Posted on 05/28/2015 5:07:21 PM PDT by ebb tide
One has the impression that under Francis the Church is becoming, in her human element, the equivalent of a banana republic, replete with Latin American-style demagoguery, exalting the poor and depicting them as always the innocent victims of the greedy rich. Our Lord said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5:3)." Francis' version of this beatitude is: "blessed are the poor" — apparently just because they are poor. He has even gone so far as to suggest that the poor be treated as objects of veneration before whom we should literally kneel when they enter a Church. That is as blasphemous as it is ridiculous.
But such is the Latin American, liberal Jesuit theology from the Seventies in which Francis seems to be mired: long on emotion and appeals to class envy and short on fidelity to the actual teaching of the Gospel. And no matter what the Pope's defenders say in their constant attempts to defend the indefensible, it all smacks of the very thing John Paul II and Benedict XVI rightly condemned: liberation theology, which seeks to harness the Church to the aims of Marxist revolution.
Does this claim seem extravagant? Whoever thinks so should explain why Pope Francis rehabilitated precisely the same liberation theologian, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, whom John Paul II suspended from the priesthood thirty years ago. This flaming Marxist subversive received the Lenin Peace Prize, was an official of the Communist-infiltrated World Council of Churches, and served as a foreign minister in the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He was also President of the UN General Assembly from 2008-2009, in which capacity he gave a speech declaring that "we are all sons and daughters of Earth and that we belong to her," calling for a "planetary civilization" that is "more respectful of Mother Earth, more inclusive of all people and with more solidarity with the poorest, which is more spiritual and full of reverence for the splendor of the universe and which is much happier."
Immediately upon the restoration of his priestly faculties by Francis, this unrepentant Marxist maniac declared:
The Vatican may silence everyone, then God will make the stones speak, and may the stones spread his message, but He didn't do this, He chose the greatest Latin-American of all time: Fidel Castro…. It is through Fidel Castro that the Holy Spirit sends us the message. This message of Jesus, of the need to struggle to establish, firmly and irreversibly, the kingdom of God on this earth... That is the essence of the heresy of liberation theology: that the Holy Spirit works through communist dictators to establish God's kingdom on earth. The result in practice is violent revolution in the name of the poor so that the revolutionaries can live a life of luxury on the backs of the very poor they claim to have liberated, after expropriating to themselves all the goods of the rich (but only the local rich, not the international bankers who financed their revolution).
No wonder both John Paul II and Benedict XVI treated liberation theology as utterly incompatible with the Catholic Faith. But now the liberal "Catholic" media are pleased to report that "under Pope Francis, liberation theology comes of age." The attempt to "baptize" liberation theology by promoting its socialist core without the practice of violent revolution appears to be a key element of what Antonio Socci has so rightly called "Bergoglianism," even if Francis prudently avoids overtly embracing it personally. Rather, he lets his actions speak for him.
And those actions could not speak more loudly. Just days ago — incredibly enough — a cause was commenced for the beatification of none other than Archbishop Helder Câmara, one of the worst Marxist and Modernist subversives in the modern history of the Church. Câmara was not only a veritable icon of liberation theology, but was also an opponent of Humanae Vitae, an advocate of women's ordination and divorce for Catholics, and a vocal supporter, at one time or another, of Communist Russia under Khrushchev, Communist China under Mao, and Communist Cuba under Castro, justly earning the title "the Red Archbishop." And this after having been a pro-Nazi activist in the 1930s!
It defies belief that Câmara has just been declared (on May 3) a "Servant of God" by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which gave a green light to the official opening of the local process for this blatant heretic's "beatification." There is no way this could have been done without Francis' approval. And what is the basis for this preposterous "beatification" proceeding? Câmara's supposed love and defense of the poor. But as a supporter of communist dictatorships he was actually an enemy of the poor, who are invariably communism's first victims.
No one has expressed the outrage this development warrants more succinctly than the Rorate Caeli blog: "Helder Câmara: a lifetime of working against the Church from the inside. — And they want to beatify him?..." Yes, they do. They really do. And if Camara is "beatified" we can only conclude that under current circumstances the process for beatification, never infallible to begin with, has been fatally compromised and is now utterly the captive of ideologues in the Vatican and the episcopacy, let loose upon the Church by Francis himself.
In a groundbreaking speech given at a pro-life conference in Rome earlier this month, Father Linus Clovis frankly addressed the growing disaster that is "the Francis effect." In that context he noted the saying people often use to respond to a question whose answer should be self-evident: "Is the Pope Catholic?" Today, said Father Clovis, "that isn't funny any more."
No, it isn't. We have clearly entered the deepest depths of what was already the worst crisis in Church history. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
“A society divided into classes” is an easy fault to fall into. I even see that worldview on FR. “People have dug themselves into holes, therefore our imperative is to poop on them in those holes.”
Some of that may be hyperbolic bluff but when it is seen often enough it can become common currency of thought.
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