Author Archives: Stumblingblock

At The Blaze writer Steven Herreid says something that’s needed to be stated for quite some time now: the Obama-like diplomacy of the FrancisVatican is an unprecedented scandal.

This weekend, the Communist President of Cuba Raul Castro met with Pope Francis in private for an “unusually long time,” according to Gerard O’Connell, Vatican correspondent for America Magazine.

When he emerged from his meeting with Pope Francis, which a Vatican spokesman called a “very cordial talk,” Castro exchanged gifts with the Holy Father. Castro gave the pope a commemorative medallion in honor of the 200th anniversary of the building of the Havana Cathedral, and a locally produced painting “inspired” by the pope’s advocacy for progressive immigration policies.

In return, Pope Francis gave Casto an image of St. Martin covering the poor with his cloak, which Pope Francis called “an insight into what we have to do.” His second gift was a copy of his controversial Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. America Magazine reports: “Looking at [Castro] with a smile, [Pope Francis] remarked, ‘There are here some declarations that you will like!’”

I love the pope’s cloak analogy.  He’s always going on about warmth and ‘closeness’ while he’s in the business of smothering the poor under his old horse blanket.

And why is Pope Francis constantly heaving out that impenetrable diatribe, Evangelii Gaudium, to every world leader?  It’s almost as if he thinks it the Pope’s job to rebuild the world according to some heretofore untried paradigm.  Does he really imagine Angela Merkel has time to read that?  She’ll probably get to it sometime after he finishes those 107 Wilhelm Furtwaengler CD’s she gave him!  It’s possible there was some message there.

I’m sure Merkel has no desire to delve into the Francis exhortation, but I bet old Raul has already read it.  You can’t be a hard-line communist without a certain tolerance for angry tedious pseudo-philosophical blather.

After noting the fairly tepid conservative ‘backlash’ to the Pope’s exhortation last year, Herreid writes:

For any serious Christian, the culture war against the left was as much a defense of free markets as it was a defense of pro-life Christian doctrine. But some Christians were less serious, and more eager to defend the pope, right or wrong, than to defend the Church.

One stalwart Catholic journalist who agreed with Limbaugh, Fox’s Adam Shaw, boldly denounced the pope’s “misguided” Apostolic Exhortation in an op-ed. He was promptly fired from his job with the Catholic News Service.

Stalwart Christian, serious Christian: we must be these things if we want to build and strengthen the true Kingdom of God.  Capitulators, hypocrites, and faux-Christians, or in other words, liberals, are useless.  The ‘market’ the pope loves to condemn is only true justice.  Nothing good can come from the injustice these socialists call charity.

Back to Raul Castro’s visit with Pope Francis: After their meeting, Castro revealed to reporters he had assured the pope that Cuba’s leaders read his speeches “every day.”

Castro had even told the Holy Father, “If you continue talking like this … I will return to the Catholic Church. I am not joking. I may convert again to Catholicism, even though I am a Communist.”

I think most of these modern ‘rulers’ we have, unless they are true Christians, make statements solely for the purpose of herding people.  In the minds of the remnant West, Raul is trying to unite the once well-understood and despised Communism with the sentimental and deadly new FrancisChurch ‘christianity.’  That’s the Pope’s project, to make Communism look Catholic, and the Castros are here to help.

Two weeks ago, a top KGB defector revealed that the “liberation theology” movement in Latin America was a Communist “invention” designed to dupe Catholics into the atheist ideology of Marxism. The ploy was especially effective among the vulnerable Christians of South America during the 1960’s and 70’s, where Communist operatives planted deep roots.

Neither Pope St. John Paul II nor his trusted friend and successor Benedict XVI were taken in by liberation theology. John Paul fought Communism throughout his pontificate, and Benedict was equally forceful against liberation theology’s interpretation of the traditional “preferential option for the poor” as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution.

According to historian Nikolas Kozloff, Pope Benedict called liberation theology a “singular heresy,” and “a ‘fundamental threat’ to the church.”

This “fundamental threat” to the church is now welcome in Pope Francis’s Vatican, where the Holy Father is making headlines by his efforts to “rehabilitate” liberation theology.

So to all my liberal friends and disengaged Catholics who think the Faith is a whole new thing since we’ve been blessed with Francis: which is it?  Is Pope Francis Catholic or were Popes John Paul and Benedict Catholic?  Is Liberation Theology Communism or is it Catholicism?  It’s not both.

It’s not a matter of only two out of three popes either.  Do some digging.  Run it by a couple hundred others.

If you need even more research why not visit Cuba?  Soon they’ll have fleets of ferries to bring you there thanks to the Holy Father – or to bring them here.  On Cuba you can find a ‘Church of the poor and for the poor’ with a ‘preferential option for the poor,’ because everything on that whole island is like that, except inside the enclaves of its pro-Francis rulers.

In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to “quickly” beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a “butcher” and an “international outlaw,” and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a “poor Church for the Poor” at an official Vatican event this week.

It might be added that Raul Castro’s friend Frei Betto is a Marxist who once compiled a series of interviews with Fidel Castro and published them as a pro-Castro book called “Fidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology.” As Victor Gaetan reported in an enlightening 2010 series at the National Catholic Register, Fidel used the book to insist, again and again, “that Christianity and his revolutionary goals, namely full socialism, are compatible.”

Raul Castro has expressed a similar hope of reconciling Marxism with Catholicism. When asked about his own faith, he once responded, “I’ve kept the principles of Christ … and the revolution carries them out.”

That sounds eerily familiar.  It’s just the Gospel, yes?

What the revolution in Cuba carried out was 30 years of mandated atheism, the persecution and near-starvation of a Christian people, the state imposition of free-abortion-on-demand, and, even today, the suppression of the dissident wives and children of numerous Catholic Cuban men arrested by the Castros for daring to demand religious liberty.

Catholics who condemned “anti-Catholic” whistleblowers and rushed to the defense of bishops who covered for predator priests during the sex abuse scandal must now live in shame. Today’s Catholics who defend Pope Francis against his critics ought to remember who some of those poor critics are.

For the most part, Pope Francis’ critics are not the anti-Christian leftists who have berated the Church all along. Rather, his critics are Cuban Catholics who feel crushed to see Pope Francis fraternizing with their oppressors. They are American Catholics whose long, thankless battle against the culture of death seems to be of little concern to a pope intent on making friends with the enemies of religious liberty.

While journalists are being fired by Catholic news providers for questioning the Bishop of Rome, Christians ought to consider how much longer they should put their sacred faith in a position that requires defending Pope Francis’s views.

Hello, Pat Archbold.

A new Catholic scandal is upon us, and not since the sex abuse scandal have so many Catholics defended the powerful and demonized the weak.

Is this truly the time of Mercy?