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, DC, ranked as one of the top donors to his campaign.1
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.2 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 the University of 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.3 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.”4
Leftists frequently turn up at the Vatican, often invited by one of Pope Francis’s closest advisers, the socialist Honduran cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga. Before the pope’s visit to the United States, a group of left-wing activists and officials from unions and organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and PICO National Network (an Alinskyite group founded by the liberal Jesuit father John Baumann) descended on the Vatican to confer with curial officials about the trip.5 Around the same time, more than ninety 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.6
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 United States. According to the leaked documents, Soros’s Open Society Foundations sought to create a “critical mass” of American bishops and lay Catholics supportive of the pope’s priorities. The documents made special mention of Rodríguez, a champion of PICO, as a useful ally for ensuring that the pope’s speeches in the United States pushed socialism.7
The hacked emails exposed the depth of the plotting:
Pope Francis’ 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 emails, 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 its success, 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.8
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.”9 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 email, 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.”10
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 email, 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.”11
Pope Francis has been influenced by 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.12
The politicians in America most associated with the Alinskyite left, such as New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio, have bragged about the utility of Pope Francis to their causes.
After the Vatican invited him to speak at a conference in 2015 about environmentalism, de Blasio said: “This is a leader such as we haven’t seen before, really. He is saying things so clearly and so powerfully all over the world that need to be said. He’s moving people on an extraordinary level. And we have few truly international leaders in any sense. What he is doing is, he’s creating an international voice of conscience that I can’t think of any previous parallel for.”13
“Maybe I have given the impression of being a little bit to the left,” allowed Pope Francis in a 2015 understatement. It is more than just an impression for socialists like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 Democratic primaries. In an interview with Vatican spokesman Fr. Thomas Rosica, which a Catholic television station in Canada aired in 2015, Sanders spoke about Pope Francis as a fellow socialist.
“Well, what it means to be a socialist, in the sense of what the pope is talking about, what I’m talking about, is to say that we have got to do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering, that does not accelerate the disparities of income and wealth,” Sanders said. It pleased Sanders to see Pope Francis inveigh against the “idolatry of money, and to say maybe that’s not what human life should be about, and that is a very, very radical critique of the hypercapitalist system, world system, that we’re living in today.”14
In April 2016, at the height of the Democratic primaries, Sanders accepted an invitation from the Holy See to lecture at the Vatican and meet Pope Francis. No other presidential candidate received an invitation. “We invited the candidate who cites the pope the most in his campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders,” said Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The New York Times describes Sánchez Sorondo as an “Argentine who is close to the pope” and quotes him as saying that the concerns of Sanders are “very analogous to that of the pope.”15
In an interview with the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica during his visit to Rome, Sanders praised the pope’s socialist commitments: “Look, I believe that the reason for which I was invited to participate in this conference is that many of the issues which the pope tackles are similar to mine.”
While in 2016 Francis’s Vatican rolled out the red carpet for a socialist who famously honeymooned in the Soviet Union, it adopted a decidedly frosty tone toward Republicans. Pope Francis denounced the GOP’s nominee, Donald Trump, for opposing open borders. Offending large numbers of religious conservatives who support the enforcement of just immigration laws, Pope Francis said that Trump is “not Christian” as he intends to build a “wall” between the United States and Mexico.16
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.
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
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
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 Earnest, 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
The chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, is given to intemperate attacks on critics of climate change activism. To a pro-lifer who questioned why his academy has hosted proponents of abortion and population control, he offered the rawly polemical reply: “The Tea Party and all those whose income derives from oil have criticized us, but not my superiors, who instead authorized me, and several of them participated.”42
Pope Francis’s first major appointment in America was Blase Cupich, whom he sent to the archdiocese of Chicago. The appointment spoke volumes about Pope Francis’s desire for a politicized Church. Cupich is as, or even more, liberal as Joseph Bernardin, the late cardinal of Chicago, and he has used his status as one of Francis’s prized prelates to push political liberalism unapologetically. “Pope Francis doesn’t want cultural warriors,” said Cupich, explaining his appointment.43
Cupich sounds more like a spokesman for the Democratic Party than for the Catholic Church. He is notorious for downplaying the issue of abortion, for prioritizing the wish list of the progressive left, and for his loud ecumenical gestures, such as holding “Catholic-Muslim Iftar” dinners. After undercover videos of grisly activities at Planned Parenthood appeared in 2016, Cupich lectured pro-lifers on the importance of other “issues”: “we should be no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice.”44
Cupich frequently bashes the free market, touts extreme environmentalism, and soft-pedals the Church’s teachings at odds with a relativistic culture. At the Synod on the Family, he told members of the press that he had distributed to every priest of the archdiocese of Chicago Cardinal Kasper’s proposal to grant Communion to adulterers. Defending the logic of situation ethics, Cupich said that conscience is more important to him than Church teaching: “The conscience is inviolable. And we have to respect that when they make decisions and I’ve always done that.”45 Democrats have also cheered him for his policy of giving Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion and gay marriage.
While he respects the consciences of the heterodox, he has considerably less respect for the consciences of conservative Catholics. He has browbeaten them for not accepting his liberal interpretation of Vatican II, pouting that “eventually” they will have to accept it. The archdiocese of Chicago under his leadership has become an engine of left-wing activism, with church officials serving as advocates for amnesty and gun control. A report on CBS called him “America’s Pope Francis” and he lived up to the billing by telling the liberal interviewer what she wanted to hear, that homosexuals can be “good parents.”46
Cupich has teamed up with Illinois senator Dick Durbin, a pro-abortion Catholic Democrat, to push amnesty. They appeared together in 2015 at an event at which Cupich described opposition to amnesty as racism and Durbin purred about the political benefits of adding millions of new voters to the Democratic ledger.47
Cupich is also thick with Chicago’s Democratic labor movement. Speaking before the Chicago Federation of Labor, he denounced “right to work” laws. The speech was so tendentiously liberal Hillary Clinton could have given it. Making no distinction between his personal politics and Church teaching, he said, “In view of present day attempts to enact so-called right-to-work laws, the church is duty bound to challenge such efforts by raising questions based on longstanding principles. We have to ask, ‘Do these measures undermine the capacity of unions to organize, to represent workers and to negotiate contracts? Do such laws protect the weak and vulnerable? Do they promote the dignity of work and the rights of workers? Do they promote a more just society and a more fair economy? Do they advance the common good?’” he said. Above all, he wanted to assure the union activists that “Pope Francis is with you.”48
That Pope Francis gave one of the most important archdioceses in America to Cupich contained unmistakable meaning for U.S. Democrats. Pope Francis had been advised by conservative Vatican officials not to select Cupich, but he brushed off that advice. Cupich represented for Francis the prototypical bishop: a left-wing political activist who energizes the Church’s critics while leaving conservative Catholics out in the cold. In 2016, Pope Francis augmented Cupich’s power by adding him to the Congregation for Bishops, which makes him, along with the liberal Cardinal Wuerl, the chief bishop-maker for the United States.49 Not long thereafter, Pope Francis elevated Cupich to the rank of cardinal.50 Another revealing appointment cheered by Democrats was Pope Francis’s selection of Robert McElroy for the diocese of San Diego, California, in 2014. McElroy is a protégé of the former archbishop John Quinn. McElroy served under Quinn in San Francisco. The liberal Catholic press hailed the McElroy appointment as “the latest sign that Pope Francis intends to make his mark on the Church in America.”51 McElroy has since made headlines by supporting gay rights and sacramental laxity. He has called the catechism’s description of homosexual acts as disordered “very destructive” and urged his priests to give Communion to people living in a state of sin. On political matters, he has sounded predictable themes, such as that all parishes in San Diego should install solar-powered systems to counteract global warming and Catholics should support “pathways to citizenship” for illegal immigrants.52
“Through his activism, Francis has significantly raised the Church’s profile on issues with which it wasn’t previously associated in American politics—issues chiefly championed by Democrats,” commented the Atlantic. “Francis is not an American politician, but his perspective on the state’s role in these issues lines up pretty well with that of most American Democrats.”53
Under the lead of Pope Francis, liberal bishops aren’t even bothering to conceal their support for the policies of the left, even on the most neuralgic cultural matters. Retired Washington, DC, cardinal Theodore McCarrick has endorsed gay civil unions, which has only elevated his standing under Francis. “McCarrick is one of a number of senior churchmen who were more or less put out to pasture during the eight-year pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. But now Francis is pope, and prelates like Cardinal Walter Kasper (another old friend of McCarrick’s) and McCarrick himself are back in the mix and busier than ever,” writes David Gibson.54 Indeed, Pope Francis made a McCarrick protégé, Bishop Kevin Farrell, the head of the newly formed Vatican department called the Discatery for the Laity, the Family, and Life in 2016, and later made him a cardinal.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, asked about the pope’s support for gay civil unions on NBC’s Meet the Press, said Francis was telling Catholics that “we need to think about that and look into it and see the reasons that have driven” the public to accept them. In the wake of the gay-marriage movement’s successes, Cardinal Kasper, speaking for many of the Francis-friendly bishops, said, “A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights.”55 Pope Francis has called on the bishops to incorporate leftist groups into their chanceries in the form of “social justice” offices. Addressing socialists at a meeting of “popular movements” in 2015, he reassured them that the bishops stand ready to help them: “I am pleased to see the Church opening her doors to all of you, embracing you, accompanying you, and establishing in each diocese, in every justice and peace commission, a genuine, ongoing, and serious cooperation with popular movements. I ask everyone, bishops, priests, and laity, as well as the social organizations of the urban and rural peripheries, to deepen this encounter.”
“The Left has its pope,” wrote the Stanford economist Thomas Sowell. “Pope Francis is part of a larger trend of the rise of the political left among Catholic intellectuals. He is, in a sense, the culmination of that trend.”56
“I am not a Catholic nor even a Christian, and I know many American Protestants who, shall we say, were never deeply invested in the moral authority of the pope,” writes Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, spelling out the stakes for non-Catholics if Pope Francis succeeds in liberalizing the Church. “So what does it matter to us whether or not this pope is surrendering the Church to the left? Historically, it does matter, because in the 20th century the Church helped change the course of history, vastly for the better, by offering ideological and material resistance to Communism. It mattered that there was a large institution with deep historical roots that was independent from the socialist state and politically correct orthodoxy, driven a different set of values. And it’s discomforting to think what might happen if that’s no longer true.”57
The implications of this unholy alliance are serious for the world, but they are even more dire for Catholics. Under the left’s gradual absorption of the Church, her freedom will continue to wither, as secularists subject the Church to coercive mandates. Owing to the alliance, the left has gained power at the expense of the Church without having to compromise on any of its anti-Catholic positions.
“To f—k your enemies, you must first seduce your allies,” Saul Alinsky once bragged to Playboy about his political exploitation of the Church.58 His disciples, such as the late Edward Chambers (a former Catholic seminarian), made it plain that they intended to hijack the Church for political gain: “The Industrial Areas Foundation has been in the field of organizing for nearly forty years. We believe that the best hope for change and social justice is the Church. The churches have the networks, the relationship of loyalty and trust, the money, the values and the untapped talent of the people.”
Had Alinsky lived to see the papacy of Francis, he would have laughed at the ease with which his devious work has been advanced in the Church.