POPE FRANCIS: “I AM NOT A COMMUNIST !”
Echoes of Richard Nixon?
Once again, Pope Francis felt compelled to deny that he is a communist.
In a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal about his pending trip to several countries in Latin America, the Pontiff is “expected to press his call for a non-violent Christian revolution against the “structural causes” of inequality and environmental degradation …”
In October His Holiness called for overthrowing an “empire of money” that he blamed for military conflict and environmental degradation around the world.
At that time he told an international meeting of “grass roots social activists” that “trash pickers,street peddlers, and artisans” and every such worker “has the right to a decent wage, social security, and a pension plan”. He called for a “home for every family”, and said that “land, shelter, and work” are “sacred rights”.
The Journal story noted that the Pope also “lamented” that, “if I speak of this, some people conclude the pope is a communist”.
(The story also reported that some other people, academics and clergy believe that Francis has “rehabilitated” the “core tenets of Liberation Theology”, a doctrine once condemned by other popes as “a back door to Marxism”.)
Whatever Pope Francis is, or whatever “some people conclude” he is, as a Catholic who has heard the message of a number of previous Popes in my lifetime, I find it morbidly interesting that not one of them ever felt the necessity to assure the flock that he was “not a communist”.
Really? How so?
Francis constantly expounds his beliefs of the many “sacred rights” people have and how a certain “economic system” seems to have as its aim to deny them. At the same time, on many such occasions, he feels compelled to deny he shares the ideology that encompasses many of the same themes.
It starts to raise the question he so desires to not answer. DLH
None of that “pursuit” of happiness for this pope. Happiness is bound to be another of those “Pope-given sacred rights” he asserts. And when you have a “sacred right”, you get it even if someone else must provide and pay for it. For all those “trash-pickers and artisans”, bring on the happiness. Pope Francis says you’re entitled to it…and those “unfettered” capitalists better come up with the resources to fulfillit!
Oh, and that question, Pope Francis “so desires not to answer”: Seems to me he’s overly desirous of answering a question which hasn’t been asked: “Are you, or have you ever been…?” Always a way popular with the left to try to discredit any reasonably well-founded suspicion that one is likely to be motivated by Marxist/communist theory. Goes along with knee jerk reaction to any concerns about leftist aims and actions…”that’s ‘McCarthyism’!”