"Is the Pope a communist?” That was the headline of a BBC News story on June 7, 2015. It was prompted by accusations from both Catholic and non-Catholic critics alarmed by Pope Francis’ many shocking statements and actions favorable to communism/socialism/Marxism that flatly contradict the Catholic Church’s constant teaching on these matters for the better part of two centuries. (See "Popes Against Collectivism.") Concerns about the radical tendencies of the current pontificate began mounting soon after the previously little-known Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the papal throne as Pope Francis on March 13, 2013. The concerns have continued to build.

Here are a few headlines from the Catholic and secular press that give a flavor of the ongoing kerfuffle over Pope Francis’ ideological heterodoxy:

“Is the pope a communist?” — MSNBC

“Really, is Pope Francis ... a communist?” — Catholic Online 

“Is the Pope a socialist?” — Catholic News Agency

“Is Pope Francis a Socialist?” — America magazine

Similar examples abound. So, how do these media outlets answer this profoundly troubling question? Well, in general, their responses fall into some formula of one part gaslight, one part spin, and one part lie. Since few Catholics (or non-Catholics, for that matter) understand the Marxist-Leninist basis of “liberation theology,” the Bergoglian apologists insist that Francis’ embrace of this communist/socialist ideology is merely an extension of traditional Catholic social teaching on care for “the poor.”

Thus, the BBC reported in the aforementioned article that Pope John Paul II believed liberation theology “had tempted some priests and bishops into quasi-Marxist and even violent ideology, and as Pope he cracked down on some Liberation Theologians. Jorge Bergoglio rejected Marxism — although he cheerfully accepts that he has many Marxist friends — but accepted many of Liberation Theology’s principles, espousing what Austen Ivereigh [his friend and authorized biographer] calls ‘a nationalist version’ of the movement, or a so-called ‘Theology of the People.’” 

There is gaslighting, spinning, and lying aplenty in the BBC claim above. As we will show in what follows, Jorge Bergoglio has never “rejected Marxism,” despite an occasional throw-away quote that his defenders can pull out of a hat, which is about as credible as a statement from Stalin condemning mass murder.

Let us explain. The proximate cause for the BBC headline in 2015 that we featured at the top of this article was Pope Francis’ central role in negotiating the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Communist Cuba and the United States. That relationship had been ruptured in 1961 when Fidel Castro’s Soviet-sponsored regime became increasingly totalitarian and ever-more hostile toward the United States. But Francis gleefully played the friendly interlocutor between Raúl Castro (who had succeeded his brother, Fidel) and then-President Barack Obama to end U.S. sanctions and restore U.S.-Cuba relations.

The BBC story reported that Castro was so happy with Francis’ diplomatic work on Havana’s behalf that he even considered going back to praying and attending church:

On his way back from the Victory Day Parade in Moscow last month, the Cuban leader Raúl Castro stopped off in Rome to thank Pope Francis for his role in Cuba’s rapprochement with the United States. “If the Pope continues this way,” Castro said afterwards, “I will go back to praying and go back to the church — I am not joking.”

It has been nearly a decade since that Francis-Castro-Obama gambit took place, but there is no evidence that Raúl Castro (or his successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel) has become a prayer warrior and churchgoer. In fact, just the opposite. According to the latest report (September 2024) from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the communist regime in Havana is as repressive as ever. It states:

Throughout 2024, religious freedom conditions in Cuba have remained extremely poor. Cuba is a one-party system under the ruling Cuban Communist Party, with no independent judiciary. The state uses its repressive legal framework to tightly control religious institutions and criminalize religious activities and expressions that the government perceives to be out of step with its ideology. In addition, the Cuban government persecutes worshipers through surveillance, harassment and threats, fines, and ill treatment of religious prisoners of conscience.

Cuba’s ongoing persecution, imprisonment, and torture of Christian believers (Catholic and Protestant) and political dissidents have not dampened Francis’ affection for the Havana regime. Cuba’s communist media outlets have repeatedly used Francis’ meetings and photo ops with Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Miguel Díaz-Canel (in Rome and Havana) as propaganda to falsely portray the island hellhole as a heavenly citadel of freedom and human rights. 

Unfortunately, Francis’ romance with the Cuban regime is not a one-off love affair. As we will see below, he has cozied up to the most oppressive anti-Christian communist regimes, with Xi Jinping’s China being the most spectacular, but far from only, example. In embracing the communist gangsters, he has reversed the policies of his predecessors and not only failed to extract any relief for those suffering under tyrants, but also turned a deaf ear to the appeals of their victims. Whether it is Hong Kong, mainland China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, or Venezuela, Francis has shown he can be depended on to side with the communist dictators and to offer only bland criticisms when forced to by worldwide outrage.

Comrade Castro: Pope Francis warmly greets Cuba’s communist dictator Raúl Castro (brother of and successor to Fidel) in Santiago, Cuba, in 2015. He continues his cordial support despite Cuba’s persecution of Christians and unrelenting hemispheric subversion. (AP Images)

Venezuela’s Maduro

Everyone knows that “President” Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is a brutal communist dictator who has turned the oil-rich country, once among the most prosperous in Latin America, into a sinkhole of poverty and corruption. Under his watch, the Venezuelan bolivar collapsed into a zombie currency, with world record-shattering hyperinflation of 10 million percent (according to the International Monetary Fund, or 53 million percent according to the Central Bank of Venezuela). Handpicked by the country’s previous communist dictator, Hugo Chávez, Maduro has continued Chávez’s Castro-style rule. As a result, more than seven million Venezuelans — 20 percent of the population — have fled the country, with most deciding to come to the United States. Virtually everyone, including (surprisingly) many leftist politicians and Marxist regimes, has condemned Maduro and his phony “elections” and violence against political opponents.

Maduro’s record of oppression is so flagrant that it has been denounced even by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), French President Emmanuel Macron, Amnesty International, the Carter Center, the Organization of American States, the UN Human Rights Council’s investigative team, the European Union, and Human Rights Watch.

On the other hand, who has supported Maduro during his 11-year reign of terror? Oh, the usual suspects: China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Turkey — and Pope Francis. During Maduro’s state visit to the Vatican in 2016, Pope Francis scandalously provided him with a propaganda photo op, bestowing a papal blessing on the forehead of the pious-looking dictator who claims he is instituting “Christian socialism.” Francis’ apologists will point to several statements critical of Maduro’s regime since the infamous blessing, but the fact remains that they have been ambiguous, toothless comments. 

The “bothsidesism” that is so typical of Francis’ pronouncements was plainly obvious in his April 30, 2017 appeal “to the government and all the members of Venezuelan society to avoid any further forms of violence,” as if the peaceful protesters murdered by Maduro’s thugs were equally culpable for the regime’s violence. However, even that milquetoast papal response came only after he had received a global outpouring of criticism for his silence on the matter. And it was followed by seven more years of silence and “both sides” comments from Francis, despite desperate pleas from Venezuela’s cardinals, bishops, priests, and citizens, and much of the world community.

On August 1, 2024, after Maduro claimed a third term following another blatantly fraudulent election, Pope Francis made “a heartfelt appeal to all parties to seek the truth, to exercise restraint, to avoid any kind of violence, to settle disputes through dialogue.” 

“That kind of ‘all parties’ Vatican response, which has marked the Holy Father’s Venezuela policy for more than a decade, causes deep upset in Venezuela,” wrote Father Raymond J. de Souza at the National Catholic Register. “It is not the opposition that is causing violence, and dialogue with a repressive regime looks to many like appeasement.”

“The Vatican has repeatedly chosen not to reinforce, or even echo, the strong statements of the Venezuelan bishops,” de Souza continued. “Indeed, at many times Maduro himself has taunted the Venezuelan bishops that they should be more like Pope Francis and ease off their criticism.” To top it all off, on August 14 Francis sent Archbishop Alberto Ortega Martín to present his papers as the Vatican’s new diplomatic envoy to the Maduro regime. Both Maduro and the opposition read this as an endorsement of the dictatorship by the Holy See, in contrast to the limp rhetorical criticism issued by the pope.

Comrade Maduro: Nicolás Maduro, communist dictator of Venezuela’s narco-terrorist state, has used his cozy photo ops with Pope Francis and the pope’s “both sides” statements to undermine widespread opposition to his rule from the Venezuelan Church hierarchy and citizenry. (AP Images)

“Leftward Ho!” Always

It’s not as if Jorge Bergoglio is shy about using his papal bully pulpit to attack political leaders — if they are conservative, that is. He has issued blistering fulminations aimed at Donald Trump, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Poland’s Andrzej Duda. He typically doesn’t mention them by name, but makes clear by his denunciations that he is targeting opponents of his radical stances on mass migration, open borders, populism, nationalism, climate change, LGBTQ “rights,” “gender equality,” Covid vaccine mandates, and other “social justice” pet issues.

So, claims by Francis, the Vatican press office, and the Bergoglian fan club that the pope avoids politics, attempts to always maintain neutrality between opposing sides, and “is neither right nor left” are laughable. Consider, for instance, his treatment of Nicaragua’s communist regime, which is similar to his treatment of the Maduro regime mentioned above. For years, Nicaraguans and human-rights activists worldwide criticized the Holy See’s silence regarding the terror, torture, and repression under Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista dictatorship. In January 2019, 20 former heads of state and government from Latin America wrote a letter to Pope Francis criticizing the “both sides” wording of his Christmas blessing for Nicaragua, which called for Nicaraguans to “see themselves once more as brothers and sisters, so that divisions and discord will not prevail.” Well, that’s a really strong rebuke to tyranny, no? The letter rightly noted that the papal call for harmony “can be understood by the victimized nations that they should come to agreement with their victimizers.”

In 2022, Francis expressed “concern and sorrow” over the escalating Sandinista persecution and hoped that, “through open and sincere dialogue, the basis for a respectful and peaceful coexistence can still be found.” Finally, on December 2, 2024, Pope Francis sent a pastoral letter to the “pilgrim People of God in Nicaragua,” assuring them of his prayers and encouraging them to trust in God and persevere. As usual, his faux consolation was liberally sprinkled with “God talk,” “Jesus talk,” and “Mary talk.” However, there was no fiery denunciation of the persecutors, who claim to be Catholic and whom, therefore, he has a paternal, pastoral duty to sternly correct. But no, his papal fire-and-brimstone artillery must be reserved for climate change “deniers,” defenders of national sovereignty, and Catholics who attend the Traditional Latin Mass!

“Liberation” Indoctrination

Pope Francis’ equivocation regarding the communist regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Venezuela is the result of his lifelong marination in the toxic juices of Marxist-Leninist “liberation theology.” This alien ideology disguised as a Christian concern for the poor and oppressed first came into view for most Americans in the 1970s and ’80s with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The Sandinista junta included members of the Catholic clergy, including high-profile members such as Father Ernesto Cardenal, Father Fernando Cardenal, Father Miguel D’Escoto, and Father Edgard Parrales. All four of the self-proclaimed “revolutionary priests” were suspended by Pope John Paul II in 1985 for refusing to leave the communist government. Pope Francis lifted the suspension on D’Escoto (then 81) in 2014 and on Ernesto Cardenal (then 94) in 2019, although neither repented of their communist beliefs. Immediately upon being restored to his priestly faculties by Francis, D’Escoto (a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize) defiantly proclaimed that God “chose the greatest Latin-American of all time: Fidel Castro…. It is through Fidel Castro that the Holy Spirit sends us the message.” However, since, in both cases, the aged priests were close to death, Francis’ actions might be seen as works of mercy. Not so for his many other promotions for communism, socialism, and liberation theology. Here are but a few out of numerous disturbing examples:

• World Meeting of Popular Movements (WMPM) — An ongoing effort initiated in Rome by Francis in 2014, the WMPM brings together radical nongovernmental organizations to implement the Bergoglian socio-politico agenda. An idea of where this movement is going comes from João Pedro Stédile, a leader of the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, who, at the 2014 Rome confab, called for the canonization of “Saint” Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theoretician whose “Prison Notebooks” have provided the game plan for the culture war that is turning society upside down.

• Zapatista “Red Bishop” Samuel Ruiz — In 2016, during his visit to Mexico, Francis made a pilgrimage to the grave of Bishop Ruiz, spiritual leader of the Zapatista (EZLN) guerrillas of Chiapas. Online Catholic newspaper Crux reported that “Pope Francis is connecting with a kindred spirit, a famed Mexican pastor and liberation theology pioneer.” According to the Crux article, “Ruiz was a peacemaker,” and “In visiting the tomb of Ruiz, Francis is validating his witness and encouraging others to emulate him.” However, according to the late Professor Ronald Hilton (Stanford University and World Association of International Studies), a Latin American specialist, Bishop Ruiz was actually the secretive real leader of the EZLN who went by the pseudonym of Comandante Marcos.

• “Scalfarigate” — Eugenio Scalfari died in 2022 at the age of 98. An atheist, former fascist, and lifelong radical socialist, he worked closely with Italian Communist Party leaders and was a founder and national vice secretary of the Radical Party. He was one of Italy’s most famous journalists. He achieved his greatest notoriety late in life as a pal of Francis, whom he frequently interviewed. The Scalfari-Bergoglio interviews always guaranteed scandal, with the journalist claiming that the pope had spouted some heretical new doctrine: Jesus was a sinner; Jesus was not God; Jesus did not bodily resurrect; atheists can go to heaven; hell does not exist, etc. After each Scalfari release, the Vatican press office would scramble to claim that “No, no, no, that’s not what the pope said.” But Francis continued rewarding Scalfari with exclusive interviews as if he relished the confusion he was causing.

• Red Archbishop Helder Camara — Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara (1909-1999), known worldwide as the “Red Archbishop,” was a subversive influence inside the Catholic Church for much of the 20th century. In the 1930s and ’40s, Father Camara was an official of the rabidly pro-Nazi (i.e., National Socialist) Ação Integralista Brasileira. By the 1960s he had transferred his allegiance to the international socialists, becoming an ardent advocate for Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba, and Mao Zedong’s China. He was founder and first general secretary of the Brazilian Bishops Conference. In 1965, near the close of the Second Vatican Council, he led a group of bishops to a secret meeting in the Domatilla Catacombs, where they signed a 13-point manifesto known as the Pact of the Catacombs. The signers of the pact, which was larded with camouflage language about charity and justice, pledged their lives to simplicity, poverty, and serving the poor. The document went viral and served as a launchpad for the “Christian-Marxist” fraud known as liberation theology. Camara claimed not to be a Marxist, but his life’s work and words belie that claim. He played a central role at the 1968 Episcopal Conference of Latin America in Medellin, Colombia, that infamously brought liberation theology to the fore and inaugurated the Ecclesial Base Communities throughout Latin America. (1968 was the year of communist-led riots in cities and on campuses worldwide.) Curiously, this notorious “Red Archbishop” was also a close associate of Klaus Schwab, leader of the billionaire club known as the World Economic Forum, which is a leading vehicle for communist-globalist convergence. In 2015, Pope Francis opened the canonization process for proclaiming Camara a saint.

• Leonardo Boff —A Brazilian ex-Catholic priest of the Franciscan order, Boff became a leading figure of liberation theology in the 1960s and ’70s. After being silenced by Rome in the 1980s for his Marxist writings and speeches, he left the priesthood and continues to cohabit with a woman who is not his wife. The 86-year-old radical, now a rabid eco-Leninist, was a co-author, along with former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev and globalist Steven Rockefeller, of the UN Earth Charter. Boff has become a key advisor to Pope Francis on climate and environmental issues and is widely credited as a major pagan-pantheist influence on Pope Francis’ Amazon Synod and his 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’. The Boff-Bergoglio comradeship goes back a long way. In 2019, Boff posted a photo on his Twitter feed that had been sent to him by Pope Francis showing the two of them in a group picture in Argentina in 1972. In a 2016 interview with the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Boff said: “Francis is one of us. He has turned Liberation Theology into a common property of the Church. And he has widened it.”

Frei Betto, Paulo Freire — In the constellation of liberation theology’s big stars, Frei Betto and Paulo Freire, both Brazilians, are considered supernovas. Francis is closely tied to both of them and has gone out of his way to promote them. Like Boff, Camara, and Ruiz, they deny being communists, but their lives disprove their denials. Frei Betto, a Dominican friar, helped found the communist-terrorist São Paulo Forum, together with Fidel Castro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Betto gained fame with his series of personal interviews with Fidel, which he made into a book, Fidel and Religion, that has become sacred scripture for liberation theologists. Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a Marxist classic, had a profound influence on Bergoglio, who made a point of visiting Freire’s widow and co-author. Pope Francis sent congratulatory greetings to Freire on the 90th birthday of the man known as “the Father of Liberation Theology,” and in a funeral eulogy called him “a great man of the Church.”

KGB “Liberation” — In 2015, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Communist Romania’s secret police (DGSP), revealed in an interview with Catholic News Agency that liberation theology had been created by the KGB, which his DGSP served under. Liberation theology, he said, “was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name” to match the other “liberation” organizations and movements created and backed by the Soviets. It was launched in 1960, Pacepa said, as a “super-secret ‘Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program’ approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB…. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.” Fidel Castro would be the KGB’s principal agent. General Pacepa’s thesis is corroborated by facts and liberation-theology literature, such as Christian-Marxist Unity by Raimundo Garcia Franco. Published in 1989 by the Marxist-Leninist Circus Publications, Inc., Christian-Marxist Unity provides important details about Cuban-sponsored “Christian” conferences and extensive quotes from the Cuban Communist Party’s program for subverting the Christian Gospel for communist ends.

Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil, has been a close comrade of Fidel Castro and his communist successors for more than four decades. Together with Castro in 1990, he launched the São Paulo Forum of Latin American socialist/communist parties (including his Workers Party) and terrorist organizations. His first presidency (2003-2011) took Brazil on a disastrous course of “revolutionary parliamentarianism,” following the communist model of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Dilma Rousseff, a member of Lula’s Workers Party, served as his energy secretary before rising to the presidency herself (2011-2016). A lifelong ultra-leftist, she was a member of several underground Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups in the 1960s and ’70s that engaged in kidnappings, bank robberies, and murder. She was captured, convicted, and served six years in prison for her criminal activities. Like many other terrorists of that era, she decided to continue the revolution through parliamentary means. Lula and Rousseff have both enjoyed the benedictions of Pope Francis.

Communist China — Pope Francis’ secret 2018 Sino-Vatican agreement is a monstrous betrayal for which there is no parallel in the 2,000-year history of the Church. Although details of the pact remain hidden, what is known is that Francis granted the Chinese Communist Party authority over the appointment of bishops. Not surprisingly, the CCP-appointed bishops toe the communist line. Supposedly there was to be a quid pro quo in which Catholics in China would have greater freedom of worship and imprisoned prelates would be released. Instead, we have seen harsher persecution. And 10 heroic bishops (whom we know of) remain incarcerated. Nevertheless, despite appeals from Cardinal Joseph Zen, many Catholic faithful, and human-rights advocates around the world, on October 22, 2024, Francis renewed the agreement.

Amazingly, we have only scratched the surface. There is so much more. Prior to Bergoglio, could it have been imagined that a pope would joyfully accept a crucifix explicitly shaped like a communist hammer and sickle — a blasphemous desecration of the Savior’s cross and a glorification of the satanic system that has persecuted and murdered millions of Christians — as Francis did when it was presented to him by Bolivia’s communist dictator Evo Morales in 2015? And except under a Bergoglian papacy, would the far-left Jesuit magazine America have dared to approvingly splash a photo of that Morales-Francis moment atop an equally blasphemous article titled “The Catholic Case for Communism”? What happened to the Catholic Church?

Comrade Morales: The shocking photo of Bolivia’s communist dictator Evo Morales presenting Pope Francis with a hammer-and-sickle crucifix in 2015 has been used globally to signal papal support for the world revolution. (Newscom)

Infiltration and Control

In 1948, Americans were transfixed by the testimony of two former high-level communists: Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley. In addition to being functionaries in the Communist Party USA, both individuals were spies and agents of influence for the Soviet Union, which was then openly menacing all of Europe and Asia. Chambers had defected a decade earlier, and had repeatedly attempted to warn America that Stalin’s agents had thoroughly penetrated our federal bureaucracy and many of our institutions. His most high-profile public appearance came in his testimony exposing Alger Hiss, a top advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1952, Chambers’ acclaimed memoir Witness became a bestseller. Chambers, however, was pessimistic that the spiritually enervated West, the former Christendom, could summon the will and moral courage to stand against the revolutionary communist onslaught. 

“There is only one fully logical conservative position in the West — that of the Catholic Church,” he wrote in an April 4, 1954 letter to William F. Buckley. Chambers, who was not a Catholic, nevertheless believed that “the Church is the only true counterrevolutionary force ... because it contains the revolution wherever the revolution manifests that wound.” He noted that Burkean conservatism and High Anglicanism were merely “chips, tossed on the blackly running stream, now a torrent.” “Only the Catholic Church has dared to look steadfastly at that torrent, and measure what it costs a man’s soul to make its passage, not in terms of deflecting hope, but in terms of what cruelly is,” he continued. “But the Church is, by no means, at one on this.”

What did Whittaker Chambers mean by that last sentence? The deeply philosophical former communist undoubtedly knew what fellow defectors from communism knew: Like other institutions, the Catholic Church had been infiltrated by its sworn enemies. Former top communists such as Manning Johnson, Benjamin Gitlow, Herbert Philbrick, and Louis Budenz testified concerning their knowledge of extensive communist infiltration of Protestant denominations. Dr. Bella Dodd, another top communist defector and an important witness in congressional hearings during the 1950s, would later tell Drs. Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand of her role in helping place “over a thousand communist men in Catholic seminaries.” She also claimed she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican “who were working for us,” meaning working with the Kremlin-directed communist conspiracy. This important history is detailed in the 2022 bestseller The Devil and Bella Dodd by Dr. Mary Nicholas and Professor Paul Kengor.

It was the Catholic Church’s stalwart stand against the communist-atheist-materialist “god that failed” that led disillusioned communists such as Dodd, Budenz, Hamish Fraser, Eugene Genovese, Douglas Hyde, Bentley, and Malcolm Muggeridge to seek Jesus Christ in the Catholic faith. By the time Chambers, Bentley, Dodd, and their confreres began warning about the mortal danger from communism, Catholic popes had already been sounding the alarm for more than a century. 

In his encyclical Qui Pluribus of 1846 (two years before Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto), Pope Pius IX condemned “the unspeakable doctrine of Communism” as being “most opposed to the very natural law.” If put into practice, he warned, it would bring about “the complete destruction” of human society. This is precisely what has happened everywhere the communist revolution has taken hold. Pope Leo XIII, writing in 1878 (Quod Apostolici Muneris), called communism and socialism “the deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibres of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction.”

Pope Pius XI, in his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris, declared that “Since Communism is intrinsically evil, whoever wants to save Christianity and civilization from destruction must refrain from aiding it in the prosecution of any project whatever.” A few years earlier, in 1931 (Quadragesimo Anno), the same pope had likewise proscribed socialism, proclaiming that “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist.”

These and many additional papal condemnations of communism and socialism (see page 16) would seem to leave little room for Pope Francis’ full-on embrace of communism/socialism. Evo Morales says the gospel of Francis “is socialism.” “I feel like now I have a Pope,” he declared. Self-proclaimed socialist and longtime Soviet apologist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has stated that “many of the issues which the Pope tackles are similar to mine.” He made that pregnant comment during his 2016 visit to Rome, where he had been invited to address the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which Francis has stacked with anti-Catholic “progressives.” Meanwhile, People’s World (the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA) runs headlines such as, “Welcome Pope Francis, campaigner against corporate greed!” and Pope Francis makes comments such as, “If anything, it is the communists who think like Christians.” How to explain such a shocking turnabout in a 2,000-year-old institution?

Is the Pope Catholic?

“Is the pope Catholic?” That used to be a snarky retort to an obviously dumb question. Kind of like, “Is a 10-pound robin fat?” While we might not be surrounded by morbidly obese robins, the papal throne does seem to be occupied by an individual who fits the description of an apostate socialist/communist. How has this come about? The answer to that burning question would require much more space than is available here. However, it is important to note that the subversion we are now witnessing in the Bergoglian papacy was made possible by more than a century of patient infiltration. An important part of that story is told in the accompanying article (facing page) by the late John F. McManus, first published here in 1985. For a more detailed historical picture of the devilish permeation that we are now witnessing, there is perhaps no better source than Dr. Taylor Marshall’s 2019 exposé Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within, which we highly recommend.

In January 2017, a group of prominent Catholic lay leaders called upon the newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump to initiate an investigation into WikiLeaks revelations pointing to evidence that Deep State billionaire George Soros, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and Obama/Clinton advisor John Podesta had conspired to overthrow the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and replace him with a radical, Jorge Bergoglio. Were American intelligence agencies used to coerce and blackmail “regime change” in the Roman Catholic Church? Is this a key part of the Deep State’s plan to create a Deep Church?  It certainly looks that way, as we have reported here in the past. Americans should again call upon President Trump to investigate and expose this diabolic scheme. On the spiritual level, faithful Catholic prelates, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Bishop Joseph Strickland, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, and others, are calling on Catholics to increase their prayers, sacrifices, and fasting for the Church and Pope Francis.