The liberal media are so in love with Pope Francis that they can’t report the hard truth about his blatant interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and what it represents.
Not only was socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) invited to a conferenceof the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) on Catholic social teaching and the world situation, he also met personally with Pope Francis.
A secular Jewish atheist, Sanders is not even a member of the Catholic Church. “I am not actively involved with organized religion,” Sanders has said. His brother Larry says, “He is quite substantially not religious.”
Instead, he is a socialist with strong ties, if not membership in, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the same group that backed Barack Obama’s run for president in 2008 and is the U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.
His involvement in the Vatican conference demonstrates how Pope Francis is moving the Roman Catholic Church into the global socialist camp.
Bolivian President Evo Morales presents Pope Francis with a crucifix incorporating the hammer and sickle symbol during a meeting at the presidential palace in La Paz. Photo: Juan Carlos Usnayo/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
To my Catholic friends, while I am loathe to criticize that which they hold dear, there comes a time when silence is the wrong answer. When Pope Francis first surfaced, I thought he had the potential to be a great Pope. But with the potential of greatness, also comes the opportunity of infamy. Pope Francis is a Marxist and embodies many, many principles that I stand against, not only as a Constitutional Conservative, but as a Christian. This last week just solidified my uneasiness concerning this Pope.
The Bolivian President, Evo Morales (who Trevor Loudon and I have long contended is a Marxist), presented the Pontiff with a crucifix depicting Jesus nailed to a hammer and sickle, which the Pope returned after a brief examination. What is under contention is what the Pope said when presented with the gift. His comments were pretty much drowned out by a flurry of camera clicks. While some have claimed he expressed irritation, muttering the words “eso no está bien” (“this is not right”), Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the Pope more likely said “no sabía eso” (“I didn’t know that”) in bemusement at the origins of the present. Which would make sense as NewsBusters and the Wall Street Journal noted, President Morales also “draped a medallion over [the pope’s] neck that bore the hammer and sickle.”
Communism has murdered well over one hundred million people in the last century alone. Many, many of those were Christians. As Ann Barnhardt put it, “Our Blessed Lord and Savior shown crucified on a hammer and sickle is, by all metrics, worse than Our Lord shown crucified on a swastika.” This constitutes blasphemy for me – Pope or not.
I also disagree that the Pope is being manipulated for ideological reasons. I think he knows full well what he is doing. We seem to have a knee-jerk response now when a leader does something unspeakable, unforgivable or outright evil – he/she didn’t know what they were doing… they were incompetent… or they were being manipulated. Knock it off! These people are not stupid; they are not rubes or babes in the woods who are so easily misled. (That’s not to say that they weren’t misled in very early life, ref. Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” That is to say, if you can indoctrinate someone in his early youth, you won’t need to sway him later: he’s already in your groove, and his decisions and choices will reflect that, not some imagined confusion of the moment.)
As for the Bolivian government insisting there was no political motive behind the gift and the Communications Minister, Marianela Paco, saying that Morales had thought the “Pope of the poor” would appreciate the gesture… bull crap. It’s the melding of politics and religion into a nightmarish agenda that is apocalyptic in scope and intent.
José Ignacio Munilla, bishop of the Spanish city of San Sebastián, tweeted a picture of the encounter, with the words: “The height of pride is to manipulate God in the service of atheist ideologies.” That is exactly right – on all counts, concerning all parties involved. It’s hard to overstate how important that observation is.
The Pope, after arriving in Bolivia, stopped to pray at the death site of Luis Espinal, a Jesuit murdered by Bolivian paramilitary forces in 1980. Espinal is being painted in press reports as a reformer who stood against the military dictatorship in Bolivia. Pope Francis also reportedly received a medal, bearing a hammer and sickle from Morales that was issued in memory of Espinal’s death.
Father Albo showed a reporter a published photo of a crucified Christ attached to a homemade hammer and sickle, instead of a cross, that Father Espinal kept by his bed.
“He was of the left. This is certain. But he never belonged to any party or pretended to be part of one,” said Father Albo, who said he hopes to present a replica of the hammer and sickle crucifix to the pope.
Father Espinal “gave a lot of importance to the dialogue between Marxists and Christians,” he explained. “It was not pro-Soviet … (it was) the need for the church to be close to the popular sectors. Some understand this, others don’t. To me it is very clear.”
It was said that the Pope wasn’t offended by Morales’ gift. “You can dispute the significance and use of the symbol now, but the origin is from Espinal and the sense of it was about an open dialogue, not about a specific ideology,” Lombardi said. Nope, it was all about ideology. This Argentinian Pope has been roundly criticized by many Marxists for not protecting Leftist priests during the military dictatorship in his country. Since becoming Pope, he has made major strides in bringing Liberation Theology to the fore in the Vatican. Thus, his campaigning for massive social and political change. This is Christianized Marxism. The irony of that term has to be savored. Kind of like “therapeutic cancer.”
Although Liberation Theology has grown into an international and inter-denominational movement, it began as a movement within the Catholic Church in Latin America in the 1950s–1960s. It is purported that Liberation Theology arose principally as a moral reaction to the poverty seen as having been caused by social injustice in that region. But its roots are solidly Marxist. The term was coined in 1971 by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, who wrote one of the movement’s most famous books, A Theology of Liberation.
Latin American Liberation Theology met opposition from others in the US, who accused it of using “Marxist concepts” and that lead to admonishment by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 1984 and 1986. The Vatican disliked certain forms of Latin American Liberation Theology for focusing on institutionalized or systemic sin; and for identifying Catholic Church hierarchy in South America as members of the same privileged class that had long been oppressing indigenous populations.
Pope Francis used his trip to Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay to highlight problems faced by indigenous communities and to warn against “all totalitarian, ideological or sectarian schemes.” That sounds very good. However, it started to go off the rails when he urged the downtrodden to change the world economic order, denouncing a “new colonialism” by agencies that impose austerity programs and calling for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labor, lodging and land. That’s sheer Marxism. And exactly what does he mean by ‘austerity programs?’ You mean the over taxing of the general populace in order that elitists can keep up their glutinous spending sprees? Or do you mean austerity as in cutting spending, sticking to a budget and reducing debts? It certainly makes a difference on how the term is being used here.
His speech was preceded by lengthy remarks from the Left-wing Bolivian President Evo Morales, who wore a jacket adorned with the face of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Che was executed in Bolivia in 1967 by CIA-backed Bolivian troops. That certainly set the stage for Pope Francis and his speech.
Then the Pope gave a magnanimous and historic speech asking for forgiveness for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church in its treatment of Native Americans during what he called the “so-called conquest of America.” This is highly offensive and revisionist – it is skewed history. It’s true that American Indians were slaughtered by evil men and eventually, after a length of time, the colonists took over America. It is also true that Indians slaughtered many of the settlers and in horrific ways. Conquest and war are facts of history by the way, something Europe and the Vatican are very familiar with. It is a human condition that is ongoing and never ending as populations replace each other and wars rage on. He’s apologizing as though the Catholic Church had set out to do those things… it didn’t. Men did those things in the name of governments and in the name of the church. Apologizing for the deeds of men who acted on their own volition, but in your name, is to presume responsibility and control of actions over which the church had neither. The colonists did not set out to ‘conquer’ America either. They fled persecution in Europe and wanted to build new lives for themselves. Conflict came with Native Americans and the rest is history. Yes, evil was done, but that evil was not the totality of the story or our history and it certainly was not one-sided. It is also not something we need to ‘apologize’ for.
Then Pope Francis uttered my favorite quote – he quoted a fourth century bishop and called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil,” and said poor countries should not be reduced to being providers of raw material and cheap labor for developed countries. Actually, when I heard the original quote, it said ‘capitalism’ not ‘money.’ While seeking unlimited riches can be a sin, it is not always so and not all wealthy people are guilty of this sin. It is also true that poor countries should not be treated as merely sources of materials and labor, however, those countries also benefit from that part of the economy. Countries are free to prosper and if more lived under free capitalistic governments where free trade was the norm and people were allowed to innovate and work for themselves, then there would be far fewer impoverished countries. But first, you’d have to get rid of the Marxists and dictators. Kind of a conundrum.
For dessert, the Pope repeated some of his encyclical on climate change. That’s Marxism on a global scale and smacks of fascism as well. It’s a twofer. Climate change is a seductive lie wrapped in a green package, but it is rotten from the inside out.
The Pope closes with what sounds to me like the echoes of Barack Obama and communism:
“Let us not be afraid to say it: we want change, real change, structural change,” the pope said, decrying a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.“
“This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable The Earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable,” he said in an hour-long speech that was interrupted by applause and cheering dozens of times.
And the useful idiots cheered on even when they knew in their heart of hearts that all of the above is nothing more than a call to follow those that would rule over us, using Mother Earth as a handy excuse and targeting for blame the engines of free enterprise, using language meant to equate it with greed, while overlooking the primary source of real greed: corrupt totalitarian governments, born of Marxism.
Pope Francis was not finished by any means concerning ‘colonialism’:
“No actual or established power has the right to deprive peoples of the full exercise of their sovereignty. Whenever they do so, we see the rise of new forms of colonialism which seriously prejudice the possibility of peace and justice,” he said.
“The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor,” he said.
Last week, Francis called on European authorities to keep human dignity at the centre of debate for a solution to the economic crisis in Greece.
He defended labor unions and praised poor people who had formed cooperatives to create jobs where previously “there were only crumbs of an idolatrous economy”.
The Pope even went so far as to praise Bolivia’s social reforms to spread wealth under Morales. That’s wealth redistribution and again, Marxism. But that is only scratching the surface on this Pope – there is oh, so much more to be concerned about when it comes to Pope Francis.
My friend and colleague (and someone I truly admire) Cliff Kincaid has done excellent research into Pope Francis and his doings. Americans need to take note who has the ear of this Pope:
Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge the “American idea” of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.
The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication America, is “a society in thrall” to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the “urgent core of Francis’ message” will be to challenge this “American idea” by “proclaiming that the path to happiness lies not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of virtues, most notably justice and charity.”
In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.
Sachs takes aim at the phrase from America’s founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These rights sound good, Sachs writes, but they’re not enough to guarantee the outcome the global elites have devised for us. Global government, he suggests, must make us live our lives according to international standards of development.
Sachs is putting forth that the UN should be in charge of all national and individual rights. That we have to sacrifice our individual rights for the greater, collective good. What hive mentality. He’s also for massive global taxation, population control and one world government. “We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes,” he wrote. “A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.” The bill he wants to stick the US with is $845 billion.
The Pope has not only aligned himself with Sachs, but with the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, who told a Catholic Caritas International conference in Rome on May 12th that climate change is “the defining challenge of our time,” and that the solution lies in recognizing that “humankind is part of nature, not separate or above.” The pope’s encyclical on climate change is supposed to help mobilize the governments of the world in this crusade. This spells slavery for the world and an all-powerful tyrannical elite who will ruthlessly rule us through Marxist politics and a one world religion.
Sachs is not alone in his ideas. A short time ago, former President Shimon Peres met with the Pope at the Vatican and proposed that the Pope head up a UN for religions. I kid you not.
But the main topic of conversation was Peres’s idea to create a UN-like organization he called “the United Religions.”
Peres said the Argentina-born pontiff was the only world figure respected enough to bring an end to the wars raging in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.
“In the past, most of the wars in the world were motivated by the idea of nationhood,” Peres said. “But today, wars are incited using religion as an excuse.”
Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi confirmed to reporters that Peres had pitched his idea for “the United Religions” but said Francis did not commit to it.
“The pope listened, showing his interest, attention, and encouragement,” Lombardi said, adding that the pope pointed to the Pontifical Councils for Interreligious Dialogue and for Justice and Peace as existing agencies “suitable” for supporting interfaith peace initiatives.
The meeting in September was the third one inside of four months. In an interview in the Catholic Magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Peres also called for the Pope to lead the inter-religious organization in order to curb terrorism: “What we need is an organization of United Religions… as the best way to combat terrorists who kill in the name of faith.” I literally cannot believe what I am hearing. This could well be the birth of a one world religion. This looks suspiciously like a move to reclaim the lost glory of the Church, harking back to those centuries when it held sway ’round the world, commanding fealty from kings and nobility. This “progressive” innovation is really a reactionary repackaging of the most sweeping colonialism in history. With one tongue they “condemn” colonialism, while with the other tongue they offer global subservience as the “solution” to the demon du jour.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The Pope is offering the masses the opium of Marxism in his stances. The question is, will the world follow him down this path? So many these days just want someone to give them everything and take care of them… they hunger for a leader who will absolve them of their sins and promise them forgiveness and welcome them with open arms. Will people, in the name of peace, usher in a one world order and willingly give up their freedoms? I’m afraid history says they will, but I know Americans, Christians and others will not be assimilated so easily by Marxist musings and flowery articulation. Pontification will only carry you so far – if you follow this pied piper, you will find yourself in the loving embrace of the UN – that Democracy of Dictators – and all that entails.
Michael Hichborn of the Lenpanto Institute says the Roman Catholic Church has been infiltrated by Marxists and homosexuals. Hichborn has authored a PowerPoint presentation on high-level Vatican links to the World Social Forum, an international communist group. He says some key players around the pope are “in bed with the United Nations and the push for global governance and population control” and identifies the point of contact for an official Catholic pro-family event in Philadelphia in September as a lesbian activist. Hichborn also documented a case of a Catholic official being involved in a same-sex marriage. This video looks at President Obama’s self-admitted links to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Hichborn has been effectively banned from future appearances on the Catholic TV network EWTN over his digging into the CCHD.
With the papal encyclical on climate change scheduled for a June 18 release, the liberal media can be expected to portray the Vatican document as a major step forward for the United Nations agenda of controlling and taxing the use of natural resources by governments and people. But a group of retired NASA scientists is taking on the pope directly, armed with the expertise that has come through decades of planning U.S. space missions and dealing with the most complex and difficult issues of climate science.
Their verdict: the pope is risking his moral status and his credibility.
In fact, this group is directly warning Pope Francis that if he embraces the climate agenda of the United Nations, he will be violating both scientific principles and the religious values he embodies that are supposed to be reflected in direct aid for the poor people of the earth.
But the pope is apparently counting on his status as “the most popular person on the Earth,” in the words of Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant organization, to make the “moral” case that we live on “an abundant yet finite planet,” and that global limits to industrial growth have to be imposed on a worldwide basis.
The battle, now taking shape, will likely help determine whether U.S. sovereignty will be sacrificed in order to make possible a system of “global governance” or world government.
In a controversial decision that could backfire, Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) has invited Pope Francis to deliver an address to Congress in September, an opportunity he could use to push the similar climate change agendas of both the Vatican and the Obama administration.
That a research team composed primarily of retired NASA scientists and engineers has entered the debate is relatively new and particularly noteworthy. These individuals have a lot of experience in the climate change area, as a result of sending astronauts into the atmosphere and outer space and returning them to earth.
The members of the group, the Right Climate Stuff Research Team, are veterans of the NASA Apollo program that landed astronauts on the moon and returned them safely during the decade of the 1960s, according to the introduction to their letter to the pope. They maintain a website setting forth their view that there is no convincing evidence that the planet is in a “climate crisis.”
These retired scientists suggest that the pope is making a big mistake by using unreliable or untested computer models that predict a “climate disaster.” They assert, “Our strict NASA policies, based on common sense concepts of the Scientific Method, trained us to ignore projections of un-validated models for critical design or operational decisions involving human safety, and instead, base such decisions on available physical data.”
Their spokesman is Harold H. Doiron, who serves as chairman of the Right Climate Stuff Research Team. He tells the pontiff in a letter that “There is no compelling scientific or humanitarian reason for immediate enactment of world-wide CO2 emission controls, as the UN is urging you to recommend…”
What’s more, Doiron and his colleagues argue, the poor in the developing world “need unfettered access to relatively inexpensive fossil fuel energy sources to improve their quality of life,” and if higher atmospheric CO2 levels do in fact occur, they will not hinder the development of poor nations but rather result in “increased food production” that will benefit them.
Rejecting the idea of CO2 as a pollutant that should be regulated, they said, “we know that CO2 is a very special colorless, odorless and non-polluting gas designed by our Creator to be an essential chemical compound for sustaining all plant, animal and human life.”
Doiron made a presentation in Rome on April 28 as part of a Heartland Institute event designed to warn the Vatican against rushing to embrace the U.N. climate change agenda. He included a PowerPoint presentation titled “An Independent, Objective Assessment of the Human-Caused Global Warming Issue,” which refers to the U.N. agenda as “climate alarmism” based on faulty models, not actual data.
At his presentation in Rome, Doiron said he was a member of a Catholic parish in Texas where fellow parishioners were “praying that Pope Francis will have discernment as he looks into this global warming controversy.” On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a practicing Catholic, said “there are more pressing problems on Earth” for the pontiff to be addressing than climate change.
Ignoring the concerns of conservative Catholics that the church should focus on moral issues, The New York Times ran a story, “Pope Francis Steps Up Campaign on Climate Change, to Conservatives’ Alarm,” reporting that the papal encyclical “will be accompanied by a 12-week campaign, now being prepared with the participation of some Catholic bishops, to raise the issue of climate change and environmental stewardship in sermons, homilies, news media interviews and letters to newspaper editors…”
The source of this statement was Dan Misleh, who has been invited inside the Vatican to help coordinate the campaign. He previously directed the educational and outreach efforts of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.
His group has now become part of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, whose website shows poor people walking through flood waters, hurricanes, and smokestacks, as visitors to the site are urged to “change our course,” and to pray and then act.
Our guest, Elizabeth Yore, is a Catholic activist and advocate for children who is extremely upset with the “unholy alliance between the Vatican and the United Nations.” She focuses her critical attention on Vatican adviser Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a global tax advocate in favor of population control measures. Yore was a participant in a Heartland Institute event in Rome to protest where the Vatican is heading. She describes how the Obama Administration, the Vatican, and the United Nations are working together. They are “softening up the targets” for the pope’s upcoming encyclical on climate change, despite the fact that there has been no “global warming” for 18 years.
Doing the research and investigative work that the major U.S. media have all but abandoned, an organization called the American Life League (ALL) has uncovered dramatic evidence of links between the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church and an international communist group known as the World Social Forum. The evidence suggests overt Marxist influence on the climate change movement that Pope Francis and his top advisers are now embracing.
The ALL report, a 76-page PowerPoint presentation complete with original source material and numerous photographs, documents how Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican’s top social justice organization, is actually “providing leadership” to the communist group.
The report’s author, Michael Hichborn, stated, “This is a very serious problem. Given how intimately connected the World Social Forum (WSF) has been with the promotion of communism, abortion, and homosexuality since the very beginning, it’s impossible to see how any Catholic can participate in it, or even speak positively about it, let alone have any involvement in its governance. But Caritas Internationalis does!”
These allegations can’t be dismissed as anti-Catholic bigotry, since the American Life League is itself a Catholic organization that has been working for years to expose Catholic funds and organizations that promote causes at variance with official Catholic teaching.
However, Hichborn tells Accuracy in Media that except for specialized publications such as Lifesitenews, the media have ignored the report.
The ALL report on the WSF includes eye-opening photographs from the group’s events, featuring open displays of communist flags and banners as well as images of such personalities as Lenin, Castro and Mao.
Most of our media, of course, reported on the “death” of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But the ALL report notes that “There can be no mistaking the materialist and revolutionary (Communist) nature of the forum itself, which sets it in opposition to the Catholic Church.”
Hichborn told AIM that he delivered a copy of the report to the Vatican office known as Cor Unum, but that nothing came of it, and that one Vatican official concerned about the issue was relieved of his duties.
ALL identifies the other Catholic groups involved in the activities of the WSF as Pax Christi, Center of Concern, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Catholic Relief Services and CIDSE, an international alliance of Catholic development agencies.
An independent review of the ALL report confirms the research into the links between Caritas Internationalis and the WSF. In fact, a document on the Caritas website still affirms that “Caritas has been involved in the WSF since its beginnings. Caritas believes it’s an opportunity to exchange ideas and to build the momentum towards real change.”
After the ALL report was released, a conference at the Vatican was sponsored by Caritas Internationalis that featured Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University professor and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of Marxist-oriented Liberation Theology.
As Accuracy in Media reported, Sachs wrote an article for the Jesuit publication America attacking the “American idea” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as narrow and selfish. He suggests that America’s founding document is outmoded and incompatible with his idea of Catholic teaching about social justice.
Sachs is an advocate of global taxes to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people in order to finance some form of world government. The climate change movement, based on dubious science, is the most popular current vehicle that Sachs and others can use to bring this about.
Seizing on Sachs’ extraordinary remarks in a major Catholic publication, the well-known writer Edward Cline comments on the Family Security Matters website that “It would take a village—or, at least, the ‘global’ one—to subjugate and sack America. That is what is being proposed by Jeffrey Sachs.”
The Cline piece carries the title, “The ‘Sach-ing’ of America,” and he concludes that “In its essentials, Sachs’ plan for the future sacking of America differs little from Islam’s.”
In short, the American way of life is at risk, this time from a Vatican alliance with America’s academic elites and the U.N.
The World Social Forum itself just held another international conference focusing on one aspect of the Sachs agenda: global taxes. The WSF announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, including a statement that “Our vision entails progressive redistributive taxation polices that fund the vital public services, end inequality and poverty, address climate change and lead to sustainable development.”
The topic fits nicely with the expected papal encyclical on climate change.
At the Caritas conference, Pope Francis adviser Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga said that critics of the proposed papal document are advocates of an “ideology” that he concludes “is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”
Critics are concerned because of the pope’s several statements indicating hostility to the system of capitalism and free markets that has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.
This kind of Marxist rhetoric from a top Vatican adviser makes it appear as if the pope has aligned himself with an ideology that, despite the “collapse” of communism, is still very much alive, and which the Black Book of Communism says has already claimed 100 million lives.
The recent cordial Francis visit with Cuban dictator Raul Castro only adds to the growing concern.
“Pope Francis will give us his encyclical letter on ecology,” said Maradiaga, anticipating its impact. “This year is a unique opportunity to take responsibility for the future of our world and the lives of future generations.”
The title of the Caritas conference was, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.” But it appears that the “caring” part lies in replacing capitalism with structures of “global governance” that involve a massive transfer of political and economic power to international organizations like the United Nations.
After Maradiaga stepped down, he was replaced by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, Philippines, as the new president of Caritas Internationalis. But Maradiaga continues as the coordinator of a group of nine cardinals that serves as Francis’s Council of Cardinals.
Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge the “American idea” of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.
The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication, America, is “a society in thrall” to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the “urgent core of Francis’ message” will be to challenge this “American idea” by “proclaiming that the path to happiness lies not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of virtues, most notably justice and charity.”
In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.
Sachs takes aim at the phrase, which comes from America’s founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These rights sound good, Sachs writes, but they’re not enough to guarantee the outcome the global elites have devised for us. Global government, he suggests, must make us live our lives according to international standards of development.
“In the United States,” Sachs writes, “we learn that the route to happiness lies in the rights of the individual. By throwing off the yoke of King George III, by unleashing the individual pursuit of happiness, early Americans believed they would achieve that happiness. Most important, they believed that they would find happiness as individuals, each endowed by the creator with individual rights.”
While he says there is some “grandeur in this idea,” such rights “are only part of the story, only one facet of our humanity.”
The Sachs view is that global organizations such as the U.N. must dictate the course of nations and individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. One aspect of this unfolding plan, as outlined in the Sachs book, The End of Poverty, involves extracting billions of dollars from the American people through global taxes.
“We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes,” he wrote. “A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.” Sachs has estimated the price tag for the U.S. at $845 billion.
In preparation for this direct assault on our rights, the American nation-state, and our founding document, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon told a Catholic Caritas International conference in Rome on May 12 that climate change is “the defining challenge of our time,” and that the solution lies in recognizing that “ humankind is part of nature, not separate or above.”
The pope’s expected encyclical on climate change is supposed to help mobilize the governments of the world in this crusade.
But a prestigious group of scholars, churchmen, scientists, economists and policy experts has issued a detailed rebuttal, entitled, “An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,” pointing out that the Bible tells man to have dominion over the earth.
“Good climate policy must recognize human exceptionalism, the God-given call for human persons to ‘have dominion’ in the natural world (Genesis 1:28), and the need to protect the poor from harm, including actions that hinder their ascent out of poverty,” the letter to Pope Francis states.
Released by a group called the Cornwall Alliance, the letter urges the Vatican to consider the evidence that climate change is largely natural, that the human contribution is comparatively small and not dangerous, and that attempting to mitigate the human contribution by reducing CO2 emissions “would cause more harm than good, especially to the world’s poor.”
The Heartland Institute held a news conference on April 27 at the Hotel Columbus in Rome, to warn the Vatican against embracing the globalist agenda of the climate change movement. The group is hosting the 10th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C. on June 11-12.
However, it appears as if the Vatican has been captured by the globalist forces associated with Sachs and the United Nations.
Voice of the Family, a group representing pro-life and pro-family Catholic organizations from around the world, has taken issue not only with the Vatican’s involvement with Sachs but with Ban Ki Moon, describing the two as “noted advocates of abortion who operate at the highest levels of the United Nations.” Sachs has been described as “arguably the world’s foremost proponent of population control,” including abortion.
Voice of the Family charges that environmental issues such as climate change have become “an umbrella to cover a wide spectrum of attacks on human life and the family.”
Although Sachs likes to claim he was an adviser to Pope John Paul II, the noted anti-communist and pro-life pontiff, Sachs simply served as a member of a group of economists invited to confer with the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace in advance of the release of a papal document.
In fact, Pope John Paul II had worked closely with the Reagan administration in opposition to communism and the global population control movement. He once complained that a U.N. conference on population issues was designed to “destroy the family” and was the “snare of the devil.”
Pope Francis, however, seems to have embraced the very movements opposed by John Paul II.
Sachs, who has emerged as a very influential Vatican adviser, recently tweeted that he was “thrilled” to be at the Vatican “discussing moral dimensions of climate change and sustainable development.” The occasion was a Vatican workshop on global warming on April 28, 2015, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Roman Catholic Church. Sachs was a featured speaker.
The plan going forward involves the launching of what are called “Sustainable Development Goals,” as envisioned by a Sustainable Development Solutions Network run by none other than Jeffrey Sachs.
“The Network has proposed draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which contain provisions that are radically antagonistic to the right to life from conception to natural death, to the rights and dignity of the family and to the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children,” states the group Voice of the Family.
In July, a Financing for Development conference will be held, in order to develop various global tax proposals, followed by a conference in Paris in December to complete a new climate change agreement.
Before that December conference, however, Sachs says the pope will call on the world at the United Nations to join the crusade for a New World Order.
Sachs says, “Pope Francis will come to the United States and the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, and at the moment when the world’s 193 governments are resolved to take a step in solidarity toward a better world. On Sept. 25, Pope Francis will speak to the world leaders—most likely the largest number of assembled heads of state and government in history—as these leaders deliberate to adopt new Sustainable Development Goals for the coming generation. These goals will be a new worldwide commitment to build a world that aims to harmonize the pursuit of economic prosperity with the commitments to social inclusion and environmental sustainability.”
Rather than emphasize the absolute need for safeguarding individual rights in the face of government overreach and power, Sachs writes that the Gospel teachings of humility, love and justice, “like the teachings of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius,” can take us on a “path to happiness through compassion” and “become our guideposts back to safety.”
Writing elsewhere in the new issue of America, Christiana Z. Peppard, an assistant professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University, writes about the “planetary pope,” saying, “What is really at stake in the collective response to the pope’s encyclical is not, ultimately, whether our treasured notions of theology, science, reality or development can accommodate moral imperatives. The real question is whether we are brave enough and willing to try.”
The plan is quite simple: world government through global taxes, with a religious face to bring it about.
America, a national Catholic weekly magazine published by Jesuits in the United States, has just published an article about the Pope headlined “The Planetary Pope.” “There is good reason for conjecture that climate change will stand as a ‘sign of the times,’ complete with strong ethical imperatives, in the forthcoming encyclical” from the Pope, the magazine says.
Dr. Peter Jones, one of the world’s foremost experts on paganism and the occult, says the Christian faith is under assault by a “one-ism” movement that is leading to worship of the earth. Dr. Jones discusses how international Marxism and global Islam could merge into this movement and help lead to the decline, even destruction, of traditional Christianity, which is based on a philosophy of “two-ism” — the idea of a transcendent God who is apart from humanity and his creation, and who has determined the nature of humanity, in terms of male and female. Dr. Jones also discusses the resignation of Pope Benedict under mysterious circumstances. “I was not convinced it was because of health reasons,” he says.
Pope Francis has formally recognized a Palestinian state, even though it does not exist. While the media have noted that the Vatican’s curious action has created some controversy, there has been little discussion of whether “Palestinians” actually do exist, where the modern-day concept of a “State of Palestine” came from, and which major power benefits from the creation of a nation under the control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East.
American-Israeli political commentator and journalist Sha’i ben-Tekoa told Accuracy in Media, “Starting with Chapter 2:1 of the Pope’s own Holy Writ, Christian Scripture refers to Judea 42 times, Samaria 11 times, never to ‘Palestine,’ ‘Palestinians’ or the ‘West Bank.’ The Arabs in Judea and Samaria meet not one of the international legal requirements for statehood.”
He is referring to Matthew 2:1, which refers to Jesus being born in Bethlehem in Judea.
Many commentators, with little or no access to major U.S. media, argue with justification that the Arabs in Judea and Samaria are squatters, with no legal right to even be there.
“Most of the so-called ‘Palestinians’ are in fact interlopers and squatters from Syria—and other places—mostly in the 1920s and 1930s who simply took possession of pieces of land in Israel,” says commentator Rockwell Lazareth. William Mayer, editor and publisher of PipeLineNews.com, says “the so-called Palestinians” are in fact “Arab colonial squatters” who have been used to wage war against Israel.
Commenting further on the Vatican’s recognition of a so-called Palestinian state, Ben-Tekoa tells AIM, “This business of recognizing a phantom state for a phantom nation that screws the Jews is an outrage. It is this generation’s version of Jew-hatred. The Pope should lead, not follow the enemies of Israel.”
If so, the fingerprints of the old Soviet Union and today’s Russia are all over the plan.
In his scholarly paper, “Soviet Russia, Creator of the PLO and Inventor of the Palestinian People,” Wallace Edward Brand documents how the term “Palestinian People” was concocted by the “Soviet disinformation masters” in 1964 when they created the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.
Soon, the United Nations adopted the cause. Dr. Harris Schoenberg’s 1989 book, A Mandate for Terror: The United Nations and the PLO, describes how the world body came to endorse and embrace the terrorism campaign of the PLO. The UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize Palestine as a non-member state, giving it the same status as the Vatican. The only countries voting against this initiative were Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, and the United States.
Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) accepted “Palestine” as a State Party to the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty. The court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is currently probing alleged Israeli war crimes during last summer’s war in Gaza with the Hamas terrorist group.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, who is scheduled to meet with Pope Francis on May 16, is widely considered to be a key Russian asset in the Middle East.
Abbas speaks fluent Russian as a result of his KGB training at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews who were murdered during World War II were actually killed by Zionists working with the Nazis. It is now called the People’s Friendship University.
Former KGB officers and intelligence analysts say that the PLO’s long-time chairman, Yasser Arafat, was an also an agent of the Soviet intelligence service.
The links between various Arab and Islamic terrorist groups and the Russians are said to continue. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc, says KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in London, was assassinated by the KGB in 2006 because he spilled the beans on how Soviet intelligence spawned Islamic terrorism and even trained al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Marius Laurinavius, Senior Policy Analyst in the Policy Analysis and Research Division of the Eastern Europe Studies Center, argues in his paper, “Do traces of KGB, FSB and GRU lead to Islamic State?,” that it is impossible to understand the rise of the Islamic state without paying attention to the links between the Russian secret services and Arab/Muslim terrorists, including in the Russian region of Chechnya.
Nevertheless, it seems that the PLO has been successful in its campaign, as even the United States government, first under President George W. Bush and now under President Barack Obama, has accepted a so-called “two-state solution” of Israel and a Palestinian state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2009 that he was prepared to recognize a “demilitarized” Palestinian state of some kind, subject to security conditions and their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. However, a document outlining the approach of Netanyahu’s new coalition government did not include any intention of establishing a Palestinian state.
The publication Foreign Policy says Obama has decided to review the “diplomatic protection” it has offered Israel in the United Nations against anti-Israel resolutions as a way to pressure the Jewish state, and that “There is a growing movement at the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution outlining a roadmap for future peace talks.” Such a “roadmap” would force Israel to accept a Russian-influenced Palestinian state.
The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has already announced that Russia will back a resolution calling for a Palestinian state.
With the Vatican endorsing statehood for Palestine, the Russians, working with Obama, may see their chance to put more pressure on Israel.
This will likely work out to the benefit of Russia and its Palestinian agents, not the United States or Israel.
In his 1971 book, Red Star Over Bethlehem: Russia Drives for the Middle East, former diplomatic envoy Ira Hirschman argued that the Soviet Union voted in the U.N. to establish the state of Israel in 1947, only to oust “the last vestiges of British power in the land-bridge area linking Europe, Africa, and Asia,” and that its strategic objective has been to make possible the long-awaited dream of Catherine the Great to establish Russian warm-water ports in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Since we published our article, “Catholic Church Captured by ‘Progressive Forces,’” it is starting to dawn on many in and out of the media that Pope Francis has come down on the side of the “progressive,” and even Marxist, forces in the world today.
Writing at the Blaze.com and commenting on the pope’s friendly meeting with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, Catholic writer Stephen Herreid of the Intercollegiate Review called the pope’s dealings with Castro and other Marxists “a new Catholic scandal” as significant and terrifying as the presence of pedophiles in the church. He wonders how conservative Catholics can continue to pay respect to a pope “intent on making friends with the enemies of religious liberty.”
Francis had a one-hour meeting with Raul Castro on May 10. The day before, Castro had greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Francis will visit Cuba in September prior to his tour of the United States.
The Associated Press reported that Castro commented, after meeting with the pope, that the pontiff “is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too.” Castro added, “I always studied at Jesuit schools.” He also promised, “When the pope goes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction.”
The evidence is getting too big for the major media to ignore: the pope has made common cause with the forces of international Marxism, which are associated with atheism, the suppression of traditional Christianity and the persecution and murder of Christians.
Conservative Catholics and many others are terrified of what is to come. Some fear that the Roman Catholic Church has joined the campaign for a global socialist state that could turn into an anti-Christian tyranny.
Dr. Timothy Ball, author of The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, told me during a recent interview, “I think the Catholic Church is regretting making him the pope. They did it because the previous pope was starting to deal with the problems of pedophilia and corruption in the money in the church. So the powerful Cardinals pushed him [Benedict] aside. It wasn’t a health matter at all. He just realized he couldn’t beat them…He [Francis] is bringing in these socialist ideas. He’s already expressed some of them—about inequities of wealth, redistributing the wealth, which are themes you’ve heard from Obama.”
Benedict had also been a strong opponent of Liberation Theology.
As Herreid put it in his Blaze column, “In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to ‘quickly’ beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a ‘butcher’ and an ‘international outlaw,’ and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a ‘poor Church for the Poor’ at an official Vatican event this week.”
In fact, this is the latest example of Francis welcoming advocates of Liberation Theology—a doctrine manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism—directly into the Vatican.
Francis received Gutierrez, considered the father of Liberation Theology, in September 2013, but in a private audience without photos. Then, on November 22, 2014, at the end of an audience granted to the participants of the National Missionary Congress of Italy, Francis warmly greeted him personally. Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, is being welcomed as an official guest at the Vatican to participate in this week’s Caritas Internationalis General Assembly, whose theme is, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.”
Caritas is a global confederation of 164 Catholic organizations. Its U.S. affiliates are Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services.
Herreid comments, “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’s interpretation of the traditional ‘preferential option for the poor’ as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution.”
The Francis-Marxist alliance seems to confirm the predictions of the late Vatican insider Malachi Martin, who wrote penetrating books about the Catholic Church entitled The Jesuits and The Keys of This Blood. He believed that Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the “restructuring” of the old Soviet Union, never gave up on Marxism-Leninism but adopted the viewpoint of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci that a worldwide communist state could only be achieved gradually. It was to be a “revolution by infiltration.” He said, “Liberation Theology was a perfectly faithful exercise of Gramsci’s principles.”
Martin wrote that “The most powerful religious orders of the Roman Church—Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Maryknollers—all committed themselves to Liberation Theology.”
In addition to Gutierrez, one of the speakers at this week’s Vatican conference is Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N.’s Millennium Project, an advocate of a global tax that could impose a cost of $845 billion from the U.S. alone. Sachs is speaking at a panel discussion on “Growing inequalities: a challenge for the one human family.”
Sachs previously appeared at a Vatican conference on “Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility,” which was held from May 2 – 6, 2014. It was held under the authority of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
A joint statement published after the close of that Vatican conference called for Sustainable Development Goals “to guide planetary-scale actions after 2015.”
It said, “To achieve these goals will require global cooperation, technological innovations that are within reach, and supportive economic and social policies at the national and regional levels, such as the taxation and regulation of environmental abuses, limits to the enormous power of transnational corporations and a fair redistribution of wealth. It has become abundantly clear that Humanity’s relationship with Nature needs to be undertaken by cooperative, collective action at all levels—local, regional, and global.”
This week’s Caritas conference includes consideration of a “strategic framework” for the years 2015 to 2019 that quoted Francis as calling on every Christian “to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor…”
In building “a civilization of love,” the document urges the “transforming [of] unjust systems and structures” and desires an outcome in which “Justice is attained with respect to climate change and the use of natural resources…”
Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, explained what all of this means in simple language. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” she said. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change…It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”
The pope’s left-wing supporters at the Catholic Climate Covenant are ecstatic over his upcoming encyclical on ecology and climate change and believe it can be the catalyst for this deliberate transformation. Dan Misleh of the Catholic Climate Covenant tells his supporters that his group is creating what he calls “an educational, inspirational video” on how to stop global warming and developing new programs to help Catholics “reduce their carbon footprint.”
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