![]() ![]() Sanders has spoken eloquently about how his Jewish background influenced his political and ethical development. Moore, a Catholic, and Turner, the daughter of an evangelist, are quoting Jesus and proclaiming the “Gospel of Bernie” to the people of New Hampshire. īut on the left wing of the party, filmmaker Michael Moore or Ohio Senator Nina Turner, surrogates for Bernie Sanders, are not shying away from matters of faith either. Some of the current crop of presidential hopefuls have been pushing back against this notion, most famously Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who tweeted “ God does not belong to a political party ” in response to President Trump questioning Buttigieg’s commitment to his Episcopalian faith. George Neumayr is the author of The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives, to be released Tuesday by Center Street.Religion-tinged appeals to voters are often considered the sole purview of the Republican party, particularly when it comes to citing scripture to support political positions. He accepted the hammer-and-sickle cross warmly, telling the press on the plane ride back to Rome that “I understand this work” and that “for me it wasn’t an offense.” After the visit, Morales gushed, “I feel like now I have a Pope. Had John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI seen such a grotesque cross, they might have broken it over their knees. Pope Francis had honored Espinal’s memory upon his arrival in Bolivia. Luis Espinal, who belonged to the Jesuit order (as does Pope Francis) and had committed his life to melding Marxism with religion. Morales described the gift as a copy of a crucifix designed by a late priest, Fr. ![]() Could a satirist like Waugh have imagined a pope happily receiving from a Latin American despot the “gift” of a crucifix shaped in the form of a Marxist hammer and sickle? That surreal scene happened during Pope Francis’s visit to Bolivia in July 2015.Įvo Morales, Bolivia’s proudly Marxist president, offered the pontiff that sacrilegious image of Jesus Christ. Were the 20th-century English Catholic satirist Evelyn Waugh alive today, he would find the radical left-wing political flirtations of Pope Francis too bitterly farcical even for fiction. To hear Pope Francis speak today, one might conclude the reverse: that no can be at the same time a good Catholic and an opponent of socialism. “No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist,” he said. In the early twentieth century, as Marx’s socialism spread across the world, Pope Pius XI declared the theory anathema. They saw it as a grave threat to God-given freedom, as it proposes that governments eliminate large swaths of individual freedom, private property and business in order to produce the “equality” of a society without economic classes. They didn’t see communism as a benign exaggeration. The flag of the poor is Christian,” he said in 2014. Such a comment would have startled his predecessors. “I must say that communists have stolen our flag. Yet many commentators have ignored them, breezily casting his leftism as a bit confused but basically harmless. ![]() These biographical details throw light on the pope’s ideological instincts. Her daughter requested that her mother and several other women be buried there because ‘it was the last place they had been as free people.’ Despite knowing full well that Ballestrino was not a believing Catholic, the future pope readily consented.” “Almost three decades later, when her remains were discovered and identified, Bergoglio gave permission for her to be buried in the garden of a Buenos Aires church called Santa Cruz, the spot where she had been abducted. “Tragically, Ballestrino herself ‘disappeared’ at the hands of security forces in 1977,” reported Vatican correspondent John Allen. According to the author James Carroll, Bergoglio smuggled her communist books, including Marx’s Das Kapital, into a “Jesuit library.” I realized a few things, an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church.” As the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he took pride in helping her hide the family’s Marxist literature from the authorities who were investigating her. Learning about communism, he said, “through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I remember that she also gave me the statement from the American Communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death,” he has said. So I also got to know that very materialistic conception. “She often read Communist Party texts to me and gave them to me to read. ![]()
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