What is wrong with the pontiff’s neo-socialist sermonizing?
On arrival in La Paz, Pope Francis was presented by Bolivian President Evo Morales with a wooden crucifix carved in the form of a hammer and sickle, the symbol of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Fidel.
Had Pope John Paul II been handed that crucifix, he might have cracked it over Evo’s head. For John Paul II had seen up close what communism did – to his country, his church and his people in 45 years of Bolshevik rule.
On his arrival in the Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega in 1983, Pope John Paul castigated a priest-collaborator who dared to serve that Sandinista Marxist regime as culture minister.
And, while in Managua, he warned Catholics they were being threatened by “unacceptable ideological commitments.”
Today we have a pope for whom free-market capitalism is the “unacceptable ideological commitment.”
As the New York Times reports, Pope Francis does “not just criticize the excesses of capitalism. He compares them to the ‘dung of the devil.’ He does not simply argue that ‘greed for money’ is a bad thing. He calls it a ‘subtle dictatorship that condemns and enslaves.’”
In South America, Pope Francis “made a historic apology for the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the period of Spanish colonialism – even as he called for a global movement against a ‘new colonialism’ rooted in an inequitable economic order.”
“The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution.”
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