It does not seem possible, or even responsible, to divert one’s attention from the constant mischief of a pontificate exercised by one who, to quote Antonio Socci’s most recent column, being “oblivious to the umpteenth scorching electoral defeat (or perhaps because of it)… with angry obstinacy continues his electoral campaign as the political leader of the worldwide Left.” Socci is referring to the massive victories for the nationalist parties of Italy, U.K., France, Hungary and Brazil, whose electorates have rejected Francis’ open borders, quasi-socialist rhetoric.
“In fact,” Socci writes, Pope Francis “continues to repeat his invective in perfect harmony with that political constituency.” Socci is referring to Francis’ just-concluded trip to formerly communist Romania, where he declared: “Do not surrender to a culture of hate” — yet another reference to his obsession with the immigration policies of states other than his own.
In the address to which Socci refers, Francis (with dreary predictability) denounced one of his many imaginary bugaboos: “a spreading sense of fear, often artfully fomented, which leads to attitudes of closure and hate.” Somehow, as Socci observes, Francis never seems to notice that it is the Left, and particularly the communist Left, that has historically fomented the politics of hate.
While during his visit to Romania Francis assisted in the beatification of seven Greek Catholic bishops martyred by communists from 1950 to 1970, he had nothing specific to say about “the massacres of communism, which was the most colossal, bloody and satanic attempt to eradicate Christianity from the soul of the people among the massacres of Christians.”
Instead, Francis immediately pivoted from the martyrdom of the seven bishops to what he imagines to be, as Socci puts it, a contemporary “‘culture of hate’ against which he [Francis] hurls himself [that] would seem to be even more dangerous than communism, ‘an individualistic culture that, perhaps no longer ideological as in the times of atheistic [never communist] persecution, is, however, more persuasive and not less materialistic.’”
Socci notes the immense gaffe involved in denouncing this bugaboo while passing over the Soviet imposition of genocidal terror and the Gulag on the Romanian people, including 44 prisons and 72 concentration camps “through which passed 3 million Romanians, 800,000 of whom died” (quoting Violeta Popescu).
In one of the Soviet prisons in Romania, Socci continues, the forms of torture included prisoners being forced to swallow an entire mess tin full of excrement, and when they vomited to swallow the vomit as well. There were also “baptisms” consisting of the forcible immersion of prisoners’ heads into “a bucket full of urine and fecal matter.” Worse, seminarians were forced to assist in black “Masses” and other sacrilegious ceremonies filed with blasphemies as part of their “reeducation.”
Yet, as a clearly disgusted Socci observes, this Pope, who has never denounced the evils of communism as such, gladly accepted from Evo Morales, and took home with him to the Vatican, a blasphemous crucifix in the form of a hammer-and-sickle, the very symbol of diabolical hatred of Christ and the sacred ministers of His Church.
Socci quotes the observation of the prominent academic and jurist Francesco Margiotta Broglio that Francis has “imported South America to Rome, a style of the Church of Liberation.” Speaking of the cardinals who elected this Pope, Broglio declared during an interview in Il Messaggero: “Did they want a Che Guevera? Well, here he is.”
The errors of Russia have indeed spread throughout the world. But now, following the decidedly anti-communist pontificate of John Paul II, they appear to have reached as far as the Chair of Peter, whose current occupant is evidently more concerned about limitations on immigration than communist persecution of the faithful in his charge — including those of China, to whose communist regime he has effectively surrendered the Underground Church.