Maureen Mullarkey takes a look at Pope Francis and his attitude towards the poor:
The English language press is ill-equipped to grasp this distortion. But the irrationality of the papal love affair with the poor has not been lost on Loris Zanatta, an eminent Argentine historian at the University of Bologna. His study “The Catholic Nation: Church and Dictatorship in the Argentina of Bergoglio” was published in Italy last year.
Zanetta’s recent essay, “The Chosen People” appears in the April issue of Italy’s prestigious Il Mulino. It was excerpted April 20 by Sandro Magister, leading Vaticanist and journalist with L’Espresso. The essay takes an informed look at the angle of this pontificate’s hold on reality. His essay confirms existing insights into the nature of Bergoglio’s pontificate. These are intuitions outside the ken of mainstream media, and ones Catholics themselves would like to wish away.
Pope Francis Means Poorer Is Holier
Is Bergoglio a Peronist? Zanatta answers: “Absolutely he is.” And not solely because of the air he breathed in his youth. Add his conviction that Personism embodies an alliance between a people and a nation that defends “a temporal order based on Christian values and immune from that . . . Protestant liberalism whose ethos projects itself as a colonial shadow over the Catholic identity of Latin America.” The statist bond will restore to the Catholic Church its lost stature.
By “Protestant liberalism,” Zanatta refers to the antinomian individualism that challenges the ecclesial authority which, in papal eyes, is the heart of Latin American identity. Is Bergolio, then, also a populist? Again, absolutely. Zanatta looks to the pope’s language to understand the tonal quality of his populism:
On his great journeys of 2015—Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Cuba, the United States, Kenya, Uganda, Central Africa—Francis used the word ‘pueblo’ 356 times. . . . He said ‘democracy’ only 10 times, ‘individual’ 14 times, mostly with a negative connotation. {These numbers] confirm for us what could also be guessed: that the notion of ‘pueblo’ is the keystone of his social consciousness.
Populism inhabits the pope’s vocabulary and shapes his politics. In his lexicon, “pueblo” means la gente común y humilde. Francis extols the piety of “the poor and simple.” Popular piety—“the memory of a people”—contains that germ of conversion with which the humilidades will evangelize the non-poor. (“Evangelii Gaudium”: “We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them.”) Zanatta explains:
His pueblo is good, virtuous, and poverty confers an innate moral superiority upon it. It is in the popular neighborhood, the pope says, that wisdom, solidarity, values of the Gospel are preserved. It is there that Christian society is found . . . .
Moreover, that ‘pueblo’ is not for him a sum of individuals, but a community that transcends them, a living organism animated by an ancient, natural faith, where the individual is dissolved in the whole. As such, that ‘pueblo’ is the chosen people that safeguards an identity in peril. It is . . . an eternal identity impervious to the unfolding of history, on which the ‘pueblo’ has a monopoly. [This is] an identity to which every human institution or constitution must bend in order not to lose the legitimacy conferred on it by the ‘pueblo.’
Populism, in the form of an idealized people, simplifies the complexity of the world:
The border between good and evil will then appear so diaphanous as to unleash the enormous power inherent in every Manichaean cosmology. This is how the pope contrasts the good ‘people’ with a predatory and egotistical oligarchy. A transfigured oligarchy, devoid of face and name, [becomes] the essence of evil, the pagan devotee of the god money: consumption is consumerism, the individual is selfish, attention to money is soulless worship.
Concern for the poor is as old as the church itself. What is new in this mystique of the pueblo is its other-worldly intoxication with poverty, as if material deprivation conferred holiness. An unacknowledged strain of cruelty runs through it. The poor are revered insofar as they play the role of the People, actors in a paternalistic drama directed by marxisant superiors inclined to interpret affluence as a signal of moral defect. Added, then, to the burdens of the poor is the servitude of personifying the sufferings of Christ.
Go here to read the rest. Helping the poor is a command of Christianity. Backing policies that will cause more poverty is blasphemy. We have a Pope who apparently loves the poor so much that he wants there to be many more of them.
I have observed pretty much from the start that, for this pope, the poor are nothing more than a prop. This article convincingly explains why. No one who actually cared for the poor would ever espouse the social policies espoused by this pope. He demands that jobs be made available for the poor, but then never lauds the job creators. Instead, he perversely advocates policies that punish job creators and ensure more poor. He doesn’t even seem capable of asking the question as to why Latin Americans head north, and not south, when they attempt to leave their poverty behind. He can bash individualism all he wants, but this article is spot on when it says he doesn’t see individuals, he sees members of some idealized group he can use to denigrate others and make himself feel superior. Demagogue is putting it politely. Accepting the commie crucifix was the last straw for me.
“it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” I didn’t think that meant that poor people were no longer “fallen.”
.
One thing is certain. Hillary, Obama, Pope Francisco, et al love the poor. They love the poor so much that they are doing everything in their powers to make more people more poor, both economically and morally.
.
The poor do work rich people will not. They vote democrat for raising their government benefits.
.
The historical record (look at oil-rich Venezuela) shows that socialism only enriches ruling elites. “Like Ponzi schemes, socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them.” – Instapundit.
.
In John 5:14 Christ (who mandated us helping the poor but did not romanticize the poor)…warns a 38 years sick, poor man whom He cured of immobility, ” Go and sin no more lest something worse befall thee.” His sickness then originally was probably Sinai Covenant punishment for a sin which is laid out in Exodus as being physical as were their rewards for being obedient. Job was an exception…and really predicted the Christian dispensation when we are promised a cross whereas God promised the obedient Jews e.g. no miscarriages, long life,victory over their enemies etc. In John 5:15 the very next verse, the cured man snitches on Christ to the Jewish leaders who previously had asked him who cured him on the Sabbath. It is one of the darkest moments in the gospel and similar to Christ curing ten poor lepers and noting that only one thanked him…a Samaritan again. Nine lepers didn’t thank him and the 38 year sick man drops a dime on Christ …snitches to the Jewish leaders shortly after being able to walk because of Christ. All were poor due to illness. The New Testament then shows us ten poor men who are poor in values also.
Pope Francis much not be reading those parts but rather the parts that feed his ideology. His predecessors did that partial reading also as to the death penalty. Cafeteria Biblical exegesis. It’s trending.
“We have a Pope who apparently loves the poor so much that he wants there to be many more of them.”
.
I’ve noted that myself on more than one occasion, but I think the hierarchy in general are of the same ilk. Same with many of the laity I’ve encountered.
There is an old saying in Overeaters Anonymous:
.
Some is not enough.
More is better.
Too much is just right.
.
We have envy at the lower economic classes and glutony at the upper. Both envy and gluttony are sins, and both send people to hell. Indeed, it isn’t riches that send someone to hell, but the love of riches. The poor love riches out of envy and the rich love riches out of gluttony. I fail to see any substantive difference.
.
Man can be dreadfully sinful whether rich or poor, and can equally be joyfully saintly, depending on one’s cooperation with God.
I remember reading in Time Magazine in 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, that the thinking of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke and Locke never made its way into Russia.
This thinking never made its way into Latin America either. I have written here many times that Argentina is a basket case. It is a continual self inflicted gunshot wound. Wealth is tied to land ownership and there is a disdain of labor.
In 26 years, Poland has surpassed Argentina in economic output, GNP and per capita income.
Nobody partitioned Argentina, suppressed its people, made them fight in WWI. Lenin, Hitler, Stalin did not attack Argentina and kill and deport millions of its people. And with all this, the Pampas that produces excellent beef,
and no wars, Argentina has fallen behind Poland.
Poverty sucks. The way out of poverty is a private sector job. The Pope does not understand this. He cannot, never has and never will.
I suspect that one of the things lost in translation here is that we in America really have no idea of what abject poverty looks like. At least not the self-inflicted kind. We’ve got the richest poor people in the world living on our streets. The rest of the world wishes they could be as poor as our poverty stricken are.
I do think that there’s some truth to the notion that the poor (at least some) have a greater inkling ( I won’t go so far as to say awareness) of their dependency on God than perhaps the rest of us have.
.
I base that on my own, recent experience with Bad Luck compounded by Ill-Health and a really, really bad allergic reaction to a newly prescribed medication. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to saintly humility (feeling more or less totally helpless and dependent on others will do that), and I couldn’t hold on to that once I started to feel more like myself again.
.
I’m glad I’m more or less healthy again, but I have to admit that I experienced a grace then that I no longer feel. And that’s my loss.
.
I also think there’s something to be said for an organic sense of community, something we, in a culture of nearly unlimited gender choices, say, are clearly in danger of losing. If we haven’t already lost it, that is.
.
Not saying that Francis is right, understand. Just that he may not be entirely wrong.
Doesn’t exalting poverty, perversely enough, give way too much credit to mammon?