By Andrea Widburg
Pope Francis represents the Catholic Church, its doctrine, and its storied almost two-thousand-year history. However, Pope Francis has consistently derided Catholic teachings on climate change and sexuality. In both cases, he speaks like a social Marxist, not the head of the Catholic Church—and he’s apparently at it again with his upcoming interview on 60 Minutes.
The Church’s strength, always, has been two-fold: Its fealty to its core religious doctrines and the glacial slowness with which it changes. Its teachings are meant to be primary and eternal, rather than to move with the fads of the moment. Changing those teachings is an enormously consequential act because each change raises doubts about the church’s prior infallibility. You’re not a spiritual or cultural bulwark if you change policies according to the polls and the whims of the crowd.
However, there’s long been a movement within the church itself to force a fundamental change upon it. That movement is “Liberation Theology,” which tacks Marxism onto Catholicism. Liberation Theology was profoundly influential in Latin America beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, just when Pope Francis was coming of age religiously in Argentina.
Reading how leftist Wikipedia describes the doctrine will help you understand that it’s the fulfillment of Marxism, as you can see through the terms I emphasized (hyperlinks and footnotes omitted):
Liberation theology is a theological approach emphasizing the “liberation of the oppressed”. It engages in socio-economic analyses, with social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples and addresses other forms of perceived inequality.
Liberation theology was influential in Latin America, especially within Catholicism in the 1960s after the Second Vatican Council, where it became the political praxis of theologians such as Frei Betto, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jesuits Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino, who popularized the phrase “preferential option for the poor”.
The option for the poor is simply the idea that, as reflected in canon law, “The Christian faithful are also obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor.” It indicates an obligation, on the part of those who would call themselves Christian, first and foremost to care for the poor and vulnerable.
As you can see, Liberation Theology has nothing to do with the church as a spiritual caretaker. This is pure Marxism, trading on oppressor and oppressed as seen through the Marxist economic lens. By the 1980s, the Latin American Church was starting to dive into the whole racial oppression issue, which the Vatican explicitly rejected along with Liberation Theology’s focus on Marxist precepts over spiritual guidance.
Also in the 1960s, while the Latin American church was obsessed with incorporating Marxism’s economic and racial ideology, the church in Western Europe, which was then a racially homogenous and affluent area, was already working to bring homosexuality and pedophilia into Catholic doctrine.
Pope Francis represents the culmination of both these trends—economic and social Marxism. He’s also tossed in Gaia worship—the antithesis of Biblical monotheism—via the vehicle of climate change madness.
You can see all this in his tirades against the free market, against the imaginary horror of climate change and, above all, in his constant efforts to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism, both of which fly in the face of the church’s support for the Bible’s narrative about God’s creation of man and woman…and only man and woman. (And isn’t baptizing someone as the opposite of their biological sex a lie before God?) There is also the little problem of the myriad Biblical strictures against homosexuality.
Now, the Pope has upped the ante by contending that American bishops who insist upon maintaining traditional church doctrines are “suicidal.”
“Conservative,” he says, means “one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that.” Nope. Conservative means conserving something worthwhile…such as the Church’s eternal teachings. Refusing to abandon two thousand years of Catholic doctrine, according to the Marxist Pope, is “a suicidal attitude.” He castigates the church’s own teachings as “a dogmatic box.”
In the same interview, Francis explains that, while he still opposes blessing same-sex unions, what he actually did was authorize blessing the people involved in those unions.
What Francis said is pure sophistry. If you’ve got a priest standing there blessing two people who are going through the form of a traditional marriage ceremony, everyone understands that the blessing goes beyond the individuals and extends to the ceremony itself.
Marxism corrupts everything it touches. Pope Francis reflects that fact and he’s exposing the rot with his statements and sophistry on 60 Minutes. Once, the Catholic church stood for something unique, intangible, and permanent. Under Pope Francis’s aegis, it’s beginning to stand for nothing at all.