By Cliff Kincaid

Tuesday night’s NBC News story, “America’s Hopes for a New Pope,” was typical of how the liberal media tried to force the Roman Catholic Church further to the left. The tone of the coverage was that the Catholic Church, in picking a new pope, had to make peace with “diversity”—liberals, feminists, and homosexuals demanding state recognition of “gay marriage” in the United States.

With the selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, the liberals have lost out. He opposes abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality. A Catholic insider tells me, “Looks like we might have ourselves a relatively conservative new pope. He appears to be opposed to liberation theology and doesn’t approach ‘social justice’ from the political end.” The latter means that while he is an advocate of helping the poor, he doesn’t believe this should be done through state socialist schemes.

Liberal and “progressive” websites are already attacking the first Latin American pope as someone who may have a “dark past” and be linked to the Argentine military during the “dirty war” against the communists. The accusations, which have now been picked up by the Associated Press, show the bitterness of the left, as their hopes were dashed of a “Red Pope.”

Mark Engler, a leftist writer, had promoted another candidate, Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, as having “significant progressive bona fides” and noted that he was “a personal friend of former Brazilian president and Worker’s Party leader Lula da Silva.” The Worker’s Party is a Marxist political organization in Brazil, and Lula was a personal friend of Fidel Castro as well. Critics say that Hummes “supported communist strikes” and allowed Lula “to make political speeches during his Masses.” In 1990, after the demise of the old Soviet Union, Lula facilitated the holding of a conference in São Paolo, Brazil, bringing together the communist and leftist parties and guerilla movements of the continent, which came to be known as the São Paulo Forum. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, the current Brazilian President, is a former communist guerrilla leader.

“Hummes would open the door for the revival of social justice ministry in the Catholic Church,” Engler had written. Of course, “social justice” is already a theme of many of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, who have funded liberal projects with parishioners’ money through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) for decades, enraging conservative Catholics in the process. It was a CCHD project that helped train Barack Obama as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago. These schemes are ways to attain political power, and they have paid off well for Obama and his associates but not for the poor people they were supposedly intended to help.

In a 2005 story, “Champion of Workers and the Poor,” The Washington Post noted that Hummes had emerged as “a critic of the U.S.-backed free-market policies that were adopted in much of Latin America.” In other words, he helped pave the way for leaders such as Marxist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who clutched a crucifix …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism