Como uno caudillo a otro

José Azel speaks truth to the powerful;

In political terms, Pope Francis is the head of an authoritarian state — an oligarchical theocracy — where only the aristocracy, the Princes of the College of Cardinals, participate in the selection of the ruler. This structure engenders an affinity for authoritarianism, as Pope Innocent III manifested in annulling the Magna Carta. 

That was back in the thirteenth century. 800 years ago, when King John--who'd been forced to sign Magna Carta by disaffected aristocrats who had to finance John's reign--appealed to Pope Innocent to get him out of his signed promises. Innocent obliged the king then. And Azel goes on;

In 1998, then Archbishop of Buenos Aires Monsignor Jorge Mario Bergoglio [today Pope Francis I] authored a book titled Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro. In my reading of the pope’s complex Spanish prose, he favors socialism over capitalism provided it incorporates theism. He offers Fidel Castro’s claim that “Karl Marx’s doctrine is very close to the Sermon on the Mount,” and views the Cuban polity as in harmony with the Church’s social doctrine.

He even uses Cuban political terminology, poisoning the well, as it were. Worse, he seems to be trying to mainstream liberation theology which prior popes had condemned.

This language is reminiscent of the “liberation theology” movement that developed in Latin America in the 1960s and became very intertwined with Marxist ideology. Liberation theology, fathered by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, provided the intellectual foundations that, with Cuban support, served to orchestrate “wars of national liberation” throughout the continent.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI censured liberation theology, but in 2013, Pope Francis met with father Gutiérrez in “a strictly private visit.” Following the visit, in an apparent exoneration of liberation theology, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, published an essay stating that with the election of the first pope from Latin America, liberation theology can no longer “remain in the shadows to which it has been relegated for some years.”

And very soon Francis will visit Cuba. Stayed tuned.