Cuba: FrancisChurch Made Manifest

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In FrancisChurch I am Catholic. I mean it from my heart.

In FrancisChurch I am a Catholic. I mean it from my heart.

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

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'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.

 

 

 

Dom Helder Camara: New Emerging FrancisSaint Even More Like Pope Francis

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They call me Communist because I'm all about social action!

They call me Communist because I’m all about social action!

FrancisChurch may seem like a completely new kind of Catholicism, but it’s not new.  The more you learn about it, the more you can see it’s all been done before.  In Kerknet Google Translation we read: before new ‘martyr’ Oscar Romero has even been beatified yet another ‘saint of the people’ has emerged from the Pope’s Latin America; home of  the poor, the poor, the poor and the oppressed….oh and the marginalized.

Mgr. Fernando Antônio Saburido OSB, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife (Brazil), Rome has asked for permission to his archdiocese the beatification process for Dom Helder Camara, the legendary “bishop of the poor”, to boot. Rome investigating the case. So wrote the French newspaper La Croix ‘Monday.

Can you imagine if our Lord in His day went around bleating continuously about the poor and their evil oppressors?  Instead of dying on a cross he might have lived to be ninety like our new FrancisChurch saint.

Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the symbol of liberation theology in Latin America, the firm took on the poor. In 1964 he became Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, in one of the poorest regions of Brazil. He left the Archbishop’s palace and went to live in a slum.

No Pope should live in the Pope’s house and no archbishop in the archbishop’s house!  What do you think I am, an archbishop?  I’m not one of those evil elitist Church-people you know.  The poor are at the center of MY Gospel.

Dom Helder Camara founded a seminary where the formation of the priest candidates in social action was as important as the theological formation.

Let me see.  Theology is about God, Truth, and the Catholic Faith. Social Action is about radical agitation, envy, guerilla  war, and Communist thuggery.  He’s right!  They are equally important!

He opposed the then military dictatorship in his country when the military him as ‘communist’ and ‘demagogue’ labeled. “When I give food to the poor, they say I’m a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they say I’m a communist, “said Dom Helder Camara then.

Wait a minute, that’s the Pope’s line, yes?  Communism stole the Catholic flag.  It’s just Christianity.  All I do is love the poor and people call me a Communist. I thought Pope Francis made that up?

Is there a slight chance that people called Oscar Romero, Dom Helder Camara, and Pope Francis Communists because they act like Communists, not because they love the poor?  Is it possible to love the poor without raving against the unjust system like a Communist? Can people who are neither poor themselves nor socialists actually love the poor?

No. It’s not possible.  In that 1970’s Latin American world of Pope Francis there was either the Church of the Poor or the greedy enablers of the repressive murderous ‘military dictatorship’ (many of whom respected the rule of law and were actually faithful Catholics).

In 1979, Pope John Paul II brought openly tribute to Dom Helder Camara, during his visit to Brazil, but in 1985 appointed Msgr. José Cardoso Sobrinho as his successor. And that immediately made a tabula rasa of everything Dom Helder Camara had built.

Once again John Paul II turns out to be one of them.  He must have been in the pocket of the U.S. money-machine backing all the Latin American oppressors.  Thank goodness the Church is finally free from their influence and we can go back to moving forward, ever forward even more toward the people!

The only issue here is that Camara can’t be a ‘martyr’ because he wasn’t shot.  Get ready for Dom Helder’s miracle.