A disgusting anti-Catholic and Marxist screed.
I highly doubt that this arrogant, so-called, journalist, would write such a critical piece on Islam.
What is happening here is a realization that Francis is in jeopardy, a jeopardy of his own making. There is going to be a massive schism and it will be caused by Francis. This article is a plant and part of a wider plan to defend Bergoglio from the outcry of faithful Catholics.
This woman is using Alinsky tactics to target and assassinate Cardinal Burke, if she could do so literally, I have no doubt that she would. The evil that flows from the keyboard of this Symons and the recent piece in the New York Times is so obvious to see.
They will all come crashing down and will fall like snowflakes in to Hell.
May Our Blessed LORD continue to guide Cardinal Burke and may St. Michael protect him from these enemies. Amen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/02/09/how-pope-francis-can-cleanse-the-far-right-rot-from-the-catholic-church/?utm_term=.ac5e3c1fdc76
Emma-Kate
Symons is a Washington-based journalist and former Paris correspondent. Her
work has been published in Foreign Policy, Women in the World in association
with the New York Times, Quartz, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and the
Australian Financial Review.
Pope
Francis needs to take tougher action against the United States’ most
influential Catholic in Rome, Cardinal Raymond “Breitbart” Burke. The renegade
cleric is not only undermining Francis’s reformist, compassionate papacy, and
gospel teaching as it applies to refugees and Muslims, but the rebel prince of
the church is also using his position within the walls of the Vatican to
legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy,
Stephen K. Bannon-style. Simply put, the Vatican is facing a political war
between the modernizing Pope Francis and a conservative wing that wants to
reassert white Christian dominance.
Burke was
reduced to a ceremonial patron role at the Knights of Malta after a power
struggle at the ancient chivalric order, won by the pope last month, following
a spat over its humanitarian wing’s alleged distribution of condoms. Losing the
leadership battle and prestige at the secretive society headquartered in Rome —
Francis is appointing his own special delegate above Burke — was seen as a
papal rap on the knuckles for the cardinal leading the charge against Francis’s
writings on communion for divorcees. But
the virulently anti-Islam (“capitulating to Islam would be the death of
Christianity”), migrant-phobic, Donald
Trump-defending, Vladimir Putin-excusing Burke is unrepentant and even defiant,
continuing to preside over a far-right, neo-fascist-normalizing cheer squad out
of the Holy See.
This
Vatican operation, called Dignitatis Humanae, or the Institute for Human
Dignity, whose advisory board includes two of the four cardinals openly
challenging Francis on marriage and sexuality, is slavishly promoting Burke’s
favorite American white Catholic nationalist, Bannon, with star billing on its
home page. The institute’s top office-bearers, Burke and his henchman, the
media-savvy Breitbart contributor Benjamin Harnwell, are also encouraging
Benito Mussolini fan Matteo Salvini, of Italy’s Northern League, and
Muslim-baiting far-right Catholic poster girl Marion Le Pen, the National Front
“rising star” niece of party leader Marine Le Pen in France.
As the Italian press first revealed, Burke
held a long meeting last week at his Vatican home with Salvini, a fierce critic
of the pope who wants to push refugees back into the sea and close all mosques
in Italy. It was a flagrant political intervention on the side of the
extreme-right racist grouping ahead of the Italian elections. Mysterious
posters also appeared around the Vatican decrying a sinister-looking pope’s
“decapitation” of the Malta Knights order.
The
situation facing the Catholic Church raises alarming parallels with the
ideological warfare that split the Vatican in the 1930s when ethnic nationalism
was sweeping Europe under Mussolini and Hitler and when fascist forces
infiltrated the highest echelons of the church. In 1937, Pope Pius XI published
an encyclical in German denouncing the Nazi regime and its racism. The diatribe
infuriated Hitler, but the focus was more on Nazi persecution of Catholics than
laws targeting Jews.
In Italy, the Vatican had long made
accommodations with Mussolini for its own geopolitical gains, and Pius XI
failed to quell widespread institutional anti-Semitism in the church before it
was too late. When Mussolini decreed in 1938 that Italian Jews were to suffer a
legal fate similar to those in Germany, Pius XI tried to prepare a fresh
encyclical deploring anti-Semitism and racism, as revealed in historian David
Kertzer’s book “The Pope and Mussolini,” he was double-crossed by pro-fascist
forces in the Vatican working in tandem with Il Duce. Senior figures in the
French Catholic Church also collaborated with fascism in France, where the
Vichy regime aided the Nazis in deporting about 80,000 Jews to the death camps.
The lesson of history has not been lost on
Francis. After President Trump’s inauguration, he warned that rising populism
could produce a new Hitler. But now, as Europe faces historic elections that
could bring extreme-right nationalists back into power across the continent for
the first time since World War II, he must act. The bellicose anti-Islam
invective being marshaled by figures such as Burke shares much in common with
the vicious anti-Semitism many Catholic clerics adhered to in the 1930s, when
they saw Jews as a danger to the Christian West whose rights must be
restricted.
Burke, like
Bannon, who says Islam is “the most radical” religion in the world, makes no
distinction in his clash-of-civilizations frenzy between the Muslim faith’s
diverse currents and interpretations, and violent jihadist movements derived
mostly from Saudi-style Salafism. Unsurprisingly, Burke says he is “very
satisfied” with Russian autocrat Putin’s “defense of life and family” and
believes he may have “converted” since his KGB days. Yet, just as godless
Communism posed an existential threat in the past, the Catholic Church has
nothing to gain and everything to lose from cozying up to far-right extremists
from the United States to Europe. They distort Christianity into an
exclusionary ideology in defense of nation and race, and unite a new support
base of Muslim-haters with historically anti-Semitic movements such as the
National Front that are anything but Christian, and often neo-pagan.
The options
open to the pope in dealing with Burke are limited. Excommunication isn’t in
the cards; Burke is not a heretic denying the Catholic faith. Nor is Burke
refusing to submit to the pontiff like French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who
was cast out by John Paul II after his ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius
X ordained its own bishops rather than take directions from the Vatican.
However,
Francis, who has full authority over his cardinals, could fully remove Burke
from his remaining sinecure with Knights of Malta, call him in for a pastoral
correction on the issue of his unacceptable political interventions,
investigate Dignitatis Humanae with a view to shutting it down for its
subversive politicking, and send the rebel cardinal back home to the United
States. As Burke tries to run an insurgency and rebukes the pope for his
doctrinal “ambiguities,” with the backing of thousands of priests, Francis
could seize the agenda. In time-honored papal tradition, he could write an
encyclical on the burning questions of populism and nationalism, with specific
reference to migrants, Muslims and Jews, so priests including Burke know they
are in breach of church teaching when they try to act as power brokers for the
international extreme right.
