Pope Francis Enters the Twilight Zone

When Pope Francis strays from religion, he is eminently fallible; he has erred

about clergy child abuse, climate change, capitalism, economics and Trump.

By: George Noga – March 13, 2016

  As an observant Catholic for much of my life, I take no pleasure in chronicling the recent pratfalls of the pontiff, which have been too numerous to ignore. The most egregious is his shameful re-characterization of the priest sex scandal as “child abuse” which now replaces “pedophilia” as the Holy See’s descriptor of choice. What actually happened was neither child abuse nor pedophilia as Pope Francis well understands.

  Only 3% of the clergy sexual assaults were pedophilia, i.e. involved prepubescents; 97% of the victims were older; ipso facto, the scandal could not be pedophilia. Child abuse is a gender-neutral, catchall term connoting non sexual forms of abuse. In the priest sex scandal, the only abuse was sexual and it was not gender neutral. Overall, sexual assault victims overwhelmingly are female; in the church scandal, the victims were 80% male. Therefore, the scandal could not possibly be considered child abuse.

   Okay, so what really was the scandal and why does it matter so much the pope dissembled to such a preposterous extent? Pure and simple, the scandal is homosexual abuse of young males. The church, abetted by the media, injected the polemical straw men (pedophilia, child abuse) solely to palliate and obfuscate. The motive was in part political correctness; but the greater motive was to avoid dealing with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, i.e. the increasingly dominant homosexual culture of the church.

   Independent studies estimate priests at over 50% gay with a higher percentage for younger priests. Some seminaries are so militantly gay, they drive out heterosexual seminarians. Pope Francis knows this truth full well but he either will not or cannot change the culture; instead, he disingenuously changes the name of the problem.

   Pope Francis imbibes the climate change kool-aid. At the UN, he pleaded for immediate action and blamed the problem on capitalism’s “selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity.” He forgot the worst environmental degradation in Earth’s history resulted from socialism in the USSR and is now being cleaned up by those selfish capitalists. Only rich countries can afford to protect the environment.

“A poor child in an African slum doesn’t need a solar panel.”

   He doesn’t get that squandering trillions for uncertain, infinitesimal benefits means we cannot spend it to alleviate suffering from unsafe water, malnutrition and lack of electricity and medicine. A poor child in an African slum does not need a solar panel! Pope Francis undoubtedly is well-intentioned but we all know where that road leads.

   Economics is Pope Francis’s real blind spot. He believes capitalism makes people rich by exploiting the poor. Unfortunately for the pontiff, even the most cursory look around the world confirms the dead opposite to be true. The poorest people under capitalism in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea are light years better off than those in socialist sinecures like Venezuela, Cuba or even Francis’s native Argentina. Capitalism has lifted one billion people out of poverty in China and India.

   This brings us to Trump. Is building a wall unchristian? Is the USA unchristian for creating great wealth amidst liberty and becoming a magnet for people everywhere? Or are Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela unchristian for creating great poverty, stifling  liberty, fomenting civil unrest and making life so miserable their people flee from their homes?

   There is a pattern in the pope’s pratfalls. He has a socialistic, Utopian world view that is demonstrably contrary to how world really works – especially the world of economics. Pope Francis needs to stick to his knitting to avoid further embarrassments.


The next post dissects recent EPA carbon regulations in a manner not found elsewhere.