The Roman Globalist Church
The Roman Globalist Church
Pope Francis accelerates Catholicism’s descent into humanist utopianism.
By Joseph Hippolito
As Christians worldwide celebrated their most significant holiday, their most recognizable figure delivered a distinctly secular message.
On Easter Sunday, the Vatican released a letter Pope Francis wrote to Catholic organizations in South America. Francis wrote that the coronavirus pandemic “might be a good time to consider a universal basic wage” that would enable the poor to enjoy “the benefits of globalism.”
Such a measure, Francis wrote, “would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.”
Toward the end of his letter, Francis hoped the pandemic would generate “a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money, and places human life and dignity at the center.”
Nowhere in his letter did Francis mention Jesus Christ.
The letter conclusively proves that Francis is transforming the Catholic Church into another non-governmental organization. In the process, he is destroying the church’s identity and credibility.
Francis’ activism reflects and culminates the Vatican’s embrace of humanist utopianism, which Front Page Magazine briefly addressed last year in “They Died For ‘Dialogue’?” That article traced the Holy See’s policy of appeasing Islam and China to the radical globalism adopted at the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.
A pastoral document written on politics and economics during the council stated that “there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter. … Hence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person.”
In 1967, Pope Paul VI called for international agencies to create “a full-bodied humanism,” he wrote, by managing the world’s economic and political development:
Such international collaboration among the nations of the world certainly calls for institutions that will promote, coordinate and direct it, until a new juridical order is firmly established and fully ratified. We give willing and wholehearted support to those public organizations that have already joined in promoting the development of nations, and We ardently hope that they will enjoy ever growing authority.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI took that concept to its logical conclusion by advocating that the United Nations direct both international and domestic economic policies:
In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need…
for a reform of the United Nations…and, likewise, of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth….
To manage the global economy…to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority…
This authority, Benedict wrote, must “seek to establish the common good” and “have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums.”
The ultimate purpose, Benedict wrote, would be to design a “directed” global economy that would “open up the unprecedented possibility of large-scale redistribution of wealth on a world-wide scale” – – including “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources, so that countries lacking those resources can have access to them.”
In promoting such an authority, Benedict subtly redefined the Catholic Church’s primary role from proclaiming the Gospel to ensuring economic benefits for all — or, at least, redefining the Gospel in materialist terms. Benedict even presumed that global economic management through a “true world political authority” can achieve spiritual harmony.
When animated by charity, commitment to the common good … has a place within the testimony of divine charity that paves the way for eternity through temporal action. Man’s earthly activity, when inspired and sustained by charity, contributes to the building of the universal city of God, which is the goal of the history of the human family.
Like his predecessors, Francis believes globalism is pivotal. In an August interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Francis criticized nationalist movements threatening the European Union:
Europe cannot and must not break apart. It is a historical, cultural, as well as geographical, unity. Never forget that ‘the whole is greater than the parts.’ Globalization, unity, should not be conceived as a sphere but as a polyhedron. Each people retains its identity in unity with others.
Francis’ bishops promote the new prime directive. “They Died For ‘Dialogue’?” mentions the praise Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Council for Sciences and Social Sciences, gave China in February 2018:
Right now, those who are implementing the Church’s social doctrine the best are the Chinese.
They search for the common good and subordinate everything to the general welfare.
Sorondo particularly praised China’s implementation of “Laudato Si,” Francis’ environmental encyclical, for “defending the dignity of the person” and “assuming a moral leadership that others have left,” a criticism of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on carbon-dioxide emissions.
Sorondo issued his praise despite the fact that China ranks among the world’s worst air polluters, performs between 10 million and 23 million abortions a year — many of them forced by the government — and persecutes Christians who worship outside of state-approved churches.
In June 2018, Cardinal Pietro Parolin became the first official from the Holy See to attend the Bilderberg Meetings, where international figures from business, finance, government, communications and academia gathered to discuss such topics as political populism, free trade and economic inequality. Eighteen months earlier, Parolin had addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Parolin — the Vatican’s second-most powerful figure as its secretary of state — received an invitation from the Bilderberg organizers, who insisted upon his presence.
Nearly three months later, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich vividly illustrated the papacy’s priorities. Immediately after Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano alleged that Francis protected and promoted sexual predators among the bishops, Cupich performed his best imitation of Marie Antoinette.
“The Pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told Chicago’s WMAQ-TV. “He’s got to get on with other things: talking about the environment, protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church. We’re not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.”
Cupich repeated that theme the next day at Mundelein Seminary in suburban Chicago: “We have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this,” Cupich told the seminarians, one of whom spoke anonymously to the Chicago Sun-Times about the archbishop’s address. The Sun-Times published the story after receiving confirmation from other sources, including several seminarians.
If Catholic prelates are willing to disregard the victimization of the innocent, nobody should expect them to uphold the church’s historic opposition to abortion and contraception.
In February, one month before California‘s primary, San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy issued voting guidelines for Catholics in his diocese. But McElroy did more than reiterate support for Francis’ positions on environmentalism and immigration. He essentially stated that those positions held greater significance than the church’s stance against abortion and contraception.
While conceding that abortion was “intrinsically evil,” McElroy criticized the idea that “candidates who seek laws opposing intrinsically evil actions automatically have a primary claim to political support in the Catholic conscience.”
“The problem with this approach is that while the criterion of intrinsic evil identifies specific human acts that can never be justified, this criterion is not a measure of the relative gravity of the evil in particular human or political actions,” McElroy wrote. “Telling a lie is intrinsically evil, while escalating a nuclear arms race is not. But it is wrongheaded to propose that telling a lie to constituents should count more in the calculus of faithful voting than a candidate’s plans to initiate a destabilizing nuclear weapons program.”
Similarly, contraception is intrinsically evil in Catholic moral theology, while actions which destroy the environment generally are not. But it is a far greater moral evil for our country to abandon the Paris Climate Accord than to provide contraceptives in federal health centers. (emphasis added)
Perhaps no better example of the Vatican’s embrace of humanist globalism exists than the presence of economist Jeffrey Sachs as a papal advisor. Sachs, who drafted the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, supports abortion as an integral part of population control. Nevertheless, he participates frequently in Vatican conferences on sustainability.
So why would Francis have Sachs as an advisor? Consider these comments the economist made to the National Catholic Register after one such conference in February:
Asked whether by the Church’s teaching on human dignity he meant respect for life from conception to natural death, Sachs replied: ‘I mean everybody’s economic needs should be met, that people should have the dignity of work, that the poor should be helped, that this is about the core ideas of human well-being.’
Asked if by helping the poor he meant wealth creation, he said: ‘Jesus said, “He who feeds the least among me, feeds me.” He was talking about helping the poor. When Aristotle talks about politics or the common good, he’s talking about a society in which people afforded dignity.’
‘We know why our current system leads to massive inequalities, leaving billions of people behind,’ he said, ‘and so this is about public policy, about individual ethics, social organization. It’s about our attitudes towards others.’
When questioned by Pontius Pilate, Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world. Yet as Sachs demonstrates, Catholicism is trying to gain the whole world by being like the world. By doing so, the church is losing its own soul.