In 1953, Manning Johnson, a former propaganda director for the Communist Party in America, testified to the U.S. Congress that Marxists had infiltrated Catholic seminaries. “In the earliest stages it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools,” he said. “The practical conclusion, drawn by the Red leaders, was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”
At the time, many dismissed this testimony. But who doubts the long march of the Marxists through the Church now? In 2009, the baldly heretical German Hans Kung dreamed of a red pope in the mold of Barack Obama: “What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama? Clearly, like Obama he would… proclaim the vision of hope of a renewed church, a revitalized ecumenism, understanding with the Jews, the Muslims and other world religions and a positive assessment of modern science…”
In Jorge Bergoglio, Kung got his wish. In 2015, Pope Francis made a speech in Bolivia before a group of communists, socialists and leftists called the “World Meeting of Popular Movements.” It was an exciting moment for the left, proof that the papacy had fallen into its hands. Sharing the platform with open Marxists such as Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president who donned a jacket emblazoned with a picture of Che Guevara, Pope Francis exhorted the radicals in attendance to continue their social agitation.
“Chavez died and Fidel is sick. Francis has taken up that leadership role and is doing everything right,” burbled an organizer of the event, Juan Pedro Stedile of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement.
Pope Francis told the ragtag leftists exactly what they wanted to hear: that capitalism, not socialism, is the source of their poverty. “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.
He went into a familiar pout about the “offenses of the Church,” referred to capitalism as the “dung of the devil,” and urged the crowd to keep “organizing”:
You, the lowly, the exploited, the poor and underprivileged, can do, and are doing, a lot. I would even say that the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives, through your daily efforts to ensure the three “L’s” (labor, lodging, land) and through your proactive participation in the great processes of change on the national, regional and global levels. Don’t lose heart!”
Many Marxist churchmen on the long march to the papacy pegged out during the journey. But they have enjoyed a posthumous victory under Pope Francis. He frequently romanticizes red prelates, such as the late Mexican bishop Samuel Ruiz.
During his 2016 visit to Mexico, Pope Francis made a point of visiting Ruiz’s tomb. Ruiz was known for pushing liberation theology, third-world ideologies, the rights of indigenous peoples, and playing fast and loose with the sacraments, which eventually led Pope John Paul II’s Vatican to condemn him. Ruiz’s admirers were thrilled when they heard that Pope Francis was going to visit his tomb, interpreting it as a moment of vindication for the liberation theologians banned by the Church. “Pope Francis is a Latin American, and his duty now is to pick up the work that men like Ruiz have done in the past,” Bishop Raul Vera said.
“I believe that a key moment in the Pope’s journey to Mexico will be his visit to the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz García in Chiapas,” said liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who helped draft the pope’s encyclical pushing climate-change activism. “This is a reparation and a lesson for the Roman Curia, which is aware of having persecuted and impeded the advancement of a truly indigenous pastoral ministry from the indigenous people themselves and from their culture.”
During the same visit, Pope Francis castigated Mexico’s bishops for not doing enough to promote liberation theology, a lecture which left them so angry that an editorial in a publication for the archdiocese of Mexico City asked after the visit: “Does the pope have some reason for scolding Mexican bishops?”
Another “red” bishop whose memory Pope Francis has rehabilitated is Dom Helder Camara. A Brazilian archbishop at the height of liberation theology’s 20th-century fever, Camara was famous for such leftist declarations as: “My socialism is special, it is a socialism that respects the human person and goes back to the Gospels. My socialism it is justice.” Camara couldn’t even condemn armed Marxists: “”And I respect a lot priests with rifles on their shoulders; I never said that to use weapons against an oppressor is immoral or anti-Christian. But that’s not my choice, not my road, not my way to apply the Gospels.”
Socialists inside the Church are pressing for the canonization of Camara — a movement that Pope Francis is entertaining. In 2015, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of the Saints quickly approved a request that the canonization process for Camara be opened up — a development America magazine called “ground-breaking.”
This week the socialist Catholic left found even more to celebrate after Pope Francis elevated the El Salvadoran bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez to the college of cardinals. Commonweal gushed:
The seventy-four-year-old Salvadoran is one of five men Francis will make papal electors when he formally adds them to the elite College of Cardinals at the June 28 consistory in St Peter’s Basilica.
Rosa Chavez has been auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador since 1982 when he was only thirty-nine years old. Today he serves as pastor of a one of the city’s largest parishes.
Known for his tireless efforts to promote the prophetic message of the now Blessed Oscar Romero, the bishop was for years treated with suspicion by conservative forces in Rome — just like the martyred Romero.
Both men were given the cold shoulder by John Paul II’s inner circle, which routinely blocked their requests for a private meeting with the Polish pope when they visited the Eternal City. Rosa Chavez, like Romero, was considered too close to the Marxists and other leftists in their small, war-torn Central American country.
The communists used to say that they would kill the last king with the guts of the last pope. But they don’t say that anymore. Now they celebrate the papacy, marveling at the relentless left-wing propaganda of Pope Francis, whose election, as the late 1960s radical Tom Hayden once put it, was “more miraculous” than the rise of Barack Obama.
Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin’s office will not release reported email correspondence with anti-GOP shooter James Hodgkinson.
An Associated Press report says, “Hodgkinson also visited the office of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign he had worked on as a volunteer, and was in email contact with the two Democratic senators from his home state.”
The “two Democratic senators from his home state” of Illinois would presumably be Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth.
When The Daily Caller reached out to Sen. Durbin’s office, we received this comment, “Mr. Hodgkinson contacted our office to state his opinion on a variety of legislation over the years. Those emails were all given to USCP and are part of the current investigation.”
When TheDC asked for more details, or whether they planned to publicly release the emails Hodgkinson sent, no response was received.
TheDC also repeatedly contacted Sen. Duckworth’s office looking for a comment or a release of the emails, but received no response.
Hodgkinson, a left-wing Bernie supporter, allegedly opened fire on a group of GOP Congressman practicing at a baseball field. He shot and injured Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, and his social media presence indicated he thought Trump was a “traitor.”
After news broke recently that John McCain’s McCain Institute for International Leadership was taking money from anti-American billionaire George Soros, the institute’s administrators are now refusing to disclose a list of its donors.
Republican Senator John McCain has been a thorn in the side of conservatives for the better part of two decades and today he is the face of the anti-Trump resistance among establishment Republicans, so naturally, the media loves him. But, recently it was discovered that his organization is the lucky recipient of a large amount of donations from Soros, one of the most dangerous, anti-American leftists in the world, and a long list of other foreign donors.
An investigation by Daily Caller discovered that McCain’s “legacy” foundation is stuffed full of Soros cash not to mention cash from a long list of American enemies.
Daily Caller reminds readers that McCain was the big man behind the McCain-Feingold act that aimed to “reform” campaign finance rules. And yet, here is his bid deal “institute” refusing to tell the nation just who is donating to its causes.
But the McCain Institute — created in 2012 with an $8.7 million donation of funds remaining from McCain’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign — refused Monday to disclose the amounts it received from its biggest donors who gave $100,000 or more.
The Institute did note that it has a list of donors on its website. But DC also pointed out that the amount donated is not listed and not disclosed.
However, the McCain Institute declined to spell out exactly how much money each big donor contributed. The web site only lists donors who have given “$100,000 and above,” which can be misleading.
The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, for instance, is identified as giving $100,000 or more on the Institute’s website. In reality, the Saudis gave $1 million.
DC also disclosed that one of the reasons that McCain housed his Institute at Arizona State University is just for the exact purpose of hiding donors.
Indeed, many of McCain’s donors are foreigners.
Now, with all these millions in foreign donations, doesn’t this whole deal smack of the same lies and influence peddling the Clintons are guilty of with their own so-called foundation?
Yet, here is McCain doing exactly the same thing.
Why won’t you disclose your foreign donors and their donations, Sen. McCain?
The weapons are foreign, the fighters are foreign, the agenda is foreign. As Syrian forces fight to wrest control of their country back and restore order within their borders, the myth of the “Syrian civil war” continues on. Undoubtedly there are Syrians who oppose the Syrian government and even Syrians who have taken up arms against the government and in turn, against the Syrian people, but from the beginning (in fact before the beginning) this war has been driven from abroad. Calling it a “civil war” is a misnomer as much as calling those taking up arms “opposition.” It is not a “civil war,” and those fighting the Syrian government are not “opposition.”
Those calling this a civil war and the terrorists fighting the Syrian state “opposition” hope that their audience never wanders too far from their lies to understand the full context of this conflict, the moves made before it even started and where those moves were made from.
If the Syrian conflict was created by foreign interests fueling militant groups it has used for decades as an instrument of executing foreign policy (in and out of Syria), amounting to what is essentially a proxy invasion, not a civil war, how exactly can a “settlement” be reached?
Who should the Syrian government be talking to in order to reach this settlement? Should it be talking to the heads of Al Nusra and IS who clearly dominate the militants fighting Damascus? Or should it be talking to those who have been the paramount factor in perpetuating the conflict, Riyadh, Ankara, London, Paris, Brussels and Washington, all of whom appear involved in supporting even the most extreme among these militant groups?
If Damascus finds itself talking with political leaders in these foreign capitals, is it settling a “civil war” or a war it is fighting with these foreign powers? Upon the world stage, it is clear that these foreign capitals speak entirely for the militants, and to no one’s surprise, these militants seem to want exactly what these foreign capitals want.
Being honest about what sort of conflict Syria is really fighting is the first step in finding a real solution to end it. The West continues to insist this is a “civil war.” This allows them to continue trying to influence the outcome of the conflict and the political state Syria will exist in upon its conclusion. By claiming that the Syrian government has lost all legitimacy, the West further strengthens its hand in this context.
Attempts to strip the government of legitimacy predicated on the fact that it stood and fought groups of armed militants arrayed against it by an axis of foreign interests would set a very dangerous and unacceptable precedent. It is no surprise that Syria finds itself with an increasing number of allies in this fight as other nations realize they will be next if the “Syria model” is a success.
For those who have been trying to make sense of the Syrian “civil war” since 2011 with little luck, the explanation is simple, it isn’t a civil war and it never was. Understanding it as a proxy conflict from the very beginning (or even before it began) will give one a clarity in perception that will aid one immeasurably in understanding what the obvious solutions are, but only when they come to this understanding.
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