Pope Francis’s address to Congress will prove a concluding flourish to the descent of the Catholic Church into an accessory for modern man’s temptation toward totalitarianism.
I am writing this on the eve of Pope Francis’ address to the joint session of Congress. Permit me a confession of distaste for tomorrow’s extravaganza and disinterest in the details of a media-conscious homily to the nation.
In large measure, Thursday’s propaganda event will prove a concluding flourish to what this pope is on course to achieve: the descent of the Catholic Church into one more geopolitical “ism,” a pious-seeming companion to every other materialist -ism that tempts modern man away from freedom and toward submission to totalitarian order. Since ascending to the papacy, Francis’ actions have served a mongrel papo-caesarism that drains Christianity of its soul. Christian idiom degrades into the carrier of a secular agenda.
Ideolatry, the idolatry of fixed ideas, is as rampant in the Vatican as in any other directorate, and just as dangerous. Even more so. Because the pope commands deference from the world’s peoples, the present object of his worship—from climate-change dogma to the antagonisms peculiar to an anti-democratic Leftist elite—disfigures the faith of billions. It becomes a golden calf festooned with gospel quotes….
Something in me gave way at the sight of an exultant image of Che Guevara overseeing the altar in Plaza de la Revolución, the approved site of the recent papal Mass in Havana. A sadistic, murderous thug looked down on attendees in an obscene burlesque of Christ Pantocrator. Under the gaze of a butcher and amid symbols of the regime, Jorge Bergolio joined his fellow Argentine in service to the calamitous Cuban revolution. The entire spectacle played like a farcical inversion of John Paul II’s presence in Warsaw’s Victory Square, in 1979, and in stark contrast to the message he brought to Cuba in 1998…
….Make no mistake—there is malice in this pope. It takes little sophistication to realize that the intentions by which people understand themselves to be motivated are often not the ones that really drive them to speak and act as they do. However incoherent Francis’ logic on issues from economics to munitions, his stridency makes clear his antipathy toward the developed world. In this, he is a commonplace Leftist ideologue intent on finding ever-new sources of incrimination in the works of the West.
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