by Giulio Meotti
The left loved Pope Francis when he denigrated capitalism, globalization, inequalities between rich and poor as well as Muslim migrants, and when he put theoretical Catholic violence and very real Islamic violence on the same level. The left loved the Pope when Francis willingly submitted to the dictates of political correctness and seemed to have adopted Chesterton’s famous “crazy Christian virtues”.
Now his admirers and faithful remember him as the Pope of the peripheries, of mercy, of inclusion, of openness to others, of the solitary mass in St. Peter’s during the pandemic, of the “people” (his best moment was instead when he went to visit what remains of the Christians in Iraq). They mourn this Pope for his funny anecdotes and that mischievous look, as well as for his reputation for being “in step with the times.”
For Bergoglio (before he became Pope Francis, he was known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio), Europe was the past. He did not understand it and did not want to understand it. He did not like Europe. And he said it every day for twelve very long years.
The Pope who did not go to Notre Dame for the reopening.
The Pope of “human brotherhood” with Imam Al Tayeeb, who called on Islam to unite against Israel, who legitimized terrorism on the basis of the Koran and called for the death of “apostates,” meaning those who convert to Christianity.
The Pope who said on October 7 “they killed someone” and brought relations with the Jewish world to the lowest point in a strange convergence between Christian anti-Judaism and Muslim anti-Jewish hatred. While Benedict XVI took a stand in defense of Western culture and pledged to strengthen “collaboration with the sons and daughters of the Jewish people,” his successor expressed distrust of the West and support for Israel’s declared enemies.
The Pope who “punch-punched” the (dead) cartoonists after the Charlie Hebdo massacre (“it’s normal, it’s normal”). Why did Francis speak in a way that would make him identifiable as the guardian of the self-defense of the “dignity of religions” (only Islam is violent) rather than the guardian of the sacredness of life and the right to freedom of expression?
The Pope who, faced with the most significant episode of intolerance towards Christians that has occurred in Europe since the Second World War, the slaughter of Father Hamel in Normandy, said that Islamists are looking for “money” and that if one must speak of “Islamic violence” he also wants to speak of “Catholic violence”.
The Pope who said that “there is an Arab invasion of Europe, a social fact, but how many invasions has Europe known in the course of its history and has always known how to overcome itself and move forward to finally find itself as if enlarged by the exchange between cultures”.
The Pope who managed to explain that “the idea of conquest” is an integral part of Islam as a religion, but also of Christianity.
The Pope who met Greta, fueling a ridiculous and anti-Western environmentalism.
The Pope who said that “I don’t feel like calling China anti-democratic”.
The Pope who called the migratory upheaval “alarmist propaganda”.
The Pope who, contrary to all the facts, said that “poverty fuels terrorism”.
The Pope who compared migrants in Europe to Jesus and the Jews that Herod was hunting.
The Pope who attacked politicians who defend the Christian roots of Europe.
The Pope who said that Europe has a “multicultural” identity.
The Pope who called the West “a civilization of barbed wire and slavery”.
The Pope who equated migrant centers to “concentration camps” and “lagers”. And this was the most serious lie.
It does not matter that, once the comparison was cleared, even Erdogan approached the Jews under Nazism – or that, if Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews, in 2020 in Europe there were 87 million migrants (alive and well).
In his writings and speeches, Francis always presented only one truth. That of the gentile migrant denied entry to a rich and despicable Western country. He rejected the idea that these influxes of migrants could also be a source of problems for the receiving countries. He saw only the advantages of “diversity.” But Islam has not yet produced civil societies, states, institutions, and a culture of rights that are equal to those of the West and as desirable to millions of people.
“John Paul II remains the Pope of freedom, who played a decisive role in the fall of the Soviet Union and the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War,” writes Nicholas Baverez, a student of the philosopher Raymond Aron. “Benedict XVI was the Pope of reconciliation between faith and reason, which he sought to erect as a barrier against the return of religious fanaticism. Francis is the Pope of resentment toward Europe and the West.”
I don’t know if Michel Houellebecq is right when he writes that “the Church is engaged in suicide”. But a certain cultural dhimmitude is the great blind side of the Bergoglian pontificate, whose aspiration for peace met with the will to power of his interlocutors. Satisfying all the requirements of the “South of the world”, decolonial and destroyer of the “privileged whites”, did not Bergoglio follow in the footsteps of the worst autocrats who manipulate this new mobilizing ideological figure, the “West”?
Benedict XVI discovered that the price of conviction is unpopularity. Francis discovered that the price of compromise is disorder.
History remembers the expression “better the turban than the tiara” by Gennadio Scolario, leader of the powerful Latinophobic and Turcophile Byzantine party, who preferred to hand the Byzantines over to the Turks and to the definitive yoke of dhimmitude rather than ally himself with Rome, rival of Constantinople.
I don’t know if history will remember Francis as “better the turban than the West,” but if Wojtyla went to Warsaw during communism and Ratzinger to Regensburg during the clash of civilizations, I struggle to find light in Bergoglio where he, in the West, saw only shadows.