{"id":2360,"date":"2015-05-12T15:17:17","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T19:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/66.147.242.160\/~stumbli4\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2015-05-12T23:27:09","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T03:27:09","slug":"cuba-francischurch-made-manifest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/?p=2360","title":{"rendered":"Cuba: FrancisChurch Made Manifest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"In<\/a>

In FrancisChurch I am a Catholic. I mean it from my heart.<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This weekend, the Communist President of Cuba Raul Castro met with Pope Francis in private for an \u201cunusually long time,\u201d according<\/a> to Gerard O\u2019Connell, Vatican correspondent for America Magazine.<\/p>\n

When he emerged from his meeting<\/a> with Pope Francis, which a Vatican spokesman called a \u201cvery cordial talk,\u201d 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 \u201cinspired\u201d by the pope\u2019s advocacy for progressive immigration policies.<\/p>\n

In return, Pope Francis gave Casto an image of St. Martin covering the poor with his cloak, which Pope Francis called \u201can insight into what we have to do.\u201d His second gift was a copy of his controversial Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.<\/a> America Magazine reports: \u201cLooking at [Castro] with a smile, [Pope Francis] remarked, \u2018There are here some declarations that you will like!\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love the pope’s cloak analogy.\u00a0 He’s always going on about warmth and ‘closeness’ while he’s in the business of smothering the poor under his old horse blanket.<\/p>\n

And why is Pope Francis constantly heaving out that impenetrable diatribe, Evangelii Gaudium, to every world leader?\u00a0 It’s almost as if he thinks it the Pope’s job to rebuild the world according to some heretofore untried paradigm.\u00a0 Does he really imagine Angela Merkel has time to read that?\u00a0 She’ll probably get to it sometime after he finishes those 107 Wilhelm Furtwaengler<\/span> CD’s <\/a>she gave him!\u00a0 It’s possible there was some message there.<\/p>\n

I’m sure Merkel has no desire to delve into the Francis exhortation, but I bet old Raul has already read it.\u00a0 You can’t be a hard-line communist without a certain tolerance for angry tedious pseudo-philosophical blather.<\/p>\n

After noting the fairly tepid conservative ‘backlash’ to the Pope’s exhortation last year, Herreid writes:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One stalwart Catholic journalist who agreed with Limbaugh, Fox\u2019s Adam Shaw, boldly denounced the pope\u2019s \u201cmisguided\u201d Apostolic Exhortation in an op-ed. He was promptly fired<\/a> from his job with the Catholic News Service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stalwart Christian, serious Christian: we must be these things if we want to build and strengthen the true Kingdom of God.\u00a0 Capitulators, hypocrites, and faux-Christians, or in other words, liberals, are useless.\u00a0 The ‘market’ the pope loves to condemn is only true justice.\u00a0 Nothing good can come from the injustice these socialists call charity.<\/p>\n

Back to Raul Castro\u2019s visit with Pope Francis: After their meeting, Castro revealed to reporters he had assured the pope that Cuba\u2019s leaders read his speeches \u201cevery day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Castro had even told the Holy Father, \u201cIf you continue talking like this \u2026 I will return to the Catholic Church. I am not joking. I may convert again to Catholicism, even though I am a Communist.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think most of these modern ‘rulers’ we have, unless they are true Christians, make statements solely for the purpose of herding people.\u00a0 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.’\u00a0 That’s the Pope’s project, to make Communism look Catholic, and the Castros are here to help.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, a top KGB defector revealed<\/a> that the \u201cliberation theology\u201d movement in Latin America was a Communist \u201cinvention\u201d 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\u2019s and 70\u2019s, where Communist operatives planted deep roots.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s interpretation of the traditional \u201cpreferential option for the poor\u201d as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution.<\/p>\n

According to historian Nikolas Kozloff<\/a>, Pope Benedict called liberation theology a \u201csingular heresy,\u201d and \u201ca \u2018fundamental threat\u2019 to the church.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cfundamental threat\u201d to the church is now welcome in Pope Francis\u2019s Vatican, where the Holy Father is making headlines by his efforts to \u201crehabilitate<\/a>\u201d liberation theology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?\u00a0 Is Pope Francis Catholic or were Popes John Paul and Benedict Catholic?\u00a0 Is Liberation Theology Communism or is it Catholicism?\u00a0 It’s not both.<\/p>\n

It’s not a matter of only two out of three popes either.\u00a0 Do some digging.\u00a0 Run it by a couple hundred others.<\/p>\n

If you need even more research why not visit Cuba?\u00a0 Soon they’ll have fleets of ferries <\/a>to bring you there thanks to the Holy Father – or to bring them here.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to \u201cquickly\u201d beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled<\/a> with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a \u201cbutcher\u201d and an \u201cinternational outlaw,\u201d and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a \u201cpoor Church for the Poor\u201d at an official Vatican event this week.<\/p>\n

It might be added that Raul Castro\u2019s friend Frei Betto is a Marxist<\/a> who once compiled a series of interviews with Fidel Castro and published them as a pro-Castro book called \u201cFidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology<\/a>.\u201d As Victor Gaetan reported in an enlightening 2010 series at the National Catholic Register, Fidel used the book to insist, again and again, \u201cthat Christianity and his revolutionary goals, namely full socialism, are compatible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raul Castro has expressed a similar hope of reconciling Marxism with Catholicism. When asked about his own faith, he once responded, \u201cI\u2019ve kept the principles of Christ \u2026 and the revolution carries them out.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sounds eerily familiar.\u00a0 It’s just the Gospel<\/a>, yes?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> of numerous Catholic Cuban men arrested by the Castros for daring to demand religious liberty.<\/p>\n

Catholics who condemned \u201canti-Catholic\u201d whistleblowers and rushed to the defense of bishops who covered for predator priests during the sex abuse scandal must now live in shame. Today\u2019s Catholics who defend Pope Francis against his critics ought to remember who some of those poor critics are.<\/p>\n

For the most part, Pope Francis\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s views.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hello, Pat Archbold.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is this truly the time of Mercy?<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cunusually long time,\u201d according to Gerard O\u2019Connell, Vatican correspondent for …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[59,208,314,313,63,19,311],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-communism","tag-cuba","tag-evangelii-gaudium","tag-francis-diplomacy","tag-liberation-theology","tag-pope-francis","tag-raul-castro"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2360"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2426,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions\/2426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}