Newly released documents from Wikileaks have exposed the efforts of hard-left billionaire George Soros to make Pope Francis quiet down on social issues like abortion and man-woman marriage and make income equality and global warming the centerpiece of his visit last year to the U.S. The documents show how these wealthy groups worked closely with the Pope’s closest advisers including two U.S. Bishops and one Latin American Cardinal.

The plan was first advanced at a board meeting of Soros’s Open Society U.S. Programs Board in May, 2015, where the radical group boasts of direct influence with Pope Francis. At that meeting, the board announced a $650,000 grant to a wealthy radical group called PICO “in order to seize this moment..to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using (emphasis added) the influence of Cardinal Rodriquez, the Pope’s senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly (emphasis added) from low-income Catholics in America.”

The grant also supported a public media campaign run by a largely protestant group called Faith in Public Life (FPL), run by Presbyterian minister Jennifer Butler who has been active in promoting abortion at the UN.

The report states, “The grant will also support FPL’s media, framing, and public opinion activities, including conducting a poll to demonstrate that Catholics are responsive to the Pope’s focus on income equality, and earning media coverage that drives the message that being ‘pro-family’ requires addressing growing inequality.”

The Soros foundation hoped the grant would also have a strong effect on the 2016 presidential election.

An after-action memo from February 2016 shows how successful the Soros grant was.

For both organizations, support via the Opportunities Fund provided essential resources to undertake the following activities: Form partnerships with the AFL, SEIU, and 11 faith groups during the September events in order to mobilize 10,000 people to public action and train 3,500 others as messengers of Pope Francis’ economic and racial justice agenda. Coordination of local PICO chapters to push for a range of state and local policy changes related to economic and racial justice. Buy-in of individual bishops to more publicly voice support of economic and racial justice messages in order to begin to create a critical mass of bishops who are aligned with the Pope. Development of an advanced media campaign featuring FPA’s Catholic Director as a leading commentator in high-profile outlets, such as USA Today, Newsweek, CNN, NBC, NPR, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

The Soros group was especially pleased that their money encouraged a “broad range of religious leaders hitting pointedly back at presidential candidates for their use of fearmongering.”

Catholics outlets like LifeSite News are especially alarmed that the Soros foundation had such easy access to key Papal advisor Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, President of Caritas Internationalis, and Head of the Pope’s Council of Cardinals who has been a driving force for the new leftward political slant of the Vatican.

It is likely that Soros and his team had an impact on the Pope’s global warming campaign. Radical environmentalists have gained significant access to the Vatican including Jeffrey Sacks of Columbia University who has been a key player at the UN in getting abortion included in the Sustainable Development Goals, a massive agreement among nations that will result in billions of dollars spent on social justice issues. Sachs was invited to the UN by the Pope’s science adviser Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo who has accused climate change skeptics of being on the payroll of oil companies.

The Soros board was especially pleased that their money was effective in getting the Vatican to step back from the Pope’s seeming embrace of Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis who met privately with the Pope at the Papal Nunciature in Washington and who encouraged Davis’s work. Later, on the Papal airplane, Pope Francis doubled down and said that even public employees had a right to resist things like gay marriage if it violated their conscience. The Soros foundation and its grantees now take credit for the almost immediate action of papal spokesmen to distance themselves from the Davis meeting.

Papal spokesman Federico Lombardi confirmed that Davis was in the Papal Nunciature that day but said there were many others there that day. The English language spokesman for the Vatican, Father Thomas Rosica went further and denied outright that Davis met privately with the Pope and that she was in a large group that greeted the Pope when he left the Nunciature to travel to New York. Davis has provided detailed testimony about her private meeting with the Pope including the room where they met and that she was served refreshments. To date the Vatican has not clarified anything further about the meeting.

PICO is an $11-million-a-year community organizing group modeled along Alinky lines that is active in a number of left-wing causes.