Why Pope Francis Hasn’t Visited Argentina

Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 2010

From The American Spectator

By George Neumayr

“He knows nothing — not morals, not theology, not history. Nothing. Only power interests him.”

 

Last Saturday, I arrived in chilly Buenos Aires. I am sure it is just a coincidence, but my arrival coincided with the collapse of the peso. A dollar goes a long way in Argentina. For $40, Americans can get a four-star hotel; for $4, they can get a tasty steak. Signs of Argentinian economic malaise abound, from shanty towns on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to hobos sleeping on dirty mattresses in its downtown. Argentines love raw dollars, offering huge deals for cash purchases.

It appears that the Peronistas are on the verge of victory. As Brazil goes right, Argentina moves back to the left, such is its addiction to its socialist traditions.

My principal purpose in visiting Buenos Aires is to learn about its not-so-favorite son, Jorge Bergoglio, who still hasn’t visited Argentina since becoming Pope Francis. During my first few days here, I asked every Catholic I met to explain that anomaly. I got some blunt and brutal answers.

“We all know he is a son of a bitch,” said a former prosecutor to me. “We are ashamed of him. He represents our worst qualities.”

His friend chipped in that Catholics consider Francis “to be a fake, a make-believe pope,” not to mention, he added, an uncultured, ill-mannered flake.

The former prosecutor oozed contempt for Francis: “He knows nothing — not morals, not theology, not history. Nothing. Only power interests him.”

The description of Pope Francis as a power-mad ideologue is very widespread, I am finding. I spoke at length with Antonio Caponnetto, who is the Argentine author of several books on Pope Francis. “At seminary, his classmates called him ‘Machiavelli,’ ” he noted.

Caponnetto gives two reasons for why the pope has avoided his home country: one, at least half the country hates him, and two, Francis dislikes the supposedly “conservative,” pro-capitalist Macri regime. The latter reason is absurd: Macri is hardly conservative, as Argentine conservatives are the first to say.

On Wednesday morning, I visited with Santiago Estrada, Argentina’s former ambassador to the Holy See. He has been close to Bergoglio for decades, but he allowed that Bergoglio “hates businessmen.” He dislikes Macri, he said, not because Macri is a pillar of conservatism but because Macri is simply not as anti-business “as the pope.” Estrada was loath to criticize his friend, but he conceded that the pope’s promotion of molesting bishops has been “inexplicable.”

The pope’s predecessors visited their home countries. Even the timid Pope Benedict XVI braved his German critics and returned home.

Is it really possible Pope Francis could boycott Argentina for the rest of his tenure?

Probably not. For one thing, say engaged Catholics, if the hardcore leftists return to power, “he will come back.” Estrada thinks he “definitely will come back next year” if Macri loses, but that he will call it a “pastoral visit.”

“Francis has been working behind the scenes” to help Macri’s opponent, an Argentine political operative said to me. “He wants Macri to lose.”

Conservatives fear the prospect of a Peronista victory. One, who has a political blog, said to me, “I will leave the country. It won’t be safe for us.”

I got a small taste of that on Tuesday as I passed the office for one of Argentina’s left-wing parties. No sooner had I taken out my camera to take some pictures of it than a couple of Peronista wannabe thugs sprinted out of the office to question me. What, they demanded, are you doing? I ignored their gibbering, while another member of my party tried to appease them with a cleverly composed piece of faux flattery.

One eye-rolling conservative Catholic told me that the Peronism of Francisworld is so strong that some acolytes of the pope are talking about canonizing Evita.

The Fundamental Path to Peace

Pope Benedict XVI’s defense of religious freedom

Catholic World Report Editorial

By George Neumayr

The pagans of Rome cast the early Christians as bad citizens, a charge which reappears today in both the West and East: secularists in the Americas and Europe gradually move to marginalize a Christian presence in public life while Islamic extremists and totalitarian regimes use starker measures to purge Christians from society altogether.

Pope Benedict XVI drew attention to these violations of religious freedom in his January address to members of the world diplomatic corps stationed at the Vatican. He began his survey by remembering the plight of Christians in Iraq, the terrorism in Egypt that “brutally struck Christians as they prayed in church,” Pakistan’s anti-Christian blasphemy law, the attacks on Christians in Nigeria during Christmas, and the trials and difficulties Christians still face in Communist China.

Turning to the West, he noted that its violations of religious freedom assume a more subtle character, often appearing in countries “which accord great importance to pluralism and tolerance.” He said that Christian doctors, nurses, and legal professionals have seen their right to conscientious objection wither. He decried “the banning of religious feasts and symbols from civic life under the guise of respect for the members of other religions or those who are not believers.” And he expressed dismay at the tendency of Western societies to harass Christian social, educational, and charitable agencies even when they “contribute to society as a whole.”

The Battle of Britain

Will Catholicism or atheism prevail?

From Catholic World Report
By George Neumayr

In World War II, Great Britain survived an atheistic assault from outside the country. Today’s “Battle of Britain” comes from an atheistic assault inside it. British culture is crumpling under the growing weight of a fervent secularism that appears religious and an exhausted state religion that appears secular. The once-claimed sturdy Anglican bridge between Christianity and the modern world has largely collapsed, leaving those thrashing around down below it to swim from the Thames to the Tiber or drown.

The Catholic Church in the United Kingdom, to be sure, has her own problems, but, as Pope Benedict’s historic September visit to Britain suggested, the country’s future could end up looking like its distant Catholic past. Pope Benedict stepped into the battle for that future not as a triumphant warrior but as a humble witness to the truth and grace contained in Christ’s Church.

The tone of Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain was set even before he got there. Asked by a reporter on the flight over what he could do to make Catholicism appear more “attractive” and “credible” to secularists and atheists in Britain, the Pope responded by challenging the premise of the question. He noted that a Catholicism which thought in those superficial terms would become just one more dangerous ideology and power grab in a world that needs fidelity to Christ:

One might say that a church which seeks above all to be attractive would already be on the wrong path, because the Church does not work for itself, does not work to increase its numbers so as to have more power. The Church is at the service of Another; it does not serve itself, seeking to be a strong body, but it strives to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ accessible, the great truths, the great powers of love and of reconciliation that appeared in this figure and that come always from the presence of Jesus Christ. In this sense, the Church does not seek to be attractive, but rather to make herself transparent for Jesus Christ. And in the measure in which the Church is not for herself, as a strong and powerful body in the world, that wishes to have power, but simply is herself the voice of Another, she becomes truly transparent to the great figure of Jesus Christ and the great truths that he has brought to humanity…

It is for this reason, he continued, that the Church’s outreach to Anglicans and non-Catholics is not the competitive poaching of a man-made organization but the apostolic work of a divine one:

If Anglicans and Catholics see that both are not there for themselves, but are rather instruments of Christ, “friends of the Bridegroom,” as Saint John says; if both follow together the priority of Christ and not themselves, they draw closer together, because the priority of Christ brings them together, they are no longer in competition, each one seeking greater numbers, but are united in commitment to the truth of Christ who comes into this world, and so they find themselves also placed reciprocally in a true and fruitful ecumenism.

Ironically, the direct but civil Pope Benedict appeared to win over many non-Catholics in Britain while the self-consciously irenic Cardinal Walter Kasper proved too divisive to come. The former head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity stayed behind after saying that flying into increasingly ethnic Britain makes him feel like he is entering a “Third World country.” Yet in a way Kasper’s “gaffe” was accidentally prophetic: British police arrested, though later released, six men of North African descent thought to be planning an attack on the Holy Father—a sobering reminder during the papal visit that the confusion of modern British life is due not just to wan and corrupted Christianity but also to the creeping Islamization aided by atheism that could take its place.

At a reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Benedict recalled “how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.” Benedict added that as “we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion, and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny.’”

The Holy Father returned to this theme of the battle of Britain several times over the course of his visit, gently impressing upon the British elite that the moral relativism and de facto atheism which they invoke in the name of democracy only imperils it. Standing not far from the spot in Westminster Hall where Thomas More was condemned to death, Pope Benedict made the unpopular point that democracy can turn tyrannical too, unless it rests on truths not subject to democratic vote, truths which reason apprehends and revelation reinforces.

Whether the English can win that battle against the 21st-century tyranny of the “dictatorship of relativism” remains in doubt, but the Holy Father through his speeches has certainly left behind in Britain a powerful light with which to dispel atheism’s darkness.

George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report.

Pope Benedict's Critics Don't Care About Kids

From The Washington Times
By George Neumayr

Since when have secularists and dissenting Catholics been experts on the protection of children?

These self-appointed reformers of the Catholic Church preside over a debased culture that abuses, aborts and corrupts children. That a reckless and depraved liberal elite would set itself up as moral tutor to Pope Benedict XVI is beyond satire.

Here we had on display during Holy Week the spectacle of the Vicar of Christ receiving moral instruction from Barabbas. Who turns orphans over to homosexual couples at adoption agencies? Who sends Planned Parenthood propagandists into schools? Who clears the streets of major cities for "gay-pride" parades with the North American Man/Boy Love Association in tow? It is the liberal elite who champion these child-corrupting practices. And wasn't it just last year that these enlightened protectors of children assembled at the golden coffin of Michael Jackson to pay their last respects? Where was the outrage about child corruption then?

The National Catholic Reporter, the flagship publication of dissenting Catholicism, which has joined the secularist posse hunting down Benedict, calls for a stern and unsparing investigation of him. This is the same publication that publishes the homilies of Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, one of which stated in 2002, at the height of the abuse scandal in America, that the "zero-tolerance" policy shouldn't apply to priests attracted to children above the age of puberty. "I do not support the 'zero tolerance' approach in every instance," he sniffed.

Another NCR article from 2002 stated: "Zero tolerance is a blunt object of punishment. All abuse is an offense against human dignity, but just as the severity of sins differs in traditional Catholic teaching, and the severity of punishment in civil law varies according to many factors, not all abuses are the same. In our overheated atmosphere, this is difficult for many to admit. A priest who briefly exposed himself to a teenager has not committed the same act as a priest who raped a minor."

Let's cut through the nonsense: The assault on Benedict last week had nothing to do with the protection of children and everything to do with the liberal elite's hatred for his orthodoxy. The three stooges - Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan - are casting lots for his robe, not because they toss and turn at night worrying about a permissive priesthood, but because they hate the conservative teachings of the Catholic Church that Benedict embodies. They are still upset that the church elected a Catholic to the papacy rather than a modern liberal. Miss Dowd is using the abuse scandal to push her feminism, Mr. Hitchens his atheism and Mr. Sullivan his homosexual activism.

The truth is that Pope Benedict has done more to address the abuse scandal in the church than his predecessor, whose tenure never excited anywhere near this level of calls for resignation. The Associated Press even acknowledged as much: "Benedict took a much harder stance on sex abuse than John Paul II when he assumed the papacy five years ago, disciplining a senior cleric [the Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ] championed by the Polish pontiff and defrocking others under a new policy of zero tolerance."

According to Reuters news agency on March 28, "Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, in defense of the pope, told ORF Austrian television on Sunday that Benedict wanted a full probe when former Vienna Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer was removed in 1995 for claimed sexual abuse of a boy. But other Curia officials persuaded then Pope John Paul that the media had exaggerated the case and an inquiry would only create more bad publicity. 'He told me, "the other side won," ' Schoenborn said."

So why is Benedict held to a higher standard than John Paul II? Is it because he's seen as more conservative by the liberal elite? Perhaps. Their unstated and perversely ironic objection to Benedict in the wake of the abuse scandal is not that he has pursued too few reforms but too many. Recall that the New York Times and other liberal newspapers roundly denounced him for one of his first major reforms as pope: a directive issued to bishops that banned the ordination of homosexuals. That is not the liberal elite's idea of reform, even though most of the abuse cases involve homosexual pederasty. Hence, they blame Benedict for a lax and dysfunctional priesthood while at the same time hectoring him for not letting homosexuals into it. They blame "celibacy" for the scandal (which rests on, among other inane assumptions, the idea the abusers were celibate in the first place) rather than acknowledge the role in it of the very low and aberrant seminary admission standards that they clamored for the church to embrace in the relativistic 1960s.

For all the opportunistic laments about "leniency" in recent days, their real hope for the church is not that it returns to her morally rigorous traditions but that it abolishes them. And it is precisely because Benedict stands in the way of this goal that they now go in for the kill.

George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report.