WASHINGTON. Liberation theology has found its way back into the news again. Pope Francis, a darling of the secular left, has been accused, along with other Roman Catholic Church officials, of covering up sexual abuses committed by now-former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Formerly the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C., McCarrick was publicly accused of these abuses by the Vatican’s former diplomatic emissary to the US, Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò. Viganò has asked that the pope resign, effectively for covering up McCarrick’s offenses.

The Viganò letter

In a letter published in the National Catholic Register, Viganò says that for political reasons, Pope Francis lifted sanctions imposed on McCarrick by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Perhaps that was because, like Pope Francis, McCarrick is a man of the extreme political left.

As Viganò recounts in his letter, when the subject of McCarrick came up in conversation, the pope told him…





“… the Bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing, they must be shepherds.”

The clear implication in the Pope’s statement was that accusations of McCarrick’s sexual abuse of male seminarians and underaged boys were, to borrow a well-worn phrase, part of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Read also: Pennsylvania Grand Jury and the Catholic Church epidemic of child abuse: What would Jesus say?

Protecting predators in the name of political correctness

Writing for The American Conservative, Rod Dreher observes that a “liberal Catholic colleague” …

“… told me that on the Catholic left, nobody will deal with the homosexual aspect of the [sexual abuse] scandal, in particular, the gay networks within the Catholic Church. It was a third rail. They had an ideological commitment that this kind of thing was nothing more than a trumped-up fantasy of homophobic right-wingers. The Catholic left was as committed to that view as the Catholic right was to its own shibboleths.”

Pope Francis and Liberation Theology lunacy

In a speech before a throng of the faithful in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the pope also denounced the globalization of capitalism. He condemned it as the “new colonialism,” and called the pursuit of profit “the dung of the devil.”

Then he became more pointed in his remarks. Drawing upon the leftist rhetoric popularized by the Marxist-based Liberation Theology and radical clerics in the 1970s, the Pope say:

“the many forms of exclusion and injustice which you experience in the workplace, in neighborhoods and throughout the land… Can we recognize that invisible thread which links them? I wonder whether we can see that those destructive realities are part of a system which has become global. Do we realize that that system has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature?”

The faces of human sacrifice then and now—

That reflexive hat tip to the silly nostrums of climate-change environmentalism ironically brings the pope’s worldview closer to that of the region’s bygone, nature-worshiping pagans. Yet there is some reasoning – faulty reasoning – behind it.

Back in 2015, Pope Francis was lauded by the Western media for denouncing the Church’s role in the European conquest of Latin America.





That conquest, among other things, brought an abrupt end to the pagan practice of human sacrifice. The priests and elders of the area’s indigenous inhabitants tore beating hearts from the chests of their sacrificial victims. This was a key element in rituals intended to bring good harvests.

By condemning that European conquest, the pope places himself firmly in the post-colonialist camp. Thus endearing him to the current generation of Marxists and post-colonialists. By combining these constructs with liberation theology, he effectively embraced the entire spectrum of secular leftist beliefs.

Liberation theology aims for the fundamental transformation of Catholicism

It’s also clear Pope Francis is nothing if not practiced in the Marxist art of purely secular dialectical materialism. Seasoned with a strong dash of secular virtue signaling. Like America’s “democratic socialists,” his secular left ideology blinds him to the deeper evils occurring before his very eyes. His long-held beliefs predictably found their roots in the Marxist-based revisionist doctrine known as liberation theology.

Liberation theology was, and still is, a radical, anti-US, anti-capitalist doctrine. It arose in Latin America in conjunction with the fashionable anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In essence, liberation theology re-cast Christ as the first Marxist revolutionary. A revolutionary whose “movement” was ultimately responsible for overthrowing the oppressive rulers of his time.

Liberation theology, in which hard-left, secular ideology repealed and replaced long-established Catholic dogma, quickly spread across Latin America. It was promoted and practiced by a great many young, radicalized Catholic priests. It is no small wonder that earlier popes strongly condemned liberation theology.

Dung of the Devil

Pope Francis embraced liberation theology decades ago. He continues to endorse its offshoots but generally conceals this through the artful use of language. The pope’s revisionism now enables him to support the quasi-religion of “climate change.”

It also offers a key to understanding his reluctance to condemn what most practicing Catholics would still regard as deviant sexual behavior. Perhaps this pope’s effective moral relativism is why he not only gave McCarrick a pass on this issue but elevated him to one of the Vatican’s highest positions.

Nonetheless, whatever the pope’s motivation, the Viganò letter has called him on it.

Today, whether it’s the privations and violence committed against the tortured souls of democratic-socialist Venezuela. Or the sexual abominations visited upon children by the priests and princes of his Church. It appears no human sacrifice is too great a sin if committed in pursuit of a counterfeit, left-wing quasi-religious ideology.

Boiled down to their essence, these detestable practices are best described as “the dung of the devil.” Why did Pope Francis effectively give them a pass?

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Top Images: Pope Francis speaks with reporters regarding Church sex scandals,

Fox News screen capture. Inset, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Catholic News Service screen capture.