The election of Jorge Bergoglio marked the culmination of the left’s long march through the Church. For decades, liberals, both inside and outside the Church, had labored for the elevation of a progressive pope who would incorporate the tenets of modern liberalism into Catholicism. That movement has been gathering strength since at least the advent of the modernist heresy in the Church, which Pope Pius X addressed in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.
To read that encyclical today, one might think Pope Pius X was writing about the papacy of Francis. Pope Pius X warned that the modernists wish to fashion a faith “suited to the times in which we live,” based not on the immutable doctrines of Catholicism but on the subjectivism of “modern philosophy.” He foresaw a Church that would chase after elite fads, defer to the spurious claims of modern science, bow down to the secularism of the state, treat all religions as equal, cast Jesus Christ as a mere human political activist, reduce priests to social workers, and Protestantize its worship and doctrine.
Despite Pope Pius X’s efforts, modernism continued to spread in the Church throughout the twentieth century, bubbling up most visibly at Vatican II and in its aftermath. “More important than the documents, the council has consecrated a new spirit, destined in the course of time to remake the face of Catholicism,” wrote Xavier Rynne, the pseudonym for Fr. Francis X. Murphy, in the pages of the New Yorker.1 The liberalism of Francis’s pontificate can be traced to that modernist spirit.
To the delight of the left and the dismay of conservative Catholics, it has come out that leading modernists in the Church had been plotting for years to make Bergoglio pope. One of the architects of Bergoglio’s election to the papacy was Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who has acknowledged this plotting.2
Danneels is known for his association with the Church’s abuse scandal. The Belgian press once caught Danneels coaching the victim of a molesting bishop into delaying a disclosure.3 But he is even more famous for his outré liberalism. In 1988, he sparked anger in the Church by leading a delegation of Catholic theologians to hobnob with “Professional Humanists” in Amsterdam. In the 1990s, he advised the king of Belgium to sign an abortion law. In the 2000s, he sent a letter to the Belgium government giving his blessing to gay civil unions. “The [Church] has never opposed the fact that there should exist a sort of ‘marriage’ between homosexuals,” he said falsely.4
As he bragged to his authorized biographers, Danneels, along with a veritable who’s who of ultra-progressives in the Church, presided over what he called a “mafia” that opposed Pope Benedict XVI and eventually helped elect Pope Francis. Danneels disclosed to his biographers that he and this group of liberal bishops had met for many years in the Swiss town of St. Gallen to promote the election of Bergoglio. They called themselves the St. Gallen group.
“The St. Gallen group is a sort of posh name. But in reality we said of ourselves, and of that group : ‘The Mafia,’” Danneels said in September 2015.5
The group started meeting in 1996 and numbered among its members Achille Silvestrini (who was long seen as a liberal alternative to Pope John Paul II), Carlo Maria Martini (the former cardinal of Milan who openly espoused socialism and a rejection of the Church’s traditional moral theology), Walter Kasper (whom Francis would later tap to liberalize Church teaching on marriage), Basil Hume (the English cardinal known for his support of “democratic” reforms within the Church and his advocacy for liberalizing the Church’s moral stances), and Karl Lehmann (the German cardinal who opposes the Church’s teachings on marriage and birth control). In 2016, Lehmann advised his fellow liberals in the Church to take advantage of the “freedom that has been granted by the pope.”6
“The election of Bergoglio was prepared in St. Gallen, without doubt. And the main lines of the program the pope is carrying out are those that Danneels and company were starting to discuss more than ten years ago,” Danneels’s biographer Karim Schelkens said at a press conference in 2015. Danneels’s other biographer, Jürgen Mettepenningen, added, “They wanted Church reform, they wanted to bring the Church closer to the hearts of people; they moved forward by stages. At the beginning of the year 2000, when John Paul II’s end was becoming more foreseeable, they thought more strategically about what was going to happen to the Church after John Paul II. When Cardinal Silvestrini joined the group it took on a more tactical and strategic character.”7
The diocese of St. Gallen has confirmed to the press the existence of the group. Its press office acknowledged that a “private circle met on a regular basis from 1996 until 2006 and that ‘the now-deceased Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and the then-bishop of St. Gallen, Ivo Fürer, initiated these meetings.” The press office conceded that the bishops “spoke about the situation in the Church at their yearly gatherings in St. Gallen” and they “also spoke—when the health of Pope John Paul II was continuously declining—about the question as to which qualities a new pope should have.”8
During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, leaks from unnamed Vatican cardinals to the press, clearly intended to undercut the conservatism of these pontificates, were routine. It is suspected that many of those leaks came from members of the St. Gallen group. Standing on the Vatican balcony near Pope Francis shortly after his election, Danneels can be seen looking jubilant. Danneels has said that the election of Francis constitutes his “personal resurrection.” Under any other pontificate, his role in the Church’s child abuse scandal would have sent him into a quiet retirement. But under Pope Francis he has received high-profile assignments. To the outrage of orthodox Catholics, he turned up at the 2015 Synod on the Family as a delegate personally chosen by Pope Francis.9 In 2016, Pope Francis made one of Danneels’s protégés, Archbishop Jozef de Kesel of Brussels, a cardinal despite his open heterodoxy, evident in his praise for homosexuals’ “way of living their sexuality.”10
The St. Gallen group had hoped to place Bergoglio in the papacy in 2005, but its effort failed. It has been established that Bergoglio came in second to Ratzinger at the 2005 conclave.11 According to Danneels’s authorized biographers, a frequent question during the meetings of the St. Gallen Group was “How can we avoid Ratzinger as Pope?”
Failing to stop Ratzinger in 2005 had embittered members of the group and explains their frequent sniping at him during his pontificate. Mainstream newspapers would often quote anonymous ecclesiastical sources harrumphing about “chaos” and “crisis” in Pope Benedict XVI’s Church. One of those murmurers was Jorge Bergoglio.
This was revealed in 2015 when one of his bumbling media aides blurted out a criticism of Pope Benedict XVI for delivering a speech in Regensburg, Germany, critical of Islam. The Western media had taken great offense to the speech for not adhering to its propagandistic view of Islam as a religion of peace. Amidst the media furor, Bergoglio’s aide said, “If the Pope does not recognize the values of Islam and it is left like that, in twenty seconds we will have destroyed everything that has been built over the last twenty years.” Bergoglio didn’t bother to distance himself from his aide’s comment. The Vatican was so outraged by the episode that it confronted Bergoglio, according to the Argentine press. “How is it possible that your spokesman made such declarations and [you] did not feel bound to contradict him and remove him immediately?” an Argentine newspaper quoted a Vatican official as saying to Bergoglio. Later, the papal nuncio in Argentina indirectly criticized Bergoglio for his sniping at Benedict through intermediaries. “The Holy Father,” the papal nuncio said, “is the victim of a persecution, he has been abandoned by the opponents of the Truth, but above all by certain priests and religious, not only bishops.”12
Given this history, it is puzzling that Pope Benedict XVI has said that he didn’t anticipate the election of Bergoglio after his resignation. He had some names in mind “but not his,” Benedict told an interviewer in 2016.13
The election of Jorge Bergoglio brought the St. Gallen group out of the shadows, but other factions within the Church also emerged, eager to take credit for the presence of a liberal on the chair of St. Peter. Modernists in Germany pointed with pride to his election as a vindication of the Pact of the Catacombs, a secret manifesto signed by socialist bishops around the time of Vatican II which called on the bishops to engage in left-wing political activism, eschew traditional titles, and advertise their poverty loudly. The document received its name from having been signed at a church near the catacombs in Rome.
“His program is to a high degree what the Catacomb Pact was,” Cardinal Walter Kasper said to reporter David Gibson.14 It “was forgotten,” said Kasper. “But now he [Francis] brings it back.”
“With Pope Francis, you cannot ignore the Catacomb Pact,” Massimo Faggioli, a professor of church history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, said to Gibson. “It’s a key to understanding him, so it’s no mystery that it has come back to us today.”
Many of the signatories of the secret manifesto came from Latin America, according to Gibson. They were loath at that time to publicize their activism, for fear of triggering backlash from communism’s critics, Gibson writes:
The problem was that the social upheavals of 1968, plus the drama of the Cold War against communism and the rise of liberation theology—which stressed the gospel’s priority on the poor, but was seen as too close to Marxism by its conservative foes—made a document such as the Catacombs Pact radioactive. “It had the odor of communism,” said Brother Uwe Heisterhoff, a member of the Society of the Divine Word, the missionary community that is in charge of the Domitilla Catacombs.
Even in Latin America the pact wasn’t publicized too widely, lest it poison other efforts to promote justice for the poor. Heisterhoff noted that he worked with the indigenous peoples of Bolivia for 15 years but only learned about the Catacombs Pact when he came to Rome to oversee the Domitilla Catacombs four years ago.
“This stuff was a bit dangerous until Francis came along,” said Faggioli.15
According to the text of the Pact of the Catacombs, the bishops pledged to politicize the Church for the sake of ushering in the “advent of another social order”:
We will do our utmost so that those responsible for our government and for our public services make, and put into practice, laws, structures and social institutions required by justice and charity, equality and the harmonic and holistic development of all men and women, and by this means bring about the advent of another social order, worthy of the sons and daughters of mankind and of God.
Another passage in the document calls for the redistribution of wealth by international institutions. It said the bishops have a duty “to request jointly, at the level of international organisms, the adoption of economic and cultural structures which, instead of producing poor nations in an ever richer world, make it possible for the poor majorities to free themselves from their wretchedness.”
L’Osservatore Romano has praised the Pact of the Catacombs:
After almost 50 years, Pope Francis—a man who comes from a continent where many Bishops made tremendous efforts to apply Council Vatican II in the context of poverty—assumed in the program of his pontificate the theme of “a poor Church, a Church for the poor.” Those words of the Pope have encouraged diverse groups to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the Pact of the Catacombs. Thus, since November 2014 special celebrations have taken place at the Catacomb of Domitilla. The Commission of Justice and Peace, the International Union of Superior Generals and the Union of Superior Generals, for example, organized a prayer vigil. The Divine Word Missionaries and the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit held a day of reflection at the Catacomb on January 15, 2015 on the occasion of the feast day of their founder, St. Arnold Janssen. And so the commemorations continued, up to the numerous meetings that have taken place in these last days.
Retired bishop Luigi Bettazzi of Ivrea, Italy, is the last living signatory to the Pact of the Catacombs. “The remembrance of the pact has been revived thanks to the atmosphere Pope Francis has indicated for the whole church to follow,” he has said.16 According to the historian Roberto de Mattei, Bettazzi was known as the “red bishop”:
In July 1976, when it seemed that Communism might take power in Italy, Bettazzi wrote a letter to the then Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer, in whom he recognised the tendency to realize: ‘a unique experience of Communism, different from the Communism of other nations’ and asked [him] ‘not to be hostile’ to the Church but ‘to stimulate’ rather ‘an evolution according to the needs of the times and the expectations of men, above all the poorest, whom you know better how to interpret at the most opportune time.’ The leader of the Italian Communist Party replied to the Bishop of Ivrea with a letter—Communists and Catholics: Clarity of Principles and Basis of Agreement, published in ‘Rinascita’ of October 14th, 1977.17
Another “red” bishop who signed the document was Dom Hélder Câmara. A Brazilian archbishop, Câmara wore his socialism on his sleeve—“My socialism is special, it’s a socialism that respects the human person and goes back to the Gospels. My socialism it is justice”—and wouldn’t even condemn armed Marxists: “And I respect a lot priests with rifles on their shoulders; I never said that to use weapons against an oppressor is immoral or anti-Christian. But that’s not my choice, not my road, not my way to apply the Gospels.”18
Socialists inside the Church are pressing for the canonization of Câmara—a movement that Pope Francis is entertaining. In 2015, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of the Saints quickly approved a request that the canonization process for Câmara be opened up—a development America magazine called “ground-breaking.” Wrote its correspondent Gerard O’Connell: “[Câmara] died on Aug. 27, 1999, but his memory lives on. Pope Francis remembers him; they have much in common. Addressing the Brazilian bishops in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis recalled ‘all those names and faces which have indelibly marked the journey of the church in Brazil’ and listed Dom Hélder among them. That was significant.”19
In 1953, Manning Johnson, a former propaganda director for the Communist Party in America, testified to the U.S. Congress that determined Marxists had infiltrated Catholic seminaries. “In the earliest stages it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools,” he said. “The practical conclusion, drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”20
At the time, many scoffed at this testimony. But who doubts the influence of the radical left’s long march through the Church now? In 2009, the heretical theologian Hans Küng, a supporter of the Pact of the Catacombs who now corresponds with Pope Francis, dreamed of a pope like Barack Obama: “What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama? Clearly, like Obama he would… proclaim the vision of hope of a renewed church, a revitalized ecumenism, understanding with the Jews, the Muslims and other world religions and a positive assessment of modern science…” Küng got his wish.
In 2015, Pope Francis made a speech in Bolivia before a group of communists, socialists, and leftists called the World Meeting of Popular Movements. It was an electric moment for the left, proof that the papacy had fallen into its hands. Sharing the platform with open Marxists such as Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, who donned a jacket emblazoned with a picture of Che Guevara, Pope Francis exhorted the radicals in attendance to continue their social agitation.21
“Chavez died and Fidel is sick. Francis has taken up that leadership role and is doing everything right,” gushed an organizer of the event, João Pedro Stédile of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement.
Pope Francis told the group exactly what it wanted to hear: that capitalism, not socialism, is the cause of their poverty. “The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor,” he said.
He decried the “offenses of the Church,” referred to capitalism as the “dung of the devil,” and urged them to keep “organizing”:
You, the lowly, the exploited, the poor and underprivileged, can do, and are doing, a lot. I would even say that the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives, through your daily efforts to ensure the three “L’s” (labor, lodging, land) and through your proactive participation in the great processes of change on the national, regional and global levels. Don’t lose heart!22
Many churchmen on the left’s long march to the papacy died on the journey. But they have enjoyed a posthumous victory under Pope Francis. He has made a point of honoring Marxists inside the Church, such as the late Mexican bishop Samuel Ruiz.
During his 2016 visit to Mexico, Pope Francis visited Ruiz’s tomb. Ruiz was known for pushing liberation theology, third-world ideologies, and the rights of indigenous peoples and playing fast and loose with the sacraments, which eventually led Pope John Paul II’s Vatican to condemn him. Ruiz’s close associates were thrilled when they heard that Pope Francis was going to visit his tomb, interpreting it as a moment of vindication for the liberation theologians banned by the Church. “Pope Francis is a Latin American, and his duty now is to pick up the work that men like Ruiz have done in the past,” Bishop Raúl Vera said.23
“I believe that a key moment in the Pope’s journey to Mexico will be his visit to the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz García in Chiapas,” said liberation theologian Leonardo Boff. “This is a reparation and a lesson for the Roman Curia, which is aware of having persecuted and impeded the advancement of a truly indigenous pastoral ministry from the indigenous people themselves and from their culture.”
During the same visit, Pope Francis rebuked Mexico’s bishops for not doing enough to push liberation theology, a lecture that left them so annoyed that an editorial in a publication for the archdiocese of Mexico City asked after the visit, “Does the pope have some reason for scolding Mexican bishops?”24
Many of the themes of Pope Francis’s pontificate were foreshadowed by movements within liberal church circles in Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. The press has praised Pope Francis for transforming the “tone” of the Church, but his “Who am I to judge?”–style rhetoric is a reprisal of the “medicine of mercy” rhetoric pervasive on the Catholic left for over two generations. Figures such as Milwaukee’s former archbishop Rembert Weakland—who spearheaded the bishops’ letter against Reaganomics and endorsed the “genital expression” of homosexuality—can be seen as forerunners of this pontificate.25
The winds of liberalism sweeping through the Church for decades pushed Bergoglio into the chair of St. Peter and knocked Joseph Ratzinger off it. One of the mysteries of Ratzinger’s pontificate is that it had happened at all. He had always been outnumbered by liberals at the Vatican and didn’t even want the papacy in the first place. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had asked Pope John Paul II if he could resign and devote himself to private study. Pope John Paul II rejected his request.26 The circumstances around his resignation remain murky, but it appears that the reluctance with which he entered the papacy (he has told a biographer his unwanted election left him “incredulous”) and the resistance he felt from factions like the St. Gallen group and the gay mafia during it contributed to his resignation.
Across many quarters of the Church—from chanceries to left-wing Catholic colleges and universities to socialist organizations such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development—modernist Catholics had been eagerly waiting for a chance to replace Ratzinger with a progressive in the style of Bergoglio. The National Catholic Reporter, a heterodox newspaper that often serves as a barometer of what liberal bishops are thinking, hinted at this when it reported during Ratzinger’s pontificate:
One need only talk to a sampling of theology departments to know that in many places theologians are lying low. Our seminaries will certainly be playing it safe for the foreseeable future. Moral theology of the sort that might raise substantial questions or handle difficult sexual or other life issues is being left to those who regurgitate the party line. More adventuresome and sophisticated theologians are out there, but they’re not going to raise their heads too far above the barricades.27
Feeling empowered by the election of Pope Francis, those “sophisticated” theologians now not only lift their heads above the barricades but happily fire upon conservative Catholics. Once critical of “conservative” purges within the Church, they now conduct their own.
They have put pressure on Catholic publications to fire conservative Catholics thought to be out of step with this progressive pontificate. After Adam Shaw of Fox News criticized the liberalism of Francis in 2013, he lost his job at the Catholic News Service.28 When Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times, balked at the liberal drift of the pope’s Synod on the Family, a long list of Catholic academics, many of whom had no problem criticizing Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, ganged up on him, writing his bosses, “This is not what we expect of the New York Times.”29 After a conservative Canadian blogger criticized one of Pope Francis’s media aides, that aide enlisted the help of a law firm in intimidating the blogger. He only called off the law firm after media attention to his heavy-handed petulance caused the Vatican embarrassment.30
Charles Curran, one of the most notorious modernist dissenters from the 1970s, understood the significance of Pope Francis’s election. He will “leave the door ajar,” he said, assuring his fans that Francis’s rise to power represented more than just a “change of style.”31 Dissenting sister Jeannine Gramick has written that the renegades from the Vatican II era have reappeared and now tell her, “My hope is in Pope Francis and what he is doing for the entire church.”32
The liberal media cast the election of Pope Francis as a chance for a hidebound institution to move into the “future.” But his election had less to do with the future than the past. It represented the Catholic left’s victory in a theological civil war that had been raging for more than a century. As Cardinal Kasper said after Pope Francis’s election, speaking for the modernists who had bided their time until his pontificate, “[we] now have the wind at our backs.”33