Understanding the adage that personnel is policy, Pope Francis has been planting Marxists throughout the Church, including at the top of the troubled religious order to which he belongs. In 2016, the Jesuits, with the blessing of Pope Francis, installed as its general superior a Venezuelan, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, whose communist convictions have long been known.

Sosa has written about the “Marxist mediation of the Christian Faith,” arguing that the Church should “understand the existence of Christians who simultaneously call themselves Marxists and commit themselves to the transformation of the capitalist society into a socialist society.” In 1989, he signed a letter praising Fidel Castro.

Turn down any corridor in Francis’s Vatican, and you are likely to run into a de facto communist: Francis has a communist running his order, a communist running his Council of Cardinals (the Honduran cardinal, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga), a communist running the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (Margaret Archer, a British sociologist who has said that she represents the “Marxian left”), and communists such as the renegade Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the Canadian socialist Naomi Klein drafting his encyclicals.

It is no coincidence that the only U.S. presidential candidate who made a visit to the Vatican during the campaign was a socialist who had honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders turned up at the Vatican in April 2016, having received an invitation from Pope Francis’s close Argentine friend, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.

“We invited the candidate who cites the pope most in the campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders,” explained Sorondo, who added that Sanders’s agenda is “very analogous to that of the pope.”

In this smug leftist atmosphere in Rome, Sosa’s elevation to the head of the Jesuits was inevitable. In the past, the Jesuits had been called the pope’s marines. Under Sosa, they are more like the pope’s Marxists, peddling his climate-change propaganda as a pretext for global socialism.

But Sosa’s ambitions, like Pope Francis’s, go well beyond meddling in economies. He is also pushing a moral revolution in the Church, evident in his astonishing claim that, since none of the Apostles tape-recorded Jesus Christ, his words on adultery can be elastically re-interpreted.

“You need to start by reflecting on what exactly Jesus said,” Sosa told an Italian interviewer in February. “At that time, no one had a tape recorder to capture the words. What we know is that the words of Jesus have to be contextualized, they’re expressed in a certain language, in a precise environment, and they’re addressed to someone specific.”

In other words, Sosa is confident that he understands Jesus’s meaning better than the Gospel writers. Like Francis, Sosa can’t resist the mumbo-jumbo of Modernist biblical scholarship, which always manages to dovetail conveniently with liberal views.

The Council of Trent explicitly condemned the claim that the Gospel writers were just making stuff up when recounting the words of Jesus Christ. But Sosa has no problem trafficking in that heresy.

“Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand exactly what Jesus meant to say,” he said.

The presumption here is extraordinary but typical of a Francis acolyte. The new orthodoxy is heterodoxy, and Sosa is wallowing in it. He is given to little sermonettes on relativism, such as this whopper:

The Church has developed over the centuries, it is not a piece of reinforced concrete. It was born, it has learned, it has changed. This is why the ecumenical councils are held, to try to bring developments of doctrine into focus. Doctrine is a word that I don’t like very much, it brings with it the image of the hardness of stone. Instead the human reality is much more nuanced, it is never black or white, it is in continual development.

Were St. Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the order he founded wouldn’t ordain him, and he would have wondered how a de facto Protestant ended up on the chair of St. Peter. Nor would St. Ignatius have believed the sheer sophistry that now passes for theological “sophistication” in his order.

Fr. Antonio Spadaro, another Jesuit close to Pope Francis, tweeted out earlier this year this profundity: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people.”

Gobsmacked by the relentless leftism of Francis and his aides, Al Gore asked in 2015, “Is the pope Catholic?” The question is no longer a joke.

George Neumayr is the author of The Political Pope.