Vatican entertained an appointment-sharing agreement with the Chinese government. This has left Cardinal Zen so dispirited that he is counseling Chinese Catholics to resist the pope: “We will have to refuse to take that step just because it formally contradicts the petrine authority. Yes, in the case under consideration (in this moment we still strongly hope that it does not happen) we will have to be loyal to the Pope (the Papacy, the authority of the Vicar of Christ) in spite of the Pope.”27

  To the Wall Street Journal, Zen said “Pope Francis has no real knowledge of communism” and attributes his tendency to romanticize it to his Argentinian background: “So the Holy Father knew the persecuted communists, not the communist persecutors. He knew the communists killed by the government, not the communist governments who killed thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. I’m sorry to say that in his goodwill he has done many things which are simply ridiculous.”28

  “Times and situations have changed,” Pope Francis has said by way of explaining his departures from previous Church teaching. In other words, deference to the fads of modern culture, rather than respect for the Catholic intellectual and magisterial tradition, is driving his pacifism.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I Don’t Want to Convert You”

  Like his fellow liberal Jesuits, Pope Francis often seems to exude enthusiasm for every religion except his own. In his extreme ecumenism, he is conforming to the lowest-common-denominator culture of a post-Christian age. As Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister has put it, “Christianity matters less” under Pope Francis.1 Even as Pope Francis pours scorn upon traditional Catholicism—he regularly caricatures conservative Catholics as heartless “Pharisees”—he heaps praise upon Protestantism, non-Christian religions, and atheism.

  The Western media has been enamored with the ecumenism of this pope since the beginning of his pontificate when, at his first press conference, he spoke of his respect for “non-believers.” The left-leaning Religion News Service was so struck by his lack of interest in Catholic evangelization that it asked in a headline: “Is Francis the First Protestant Pope?”2

  Pope Francis is particularly quick to defend and bolster Islam, a historic adversary of the Church. He repeatedly calls it a “religion of peace,” even as Islam’s persecution of Catholics intensifies and its radical branches spread terrorism throughout the world.

  “Our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence,” Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium.

  Speaking to Sun TV, Robert Spencer, an expert on Islam, responded to the pope’s statement: “I don’t hesitate to say that this statement is flatly wrong, it’s misleading and it’s a shame because it gives the Christians who are being persecuted by Muslims in Nigeria, in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere no support; it doesn’t give them any help to deny and dissemble about the root cause of why they are being persecuted in the first place.”

  Pope Francis hews closely to the fashionable liberal talking points about Islam. In an anticipation of his liberal papacy, he had joined the Western liberal elite in denouncing Pope Benedict XVI for a speech critical of Islam that he delivered at the University of Regensburg. Yet nothing Pope Benedict XVI said about Islam in that speech was untrue. Indeed, the violent Islamic response to his comments only confirmed their validity.

  In 2014, Catholics witnessed the curious spectacle of Pope Francis commending the reading of the Qur’an, a book that his predecessors viewed as a source of rank heresy. Placing Christianity and Islam on the same level, Pope Francis said to an audience composed of Christians and Muslims: “Sharing our experience in carrying that cross, to expel the illness within our hearts, which embitters our life: it is important that you do this in your meetings. Those that are Christian, with the Bible, and those that are Muslim, with the Quran. The faith that your parents instilled in you will always help you move on.”3

  In a 2016 interview with the French newspaper La Croix, Pope Francis outrageously likened the concept of jihad within Islam to the preaching of the Gospel in Christianity. “It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest,” he said.4

  In a previous interview, he compared conservative Christians to jihadist Muslims: “You just can’t say that, just as you can’t say that all Christians are fundamentalists. We have our share of them [fundamentalists]. All religions have these little groups,” he said. “They [Muslims] say: ‘No, we are not this, the Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace.’”5

  An Apologist for Islam

  The Islamic persecution of Christians is a subject that Pope Francis has largely avoided out of a politically correct fear of offending Muslims.

  “On Islam the Catholic Church stammers, the more so the higher up the ladder one goes,” wrote San
dro Magister in 2014. “[Pope Francis] remained silent on the hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram. He remained silent on the young Sudanese mother Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death solely for being Christian and finally liberated by the intervention of others. He remains silent on the Pakistani mother Asia Bibi, who has been on death row for five years, she too because she is an ‘infidel,’ and does not even reply to the two heartrending letters she has written to him this year, before and after the reconfirmation of the sentence.”6

  His references to the persecution of Christians have tended to be opaque and rare, and do not even remotely approach the urgent status he has given to such comparatively trivial subjects as climate change and amnesty.

  Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, among other commentators, finds the pope’s unwillingness to prioritize Christian persecution frustrating. “I am a Catholic,” she said in July 2014. “And I mean no disrespect, but it is time for the papacy and Pope Francis in particular to start protecting his Christian flock. This month, Pope Francis preached that immigrant children in facilities around the United States should be ‘welcomed and protected.’ Your holiness, they’re in the United States. They are protected. They are being given food, and clothing and shelter. No children are being killed by the United States. Christian children are being killed in the Middle East! And while we appreciate your prayer for those in the Middle East last week, it’s just not enough!”7

  After Islamic terrorists shot up the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015, killing ten journalists, Pope Francis felt the need not to defend free speech or the Christian West but to defend Islam. “You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others,” he said. People should “expect a punch,” he said, if they offend others.8

  The pope’s comments sparked outrage in conservative circles, prompting articles about the pope “blaming” the cartoonists for “provoking the attack.” Conservatives ruefully noted that the pacifist pope, normally so eager to lecture others on the need to turn the other cheek, had finally found a form of violence that he could condone.

  The Vatican’s newspaper L’Osservatore Romano often runs pieces in defense of Islam and treats Western criticism of it as “blasphemous,” a claim that would only make sense if Catholicism viewed Islamic doctrines as true and divinely inspired. Catholicism never has. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of Muhammad, “He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us.” Along with countless popes, Aquinas regarded Islam as a combination of half-truths, “fables, and doctrines of the greatest falsity,” without the slightest odor of sanctity about them: “Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”9

  “Religions don’t want war,” Pope Francis declared after jihadists cut off the head of a Catholic priest in France in July 2016. The motivation for that act of terrorism was baldly Islamic. The ISIS terrorist who slit the priest’s throat yelled “Allahu Akbar.” Yet the pope refused to attribute it to “Islamic violence.” “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence,” he said. He then offered an off-the-wall explanation for terrorism rooted in the “idolatry” of capitalism: “As long as the god of money is at the center of the global economy and not the human person, man and woman, this is the first terrorism.”10

  Pope Francis rarely misses an opportunity to serve as an apologist for Islam or tut-tut Christians who dare to criticize it. After a jihadist almost shot up the Muhammad Art Exhibit in Texas, the Vatican condemned the event as an irresponsible exercise of free speech.11 During a 2016 visit to the Muslim Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a member of the pope’s inner circle, removed his pectoral cross, lest it offend Muslims.12

  “It’s ironic that a Catholic can get a better grasp of the Islamic threat by listening to a short speech by [Egyptian] President el-Sisi than by listening to a hundred reassuring statements from Catholic bishops,” writes author William Kilpatrick, referring to el-Sisi’s comments about problems within Islam. “The let’s-be-friends approach has been in place even since Vatican II, but other than dialoguers congratulating themselves on the friendships they have made, it hasn’t yielded much in the way of results. Christians in Muslim lands are less safe than they have been for centuries.”13

  The Pope’s Praise of Atheists

  The pope’s pandering to Islam has disoriented the faithful but earned him accolades from Western liberals. He is also generating praise from them for his curious sympathy for atheism. Francis is the first pope to pride himself on not trying to convert atheists to belief in God.

  “When I speak with atheists, I will sometimes discuss social concerns, but I do not propose the problem of God as a starting point, except in the case that they propose it to me,” he has said. “I do not approach the relationship in order to proselytize, or convert the atheist; I respect him and I show myself as I am. Where there is knowledge, there begins to appear esteem, affection, and friendship. I do not have any type of reluctance, nor would I say that his life is condemned, because I am convinced that I do not have the right to make a judgment about the honesty of that person; even less, if he shows me those human virtues that exalt others and do me good.”14

  In a 2013 interview with the atheistic ex-Catholic Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis said that he had no interest in converting him and that atheists should just follow their own consciences. Don’t trouble yourself with the “solemn nonsense” of those Catholics who expect you to convert, Pope Francis told him. “The most surprising thing he told me was: ‘God is not Catholic,’” Scalfari said after the interview.15

  “God’s working in non-Christians tends to produce sacred expressions which in turn bring others to a communitarian experience of journeying towards God,” Pope Francis asserted in Evangelii Gaudium, a comment that past popes would have found inexplicable.

  Scalfari told Francis that he never envisioned a pope who could embrace relativism and atheism: “Your Holiness, you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.” Pope Francis was flattered by this review of his courage and said in response, “And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”16 To orthodox Catholics, this sounded like raw relativism.

  Scalfari has been playing Boswell to Francis’s Samuel Johnson. Pope Francis was so happy with his first interview with Scalfari that he had the Vatican publishing house issue it as a book. If a future pope ever revives the Index of Forbidden Books, that book may appear on the list. Many of Francis’s answers to Scalfari’s self-indulgent questions were unfathomable for a priest to make, much less a pope. (In 2016, Pope Francis gave yet another interview to Scalfari, in which he said, “If anything, it is the communists who think like Christians.” The fact that Pope Francis continues to give interviews to Scalfari makes it impossible to sustain the charge, made by some apologists for the pope, that Scalfari is misrepresenting him.)

  In a 2013 homily, Pope Francis said, “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”17

  HBO’s Bill Maher was so impressed by this statement that he declared, “I think the pope is an atheist” and that the pope’s emphasis on political liberalism rather than Catholic theology put him in mind of his experience with atheistic priests: “[It] made me think—I remember when I was making ‘Religulous’ and we talked to a lot of priests, and we found out that a lot of priests really aren’t believers… they do it because it’s a way to help people and they know they can’t tell the masses that it’s all a crock.”18

  Pope Francis ap
pears to entertain theological novelties about both heaven and hell. While saying confidently that atheists can go to heaven, he has flirted with theological concepts suggesting that no one goes to hell. The wicked, he told an Italian interviewer, don’t suffer punishment but “annihilation,” which means “their journey is finished.”19 On another occasion, he said that hell may be empty of all sinners, since “if you were a terrible sinner, who had committed all the sins in the world, all of them, condemned to death, and even when you are there, you were to blaspheme, insults… and at the moment of death, when you were about to die, you were to look to Heaven and say, ‘Lord…!’, where do you go, to Heaven or to Hell? To Heaven!” In Amoris Laetitia, he again suggested that no one goes to hell by writing that “the way of the Church is not to condemn anyone forever.” He has also astonished Catholics by speaking of Judas sympathetically, as a “poor, repentant man.”20

  The Pope Celebrates Martin Luther

  On several occasions, Pope Francis has told Protestant leaders that they should remain Protestants. “I’m not interested in converting Evangelicals to Catholicism. I want people to find Jesus in their own community,” he told a group of Protestants in 2014.21 After his late friend Tony Palmer, an Anglican bishop, expressed an interest in converting to Catholicism, he discouraged him, saying that he should remain among the Protestant “bridge-builders.” In a foreshadowing of that attitude, he had opposed the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to set up an “ordinariate” for Anglicans interested in converting to Catholicism. At the time, Bergoglio told the top Anglican leader in Buenos Aires, Greg Venables, that the ordinariate “was quite unnecessary” and that they should stay “as Anglicans.”22