FRANCIS & POLITICAL ILLUSION

There is a great temptation today to confuse sociological evolution with spiritual progress, and Christians are the first to succumb to that temptation. Nevertheless, the Bible expressly tells us that the history of mankind ends in judgment. It does not give place to the Kingdom. Jacques Ellul, False Presence of the Kingdom Conformity to the world is expressed by the passion for politics, by the politicizing of Christian thinking, manners and action. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment In the cap and bells of Flip Wilson’s Church of What’s Happening Now, Pope Francis is readying an encyclical on climate change. He will address the world’s latest mutation of the grail quest: human ecology. Abandoning nuance for apocalyptic alarmism (“If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.”), Francis has signaled the tenor of his utterance.

It comes as no surprise. Handwriting has been on the wall along the Viale Vaticano from the get-go. At the beginning of his pontificate, Francis revealed himself to be fastidiously attuned to image. He refused to give communion in public ceremonies lest he be photographed giving the sacrament to the wrong kind of sinner. So, when he agreed to pose between two well-known environmental activists and brandish an anti-fracking T-shirt, we believed what we saw.

It was a portentous image. Press toads hopped to their keyboards to correct the evidence of our lying eyes. Francis was neither for nor against fracking, you see. Nothing of the sort. He was simply using a photo-op to assert blameless solidarity with the victims of ecological injustice. (Both a decisive definition of such injustice and its particular victims went unspecified.)

If that restyling were true, then the more fool Francis. But Francis is not a fool. He is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.

Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

Ronald Gunther. Soap Box Orator (c. 1935). Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma.

Conscientious concern for the environment is not at issue. Man’s stewardship of the earth’s resources is to be taken with great seriousness. But debate as how best to effect that stewardship is intricate and ongoing. There are hazards in unraveling divergent, often contradictory, ideas and undertakings bundled together by the media as a coherent movement.

Francis serves an environmentalist mindset that, unlike the traditional ethos of conservation, views man as a parasite (Western man in Francis’ marxisant variant) and understands wealth in pre-modern terms as a zero-sum game. It discards the West’s great discovery—realization that wealth can be created. The endgame is transfer of wealth from productive nations to unproductive ones.

Boris Kustodiev. Festivity for Opening of the 11th Comintern Congress (1920). Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.

Orthodox environmentalism resents human sovereignty over the earth we inhabit. It begrudges ingenuity in the transactions we invent with nature and with each other. Its radical form, which beckons Francis and Vatican academics, is atavistic, even animist. Discount the gospel gloss. What matters is the spectacle of the Church imitating the world by justifying political agendas based on still-contended data and half-baked Gramscian dogma. Jacques Ellul, writing in the post-war decades, cautioned against introducing political morals into the Church as a springboard for unexamined action:

Proof is of no avail in the face of the sociological trends which bring Christians irrevocably to do what everybody else is doing, and to think what everybody else is thinking. Ferdinand Hodler. The Orator (1912). Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Man cannot destroy “Creation.” It is not within his power. Nor is “Creation” a willful entity with Doomsday on its mind. Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda. Francis’s loaded abstractions—a planet “exploited by human greed,” a vague “economy of exclusion,” and that old goblin, “the god of money”—echo Reverend Wright’s “A world in need is run by white folks’ greed.” Explicit racial component is absent from Francis’ denunciations. Nevertheless, hearers know which world—First or Third?—prompts papal hostility.

The world is what it has been and will remain. Satan is still the prince of it. And Francis is imprudent.

Francis is as strong ideologue as Obama... birds of a feather

CDF head: Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology

The Tablet ^ | 5/2/14 | Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/365/liberation-theology-coming-in-from-the-cold

According to Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, the same discaterio that once condemned the movement. In the 1980s the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger attacked liberation theology as borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought“.

COMMENT
Few know that Müller is also a pupil of Gustavo Gutierrez, the “father” of Latin-American liberation theology. It certainly, when Müller, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirms that “Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology” it makes clear the reason for the exaltation of Leonardo Boff and the most radical leaders of the Marxist Liberation theology with the election of Pope Francisco .

It is a fact that in the Liberation Theology the Gospels are profoundly corrupted by Marxist ideology and praxis, including the promotion of class struggle and the creation of the so called “iglesia popular” (parallel and opposed to the Church), an instrument used by Marxist theologians to support the Marxist guerrillas and regimes in Latin America.
During the Nicaraguan Communist Sandinista regime, they went as far as substituting Christ on the Cross for a naked Che Guevara with his genitals exposed.

“During the ordination in Managua of Nicaraguan Napoleon Alvarado by the Jesuit Luis Manresa, who was Bishop of Quetzaltenango, and who was then rector of the University Landivar in Guatemala City, to the Offertory of the mass of ordination, Napoleon offered a machine gun extolling the Sandinista movement and the Jesuit liberation theologian Fernando Cardinal choosing him as a model of his priesthood at the service of the soviet. “ (Ricardo de la Cierva, “Dark Rebellion in the Church” pag.24)

The Marxist Liberation Theology, although it had its roots in the works of European theologians, it had its largest impact in Latin American, mostly by the works of Catholic theologians. This movement also infiltrated the American churches, and not just only the Catholic Church. Obama’s religious mentor for over 20 years, Rev. Wright, is a follower of the Marxist Black Liberation Theology, a racist anti-white church whose Marxist praxis compels his followers to pray “God damn America” instead of asking blessing for this great country of ours.

The American Maryknoll Order became one of the main promoters of the Marxist Liberation Theology in Latin America. In Colombia the Diocesan Father Camilo Torres joined the Marxist guerrillas and died in one encounter with the government forces. He is perhaps best known for the quote: “If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero.”

The subversive activities and collaborationism with the Marxist guerrillas of a group of Jesuits in El Salvador, including his superior, Ignacio Ellacurria, professors from the University of Central America (UCA), was so scandalous that in 1972 the Bishops of El Salvador threw them of the control of the Seminary of San José de la Montaña where there was a Marxist-Leninist cell among seminarians prepared by Dr. Fabio Castillo, who was the rector of the National University.

During the 1980’s,the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), located in the San Antonio Seminary, served as the headquarters for the Marxist Liberation Theology in the U.S. This Center, sponsored by Archbishop Patricio Flores, became the Mecca of Marxist Liberation Theology in the U.S. where priests, religious and lay Catholics came from as far as Philippines to be indoctrinated in the Liberation Theology by the luminaries of the movement, which included Father Gustavo Gutierrez’s putative father of Liberation Theology.

In the book store of the MACC you could buy not only the most radical works by the Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino or the Franciscan Leonardo Boff, but you could also buy the bible for the conquest of power by the Marxists, Saul Alinksy’s “Rule for Radicals”, a book dedicated to Lucifer, who he considered the first radical. This manual has proved to be very useful to Barack Obama, who excelled in applying it in his struggle to reach the White House using the Marxist praxis developed by Alinsky.

Spanish Catholic historian, Ricardo de la Cierva has written several scholarly works on the communist infiltration in the Catholic Church, including “Jesuits, Church and Marxism - unmasked liberation theology,” (1986) “Dark rebellion in the Church” (1988), and “The gates of hell” (1995).

Pope John Paul II put Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in charge of confronting the doctrinal corruption that pervaded certain aspects of the Theology of Liberation.

In 1984 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published “The Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Liberation Theology”. It was a dagger to the heart of those theologies which, in one way or another, embraced the Marxist fundamental option. The preferential option for the poor will never be well served through an atheist ideology that has brought so much oppression and misery to the world.
After the measures taken by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the followers of Liberation Theology entered in a period of hibernation to apparently resurge with Pope Francis.

The liberationists rejoiced with the election of Cardinal Bergoglio as it seems that they take for granted that he is one of them. One of Pope Francis’ most vocal supporters since his election has been Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology, and the most radical of it, a man silenced by the Vatican in 1985, and later by his Franciscan Order because of his attacks to the main tenets of the Church. An exulted Leonardo Boff expressed his feelings: ‘This pope will change the church’, basically, according to Boff, in fact we shouldn’t need a pope. The church could build a network of religious communities which communicate with each other.

Pope Francis has demonstrated his contempt for the American people.

In collusion with Cardinal O'Malley.

Check out this report from his diocesan newspaper, the Boston Pilot:

"Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley, OFM Cap. played a substantial role in recently-announced restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, according to local media.

The Boston Globe reported Dec. 18 that outreach from Cambridge non-profit Beyond Conflict founder and chairman Tim Phillips to Cardinal O'Malley eventually brought the issue to the attention of the Vatican and Pope Francis himself.

According to reporting at the Globe, the group sent a memo to Cardinal O'Malley suggesting that Pope Francis talk to President Barrack Obama about normalizing relations with Cuba.

"We are excited to share our role in recent developments related to Cuba. Beyond Conflict has been actively working for three years to help Cuban Americans prepare for eventual reconciliation with Cuba," Beyond Conflict posted on their Facebook page, Dec. 18..."

http://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.asp?ID=172815

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.