Why is it considered unsophisticated and hysterical to write about Communism these days when totalitarian statism has never been more accepted?  Why is it so difficult to see the effects of it’s influence, of it’s backers and their patient efforts, even inside the Church?

Communists see traditional Catholicism and the Ancient Mass as products of an oppressive elite?  Why not?  They see everything else that way.  Communists think of the new vernacular Mass as the “people’s” Mass.  So does Pope Francis, the same Pope who sees the difference between Catholicism and Communism as only one of semantics.

Take Communism and add some God and you’ve got the Catholic Church according to Francis; you know, a Church where the ‘poor are the center of the Gospel’ and all that, where if you don’t help the poor on the peripheries it doesn’t matter what ‘religious observances’ you follow.

Just as Communists praise Francis today, I suspect that Communists were quite happy with the Paul VI Mass.  Why?  What do they care?  It is because Communists are atheists who cannot realize their goals without thwarting the graces of the Church, causing widespread rejection of God, and a depraved rootless people.

Pope Francis is entirely wrong when he links Communism to Catholicism, but he’s not wrong when he links his own concept of the Church to it.  FrancisChurch, moving “forward” from Paul VI, is entirely compatible with Communism because it enables it quite well.

At Breitbart, Austin Ruse follows up on what Communists, and Reagan Era Communist-fighting men see in the New Pope of the People.

A largely overlooked column by human rights advocate Armando Valadares raises questions about the initiative of Pope Francis toward the “island-prison” of Cuba.

In early January, Valladares, who spent 22 years in Castro’s prisons and went on to write a highly influential book about it, says the recent opening to Cuba by the West is part of an “Obama-Francis axis” that he calls a “spiritual-political axis which… will now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”

He says Pope Francis and President Obama are merely replacing the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and finally Brazil as Castro’s financial enablers.

Two days after the simultaneous December 19th announcement by Rome, Washington, and Havana of the diplomatic rapprochement, Valladares reported a Cuban Coast Guard boat “began ramming a boat fleeing Cuba with 32 people on board, including seven women and two children, to sink the frail craft.” Valladares called it “a brutal action by a regime that feels back up by powerful allies. A criminal event so seriously damning for the Castro regime would deserve a worldwide outcry of repudiation but was hardly noticed…”

He said the event wasn’t even notice by “churchmen who should imitate the Good Shepard by being ready to give their lives for their sheep.”

Valladares, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush, charges that the “most serious and tragic aspect of this agreement” between the US and Cuba, “falls upon Pope Francis, its most eminent architect and mediator.”

But, he says, “This is not the first time that Francis takes measures that objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America… For example, he personally attended the World Meeting of Popular Movements held in Rome from October 27 to 29. It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators.” Valladeres called the meeting a kind of “beatification of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures…”

Valladares also points to Francis’s overturning the suspension of the Nicaraguan priest Miquel D’Escoto who had been the Foreign Minister of the revolutionary Sandanista regime, “a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.”

Where Valladares might be described as a man of the right, a man of the farthest left sees the same thing in Francis and approves.

Despite the continual refrain that now ‘martyr’ Oscar Romero was not a Liberation Theologist, just ‘used’ by them; Romero is their hero, and the Pope has backed his cause despite years of it’s being blocked.  (Note the similarities between the populist ‘art’ surrounding Romero and the material produced by the Pope’s Vatican artist, Chinese propagandist, Shen Jiawei.)

Richard Greeman, a writer for the Marxist website New Politics, wonders if “Catholicism is the new communism.” He describes his years, after the Second Vatican Council, working in Latin America, participating in the rise of “liberation theology.” He says, “Liberation theology Catholics were consistently more revolutionary than Leftists of all stripes.”

Read the rest here.  The ties between Communism and the modern radical revolution in the Church must be revisited, not shamefully hidden, in the new Francis Era, if only for the fact that a disabled Church is key to the success of statism.

Ruse closes with a chilling reality that we must squarely face.

Greeman asks, “How did such an openly radical priest manage to get elected.” Valladares may be asking the same question.