“Those who best realize the social doctrine of the church at this time are the Chinese,” Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo told the Italian newspaper La Stampa last Friday. “They seek the common good, subordinating all things to the general good.”

John Zmirak, senior editor of The Stream, joined Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss Sorondo’s praise of China. Sorondo heads the Vatican’s academies of science and social science.

“One of the pope’s right-hand men, Archbishop Sorondo from South America, he is the head of the Vatican’s office on science and social sciences. He actually said a couple of days ago that China does a better job living out Catholic social teachings than the United States,” said Zmirak.

Sorondo pushed left-wing narratives of “climate change” and “capitalism” in his praise of the Chinese state’s policies.

“[Sorondo] is saying that they’re defending the climate; they’re avoiding reckless capitalism,” said Zmirak. “It’s staggering. This is a country that still forces women to get abortions after their second child. This is the head of the Vatican’s congregation for science and social sciences. He is saying that because the Chinese government is more responsible, supposedly, on climate change and because it doesn’t allow capitalism, it’s better than the United States.”

Pope Francis abandoned the underground Catholic church in China in favor of legitimizing an ostensibly Catholic church alternative controlled by China’s communist government, said Zmirak.

“The Vatican just cut a deal with the collaborationist Chinese communist party-controlled Catholic church,” said Zmirak. “There’s a real church, which has been underground and illegal since Mao Zedong, and then there’s been kind of like a Vichy French collaborationist wing, where they work for the government. The government appoints the bishops. The government controls everything. The Catholic church always condemned that as a communist front group. The Vatican just made a deal with the communist front group that they are going to be regarded as the real church, and the underground church has to resign and just go join the communist church.”

Mansour described Pope Francis’s “about-face” towards communism as a 180-degree reversal of Pope John Paul II’s approach.

“Right now, the Chinese communist government is blowing up the churches of evangelical Protestants, and now, what are we doing?” asked Zmirak. “We’re siding with the government that’s blowing up these people’s churches and putting them in prison. I guarantee you, if this continues, in thirty or forty years, when Christianity is continuing to spread through China, Pope Francis is guaranteeing that it will be Protestant rather than Catholic. So, my Protestant friends, you should thank Pope Francis for guaranteeing that, eventually, China will be largest Protestant country on earth, not Catholic.”

A former cardinal from China, Joseph Zen, has criticized the Vatican for “selling out” Catholicism via its overtures to Beijing.

“There’s a cardinal, Cardinal Zen, I believe, who spent a lot of time in a communist prison, and he feels completely betrayed by the fact that they’re making a deal with his persecutors,” said Zmirak. “Vatican officials are saying, ‘Oh, [Joseph Zen is] out of touch. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ They’re dismissing the guy who lives in the country and has been in its prisons while they sit in their little Italian hideaways eating gnocchi, drinking wine, and imagining that they’re great realpolitik practitioners.”

Shantytown-caliber poverty is non-existent in China, said Sorondo, following a state-supervised visit to the authoritarian country.

“I found an extraordinary China,” said Sorondo. “You do not have shantytowns. You do not have drugs. Young people do not have drugs. There is a positive national consciousness. They want to show that they have changed. They already accept private property.”

In an article analyzing the possible motives for Sorondo’s affinity for Communism, Zmirak writes that Sorondo’s fondness for totalitarianism is the reaction of “an angry, self-conscious mediocrity lashing out at his moral and natural betters. No wonder such men find kindred spirits in the gray, vicious ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.”

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.