RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an encyclical published on Sunday, Pope Francis announced that he’d had an epiphany thanks to the Wuhan virus: It’s time to ditch capitalism. But that’s not all. He believes, too, that in a time of a serious infectious disease, we should focus even harder on open borders.  And he blithely upended almost two millennia of Church doctrine by doing away with St. Augustine’s “just war” theory.

These actions reflect Francis’s Catholic upbringing within the communist “liberation theology” of the Latin American church. They may also show the effects of his ongoing alliance with Chinese communists and with Muslims.

Fox Business sums up the gist of Francis’s communist dreams (emphasis mine):

“Aside from the differing ways that various countries responded to the crisis, their inability to work together became quite evident,” Francis wrote. “Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.”

He cited the grave loss of millions of jobs as a result of the virus as evidence of the need for politicians to listen to popular movements, unions and marginalized groups and to craft more just social and economic policies.

“The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom,” he wrote. “It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at ‘promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity’ and makes it possible for jobs to be created, and not cut.”’

[snip]

As an outgrowth of that, Francis rejected the concept of an absolute right to property for individuals, stressing instead the “social purpose” and common good that must come from sharing the Earth’s resources. He repeated his criticism of the “perverse” global economic system, which he said consistently keeps the poor on the margins while enriching the few — an argument he made most fully in his 2015 landmark environmental encyclical “Laudato Sii” (Praised Be).

I know from experience that, when people read what Francis wrote, many will say that the church has always been socialist in orientation. That’s untrue. Jesus distinguished the realm of faith from the political realm. When he spoke of giving up property, he was speaking to individuals, not calling for communism.

Francis also fails to recognize that our current economic problems aren’t because the free market failed. They’re because leftists slammed the brakes on the free market.

The Pope used this encyclical to reiterate his endless push to erase borders:

Much of the new encyclical repeats Francis’ well-known preaching about the need to welcome and value migrants and his rejection of the nationalistic, isolationist policies of many of today’s political leaders.

Lastly, the Pope seeks something he calls a greater “human fraternity.” In doing so, he relies upon a document he composed with the grand imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar.

The Pope is perhaps too naïve to recognize that, in Islam, the house of fraternity and peace (Dar al-Islam) is a world in which everyone is Islamic. Outside of the Islamic world is the world of war (Dar al-Harb), and every faithful Muslim must wage jihad to achieve that “peaceful,” fraternal world. Or, as Tacitus wrote when quoting Calgacus, a Caledonian who fought Rome’s imperial reach, “they [the Romans] make a desert and call it peace.”

Pope Francis, bathed in ahistorical ignorance, also concluded that there can be no “just wars”:

“It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war,’” Francis wrote in the most controversial new element of the encyclical.

Both the Chinese and the Islamists must be delighted to read those words. Hitler would have liked them too. Had Frances been in the Papacy during WWII, all of Europe would have been enslaved to Germany, and all Jews, not just six million, would have been slaughtered. Homosexuals, gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and anyone else that the Germans dehumanized would have also found their way to the gas chambers.

As with everything he’s done since attaining the papal throne, Frances intends to undo all of the good work that the great John Paul II did in pursuit of human freedom and dignity.