Hammer-and-Sicklegate: What It Reveals

As usual, the neo-Catholic cover-up of disaster has failed. Pope Francis not only accepted but took home with him the blasphemous depiction of Christ on a hammer and sickle—the very symbol of the massacre of scores of millions of Christians in the name of an ideology whose aim was to wipe Christianity off the face of the earth. As Francis revealed on the flight home during his usual off-the-cuff blabbing to reporters:

Of course, Francis never said: “that’s not right” when presented with the blasphemous crucifix, as National Catholic Register (owned by neo-Catholic flagship EWTN) falsely reported. That was what NCR’s editorial staff dearly wanted everyone to believe given the undeniable scandal of the affair. NCR later grudgingly reported the truth after the Pope’s own statements to the press made it impossible to deny, but without retracting or correcting the original false reports of Francis’s disapproval of the image.

Here at the Remnant we are quite used to such deception in the neo-Catholic establishment, whose opinion-makers have spent the past half-century attempting to minimize, explain away, or simply deny the ever-mounting evidence of the greatest crisis in Church history. Over at the excellent new blogsite OnePeterFive, however, there was this expression of surprise and dismay: “Journalistic and Catholic integrity demand a public retraction of the [NCR] story and an explanation of this unprofessional behavior. Without it, the National Catholic Register risks forfeiture of any claim that it is a reliable Catholic news outlet.”

As far as we are concerned, that claim was forfeited long ago and this affair is but the latest example of why. But it seems to me that even traditionalist coverage of the Commie-Crucifix scandal has not captured its essence: the current Vicar of Christ is willing to defend obscene and blasphemous depictions of Christ. As Francis revealed to the press (exploding the latest neo-Catholic cover story):

[Y]ou can qualify it in the genre of “protest art.” For example in Buenos Aires, some years ago, there was an exhibit of a good sculptor, creative, Argentine, who is now dead. It was protest art, and I recall one, it was a crucified Christ on a bomber that was going down, no? It’s Christianity, but a criticism that, let’s say, Christianity allied with imperialism, which is the bomber….

[I]n this concrete case, Fr Espinal was killed in 1980. It was a time when liberation theology had many different branches with Marxist analysis of reality. One of the branches was. Fr Espinal belonged to this…. Espinal was an enthusiast of this Marxist analysis of the reality, but also of theology using Marxism. From this, he came up with this work…. Making a hermeneutic like this, I understand this work. For me it wasn’t an offense, but I had to do this hermeneutic, and I say it to you so that there aren’t any wrong opinions.

Notice what Francis is saying here. He is not denying the objectively obscene and blasphemous character of the Commie-Crucifix—an object so horrific that NCR at first desperately pretended that the Vicar of Christ had not received it favorably. Rather, Francis declares that for him it “wasn’t an offense” because he conducted a personal “hermeneutic” according to which he understands the Commie-Crucifix as “protest art.” Further, he defends the use of Christ’s sacred corpus to criticize Christianity as an ally of “imperialism” by affixing the corpus to a dive-bomber, a blasphemy he calls “creative” work on the part of a “good sculptor” from Argentina.

In short, the current Vicar of Christ approves blasphemous abuse of the sacred image of Christ’s crucified Body for purposes of leftwing “protest art.” Is any further comment necessary concerning the mentality of the man who now occupies the Chair of Peter?

POPE FRANCIS, MARXISM AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY.

Pope Francis describes as “mistaken” the Marxist ideology.

From “mistaken” to “intrinsically perverse” goes a long way. A mistake that has cost more than 150 million human beings sacrificed at the altar of this evil ideology.

Pope Francis describes Marxism just as “mistaken”, in a dramatic contrast with the doctrine of the Church that has defined it as “intrinsically perverse” in the Encyclical “Divini Redemptoris” of Pius XI over atheistic communism published in 1937, an ideology unequivocally condemned by the Magisterium since the end of the 19th century to Benedict XVI.

That soft position of Pope Francisco vs. the Marxist penetration of The Church explains the great joy of the founders and proponents of the Marxist Liberation theology when he was chosen as the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

The “Liberation Theology” was condemned by Juan Pablo II in the “Instruction on certain aspects of the theology of liberation”, promulgated by his order by the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the doctrine of the faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later elected as Pope Benedict XVI.

In opening the Vatican doors to the Marxist promoters, Pope Francis is disregarding the Magisterium of the Church.

‘Try, venerable brethren, with care that the faithful do not be fooled. Communism is intrinsically evil, and cannot accept that they collaborate with communism, in any field, those who want to save Christian civilization from the ruin. And if some, misled the, cooperate for the establishment of communism in their own countries, they will be the first to pay the penalty of their error; and the more ancient and luminous is the civilization created by Christianity in the Nations in which Communism managed to penetrate, the greater the devastation that they will exercise the hatred of Communist atheism.”(Pius XI, Divine Redemptory’s)

“Would be illusory and dangerous to get to forget the intimate bond that unites them radically, accept the Marxist analysis elements without recognizing its relations with ideology, entering the practice of the fight of classes and its Marxist interpretation leaving perceive the kind of totalitarian society which leads this process “” . (Pablo VI, Octogesima adveniens, 1971)

INSTRUCTION ON SOME ASPECTS «THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION

Quotes from the Instruction

Thus it is not uncommon to be ideological aspects that predominate in loans that many of the “theologians of liberation” taken from the Marxist authors... VIII - SUBVERTING THE MEANING OF TRUTH AND VIOLENCE

1. This totalizing conception imposes its logic and drag “Theology of liberation” to accept a set of positions incompatible with the Christian vision of man. In fact, the ideological core, taken from Marxism, to which it refers, exercises the function of a determinant principle. This function has been given under the qualification of scientist, i.e., necessarily true, that has been attributed to him. In this core we can distinguish various components...

2. 8. The fundamental law of the class struggle has a character of universality and globalism. Reflected in all fields of existence, religious, ethical, cultural and institutional. With regard to this law, none of these fields is self-contained. This law is the decisive element in each...

9. By granting to the theses of Marxist origin, put radically into question the nature of ethics. In fact, the transcendent character of the distinction between good and evil, principle of morality, is implicitly denied in the view of the class struggle.

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