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In a Jan. 29 commentary entitled “Trump and the Vatican: War in Progress,” Professor Stefano Fontana wrote that early policy decisions of the Trump administration have exposed the extent to which the Vatican’s close alignment with a progressive globalist agenda has caused “great damage” by weakening her voice on a number of serious moral issues.
Fontana is director of the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory on the Social Doctrine of the Church, a research organisation founded in 2003 that emphasises fidelity to the Church’s established social teaching. Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, a former Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, helped found the observatory and is a regular contributor.
Describing globalism as a “totalitarian” and “elitist post-democratic system,” Fontana said it has brought together a wide range of powerful institutions including big tech, media corporations, academia, “philanthropic” institutions, governments, international agencies and European Union leaders. Some of the key issues it promotes are unlimited immigration, gender ideology, and a radical green agenda.
The existence of this system, he said, has now been confirmed by the fact that many of its partners are changing direction on some policies. At the same time, he believes the new Trump administration has “opened the doors to a counter system.”
As for the Church’s role, he believes there are “many reasons” to argue that her leaders have “contributed to that totalitarian system,” and he pointed out “many convergences” such as the objectives of the Biden administration, the World Economic Forum, the European Commission and the WHO “just to name a few of the clique.”
Significantly, he wrote that the Catholic Church’s leaders have failed to free the Church from this “dominant ideological power” and “from the meshes of a system.” At the same time, he said they failed support those bishops who were willing to resist it by, for example, denying Holy Communion to pro-abortion Catholic politicians such as Present Biden or Nancy Pelosi.
Instead, he said, the Vatican sent “messages of support and good wishes” to Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, arguing that the WEF “could do a lot for the common good.” Fontana pointed out what he sees as a discrepancy between serving the common good and advocating uncontrolled immigration, “health totalitarianism” during the COVID pandemic, and pushing the climate ideology that “lacks scientific foundations and brings poverty to the working masses.”
“All this and more demonstrates a line of obsequiousness to the current system of social control,” Fontana wrote, adding that the policies that the Church has supported, “either by proposing them itself or by remaining silent about their negative aspects, have caused great damage.”
Of course throughout his pontificate the Pope has embraced causes, like climate change, that have bupkis to do with Catholicism. There is nothing stronger in this Vale of Tears than Catholicism when Catholicism preaches the Faith. There are few things more absurd than when clerics attempt to use the Faith to ride their own political hobby horses.
Wise words, lost on the old Argentine.
The American Catholic bishops are agents of a foreign head of state, Pope Francis. They are not registered as such due to an exemption within the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Nevertheless, our bishops are appointed, assigned, promoted and retired by one man and one man alone.
The Papal Nuncio and the USCCB understand this very well. It is what it is.
The commingling of church and state has always been a problem, mostly for the church. What happens when the pope gets out of his lane and starts speaking on political issues and takes a political side, people tune him out just like they tuned out the liberal media. People can stand getting gas lit only for so long. Having lost any moral authority, people just stop listening.
I agree with all comments thus far. Our current Pontiff is a fool and most American bishops are no better than secular foreign agents.
Lead Kindly Light,
I think you’ve partly mis-stated the trouble, though perhaps incidentally.
I don’t think there’s a problem with the Pope taking a political stance per se. His role as pope includes need to remind us how to implement our faith in practice, which inherently requires making statements that have political bent. Or at least, political effects.
I think the problem mostly arises by his taking a political stance from a (somewhat incidentally) progressive viewpoint. In doing so, he trivializes another teaching of the faith which has greater import for the particular problem.