The Pope's Strange Message to Popular Movements

Pope Francis has for years supported the Organization of Popular Movements, a conglomerate of groups making claims for those left behind, for what they call the “3Ts”: land, house and work (Tierra, Techo y Trabajo in Spanish ), three “sacred rights.” The Sovereign Pontiff has participated in the three previous meetings (Vatican, 2014 and 2016; Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in Bolivia 2015).

It is useless to dwell on the nature and the political objectives of these groups, except to say that they find in Pope Francis a “spiritual” support for their aims, just like capitalism without scruples is based on American neo-Protestantism and certain sectors of Catholic conservatism.

South America and the Amazon are the battleground for these two great trends in world politics, in a sort of general dissolve and congeal - dissolution and reconstitution, which leaves no room for genuinely Catholic positions.

The Pope addressed strong words of encouragement and support to popular movements, calling them “social poets.”

The speech then turns into a call repeated several times “in the name of God,” inviting the powerful and the industrial and financial organizations to a series of radical reforms, sometimes pleasant, sometimes utopian, but without any supernatural influx, with the exception of the initial invocation. The problems and their solutions all remain intra-human, with no horizon beyond this lifetime.

Of course, there is no shortage of calls for governments and pharmaceutical companies to donate vaccines to every country in the world.

It would take too long here to refute this kind of totally naturalistic view of politics, where nothing Catholic remains, and where cooperation with non-Catholics for more or less dubious natural ends becomes the rule.

To understand its seriousness, it is enough to read or reread the encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique by St. Pius X, which in 1910 condemned the French Sillon political movement, a moderate version of what Pope Francis praises in “popular movements.”

It will suffice for now to dwell on one of the Pope's invocations, which puts him particularly in tune with the mainstream of progressive news.

He thus addresses the major communication platforms: “I want to ask, in the name of God, the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits, without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.”

To invoke censorship of the major social media in the current circumstances is to reinforce the positions of global progressivism on any subject: from LGBT struggles to all the narratives useful to radical politics. On the one hand, the Pope supports popular movements, but on the other he calls for uniformity of thought with the powerful of this world.

In his speech, François uses the term “post-truth” three times, coined by the progressive mainstream media and used in a very specific and technical way to disqualify any alternative narrative to theirs, especially after the last American election which even saw the censorship of a United States president.

If a few years ago, modernism was concerned with transmitting the thought of the modern world by using Christian language, but it seems that today the hierarchy serves as a sounding board for political correctness by using exactly the same terms as the world.