The Soros-Bergoglio Axis

2,074 words

I know that many readers of Counter-Currents are anti-Christian, as a subset of their larger rejection of universalist ideologies that are color-blind and race-blind. This was the position of the late Revilo P. Oliver, whose life-long study of religions had led him to the conclusion that both liberalism and Marxism were “succedaneous religions”—that is, ones which had merely preserved the universalist and altruistic ethics of Christianity while dumping their metaphysical sanction in doctrine, scripture, and patristic tradition. These succedaneous religions were simply Christianity Lite, a kind of feelgood benevolence based on an overly optimistic view of human nature.

Mainline Protestant sects went Lite years ago. They became essentially a spiritual cheering section for the DNC. Now it would appear that the Roman Catholic Church is hell-bent on transforming herself into one more variety of this Christianity Lite. And she seems to be doing so with the help and support of the malignant George Soros.

It is hard to think of George Soros without retching. A multi-billionaire driven by an ideological fanaticism to change the world utterly, he is a perfect specimen of the kind of thinking that lay behind Esperanto, the artificial language (with a concomitant universalist utopian philosophy) that enthralled his father, the Hungarian Tivadar Soros (Theodore Schwartz). Esperanto, which was invented in the 1880s by the Russian Jew Ludwig Zamenhof, was meant to be more than just a means of easy communication. Zamenhof’s dream was that his new language would grease the skids for universal peace and brotherhood in a socialistic world unity. Esperanto always had a political dimension apart from its linguistic identity. The Soros family has kept that dream alive, and seeks to render it a reality via their money and influence. And it would have been rather difficult, sixty years ago, to imagine such a man as George Soros cementing a friendship with the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries the Church has stood as a kind of bastion and bulwark against all forms of Left-liberalism, and all varieties of socialistic dreaming. How could the hierarchically solid traditionalism of the Vatican and the Holy Office be conjoined with the pipedreams of Esperanto one-worldism?

But i tempi cambiano, said Michael Corleone. Times change. Today the visions of George Soros are looked upon with a kind of sympathy in the higher ranks of official Catholicism, and particularly by the current occupant of the See of St. Peter. The unlimited wealth of Soros, combined with the still considerable clout that Catholicism has among millions of simple people, now seems poised to achieve what the Left has never managed to accomplish—a truly global revolution, one that will encompass all nations and all persons. Such a world revolution will not simply be the fruit of well-placed financing and political propaganda, but also of a new evangelism—an evangelism not rooted in any dogmas, but in a tsunami of mindless emotion. A species of Smiley-Face crackpot Franciscanism will rule the world, surfing a massive wave of love, brotherhood, multicultural acceptance, ecumenism, and the Pope’s clownish smile. Left-wing Esperanto speakers have met and embraced Catholicism.

The real interest that the globalist Left has in Catholicism is not religious at all, but rooted in an envious admiration of the Church’s disciplinary and administrative structure. The Left dreams of an ideological hegemony over the world—one that is backed up not merely by force and money but also by some kind of unassailable metaphysical sanction. In the Left’s view, if Catholicism could be shorn of its atavistic attachment to certain dogmas and practices, it would be a perfect engine of social control over mass populations. This is the real driving force behind the Soros attempt to forge links with the Vatican and with the freakier elements in the post-Vatican II Church. The Left’s long-range strategy foresees a new and utterly transformed Catholicism, one directed not towards heavenly rewards but towards the secular goals of progressivism, humanism, environmentalism, international consensus, and the utter extirpation of ethnic and cultural identities. In short, the Left wants the Church to become a world-encircling NGO, totally given over propagandizing its flocks into an acceptance of a progressivist sociopolitical agenda. The carefully orchestrated election (by a cabal of radical cardinals) of the somewhat simpleminded Leftist Jorge Bergoglio as “Pope Francis” was a major step in this direction.

This is the real motivation behind the current push, by the Church’s Left wing, for a “new evangelism” and for “non-doctrinal pastoralism.” It’s not to spread Catholicism in any traditional sense. Soros and Bergoglio want Catholicism to forget its actual identity, but not its historic commitment to the endless missionary work of conversion, and to the cradle-to-grave inculcation of obedience and lockstep belief. As long as the obedience and the belief are in the service of Left-liberal causes and goals, the Left is perfectly happy with the hegemonic conformism of a hierarchical Church. Students of Russian literature will recall that even in the nineteenth century this was a major objection of Fyodor Dostoevsky to Catholicism—namely, its tendency towards the dictatorial imposition of a culturally indifferent universalism.

Ironically, the Soros-Bergoglio scheme parallels a similar but Right-wing attempt in the early twentieth century to harness the structure of institutional Catholicism for political ends. The French writer Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was personally agnostic on religious questions, but he nevertheless championed Catholicism and Catholic practice as guarantors of the integrity of French culture, and the ascendancy of Rightist principles in government. His organization L’Action Française had thousands of Catholic members, and wielded no small influence in French politics. However, strong Left-liberal elements in the Church’s hierarchy opposed Maurras, and they eventually engineered a papal condemnation of L’Action Française in 1926. Although this condemnation was revoked by Pius XII in 1939, the damage was done. L’Action Française never regained its former influence among French Catholics.

One should not expect the same sort of pushback against the Leftist Soros-Bergoglio agenda today. Apart from a vociferous conservative Catholic blogosphere, there is little real effective opposition to long-range plans to secularize and bolshevize institutional Catholicism. Those in the hierarchy who aren’t enthusiastic partisans of the scheme are largely timeserving careerists who will go along to get along. As for the bulk of the Catholic laity, they have not been properly catechized for nearly six decades, and have little stake (and even less interest) in what’s going on. Ask them if women should be ordained priests, or if gays should be married in a Catholic ceremony, and their typical answer will be “Yeah, sure—why not?” The average Catholic layman is now a soft-Left libertarian who is indifferent to both abortion and contraception.

Whether the Soros-Bergoglio plan will ultimately succeed depends on several factors. Apart from a supernatural intervention from heaven (an event which many conservative Catholics now seriously think is both inevitable and imminent), the only earthly hope of frustrating the scheme lies with that small minority of the Catholic laity who are alive to the cultural and racial catastrophe that now looms over the Western world. Soros and Bergoglio have both praised the influx of refugees into Europe, the Pope in particular expressing the outrageous idea that European Catholics should be willing to sacrifice their national identities as a way to welcome and assimilate these invading hordes. The Pope’s ploy backfired, as the rise of a new populist Right in Europe seems to suggest. It’s one thing to be a good Catholic—it’s quite another to be a Frenchman or a German who watches as his homeland and culture are degraded and despoiled by uninvited vermin.

A great many uneducated Catholics believe that anything a Pope says is divinely inspired and must be accepted and obeyed implicitly. This notion is not true—a Pope’s claim to infallibility is severely circumscribed, and his personal opinions on various sociopolitical questions carry no magisterial weight. Nevertheless, the strong undertow of respect felt by Catholics for the Roman pontiff gives Bergoglio a crucial edge in his fight to shift the Church leftwards. And Bergoglio’s conservative opposition is severely hampered by disagreements and infighting whenever this Pope opens his mouth. Is the man really the Pope? Is he an anti-Pope? Are his pronouncements heretical? Is Benedict XVI still the Pope? Are the various Latin Mass societies valid substitutes for worship? These questions roil the Catholic Right in a welter of self-defeating intramural conflict. All the many warring groups cannot present a united front of opposition to the Soros-Bergoglio scheme, because they are fatally caught up in abstract issues of doctrine, authority, Canon Law, and ceremonial practice.

A few attempts have been made to rein in Bergoglio, but the absolutist nature of Catholicism as an institution has rendered the attempts futile. The most important was the presentation of dubia (doubts, or questions) by four prominent cardinals who opposed the heretical overtones of Bergoglio’s infamous apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. These dubia have remained unanswered (and not even acknowledged or addressed) by the Pope or anyone else in the Vatican, despite the passage of over a year. Another is the more recent Correctio Filialis (“filial correction”) sent to Bergoglio by nearly three hundred Catholic theologians, scholars, and writers, criticizing in a more pointed and detailed manner the Pope’s departures from orthodox Catholic doctrine. It’s a good bet that this “correction” will also go without an answer, since this Pope seems utterly oblivious to specific questions of doctrine, or theology in general. In the absence of unity on the Catholic Right, there is no chance for removing Bergoglio canonically from his position.

The problem in deposing a sitting Pope is the sheer lassitude, inertia, and visceral resistance of the institutional Church, as represented by the great majority of the hierarchy, the utterly acquiescent Catholic academic centers, the pro-Pope Francis echo chamber in the mainstream Catholic media, and a host of brainwashed laity at work in the various parishes and diocesan offices worldwide. No matter what is possible canonically or in terms of legal protocols, the dead weight of this inertia will prevent it from happening. And this inertia is a good example of how liberalism tends to triumph by means of a kind of thoughtless momentum based partially on feeling and partially on money. All of Bergoglio’s supporters have an emotional (and frequently financial) stake in the post-Vatican II Church. This Pope is their first full-fledged and undisguised operative. They will defend him to the hilt. And since they have not been catechized in any significant sense, they don’t really care what heterodox or heretical statements are made by priests, bishops, the Vatican, or the Pope himself. The post-Vatican II Church has worked very hard to cultivate this crucial cadre, and the labor has paid off. These people are everywhere in the Catholic establishment, like termites in support beams. They are Bergoglio’s political base in the parishes, where the lay members serve as ushers, lectors, communion distributors, choir members, religious instruction teachers, sodality leaders, and minor functionaries in the diocese. Along with those insufferable and perky up-to-date nuns in short skirts and pussy hats, they constitute a grass-roots, boots-on-the-ground reserve force of the Soros-Bergoglio axis. Are they a minority? Perhaps. But like the Leninists they are a very active, energetic, and committed minority. Canon Law and protocols notwithstanding, they will fight to the bitter end for their Pope, like Japanese soldiers chained to their machine guns.

Those readers who are anti-Christian will merely shake their heads in unsurprised disgust. After all, if you hate all universalist religions and philosophies on principle, there won’t be anything shocking to you in the fact that a universalist faith finally reverts to type, and ceases to be a weapon of defense for a particular culture. Revilo P. Oliver saw this way ahead of time, intuiting that whatever veneer of pro-Western loyalty might have accrued to Christianity over the centuries, it would in the late twentieth century slip away, revealing a different (and suicidal) loyalty to the Other.

We are in fact witnessing a major seismic shift in the Western world. The austere Latin of St. Jerome gives way to the zany Esperanto of Ludwig Zamenhof. The institutional Catholic Church is likely to become, over the next decade or so, simply one more megaphone for globalist corporatism, multiculturalist propaganda, and NGO politicized philanthropy. Whatever glorious history the Church may have had as a defender of our European culture and traditions is now a closed book. Unless, of course, you are still waiting for divine intervention.