November 21, 2024 - 10:00am
In a book published this week, Pope Francis declares that “according to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide”. He’s right. Some experts do use that word to describe Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, which has killed more than 43,000 people. But other experts profoundly disagree.
The Pope’s solution? “We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.” This raises some questions. Who are “we”? He can’t mean the Vatican, which has no expertise in this matter. Presumably he’s referring to the International Court of Justice at the Hague, which is considering an accusation of genocide brought by South Africa. That case is costing the ANC-led government around $10m, which is a lot of money considering that it’s bankrupt. Perhaps someone should “investigate carefully” reports that the case is being funded by the pathologically antisemitic foreign ministry of Iran.
And we should also ask whether the 87-year-old leader of the Catholic Church has already pre-empted any ruling by the ICJ (which would in any case be worthless and unenforceable). The Palestinians claim that when Francis met them last year he described Israel’s actions as a genocide.
He hasn’t, however, used the word to describe a textbook exercise in ethnic cleansing: China’s herding of Muslim Uyghurs into concentration camps, where women are forced to undergo sterilisation and abortions. In fact, Francis has kept completely silent, apart from a single glancing reference to the Uyghurs as a “persecuted” people back in 2020. That’s because in 2018 the Vatican signed a deal with Beijing that gave the Communist Party control over the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops in return for undisclosed benefits. The details remain secret.
The Pope can’t take all the blame for the squalid pact with China. Their key player was his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who last week insisted that “there is no contradiction between being authentically Chinese and good citizens and being Christians”. Really? Authentic Chinese Christians are forbidden to educate their children in the faith and forced to attend services that deify President Xi and the Party. No wonder Cardinal Joseph Zen, the heroic former bishop of Hong Kong, describes Parolin as a “shameless liar” with “sickening” opinions.
Parolin may be a creature of this pontificate, but the recent history of the Catholic Church is full of slippery opportunists who have sucked up to dictators. It’s possible to defend Pius XII’s silence in the face of Nazi atrocities; the late Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert estimated that the wartime pope, who supported plans to assassinate Hitler, saved “hundreds of thousands of lives”.
That said, under Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Vatican diplomacy was disgraced by its support for Right-wing dictators and money-laundering to protect its assets. And during the Cold War Vatican departments were routinely infiltrated by Communist spies who pushed the Church towards a naive accommodation with the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Even so, there is no precedent for the bizarre moral compromises of Vatican foreign policy under an unreformed Peronist who, as I’ve reported, has repeatedly shielded his sex abuser allies from justice. Previous popes sometimes betrayed local Catholics in order to bolster their central authority; arguably the cynical Beijing concordat falls into this historic category, though none of Francis’s recent predecessors would have approved such an egregiously stupid deal.
What distinguishes this Pope are his embarrassing genuflections to an international Left that treated him like a superstar when he was first elected but now barely acknowledges his existence. Partly that is because he has not delivered the changes to doctrines on women’s ordination or homosexuality that they expected; mostly it’s because today’s champions of globalist orthodoxy, compared to those of 2013, were never educated to give a stuff what the Catholic Church thinks about anything.
Yet Francis keeps clutching at straws, identifying foreign policy and other political positions agreeable to the liberal Left and then attempting to commit the Catholic Church to them. And he does so clumsily, not bothering to hide personal prejudices against (for example) the state of Israel or conservative border policies that are not shared by most practising Catholics. These drive him into alliances with enemies of traditional Catholic teaching who don’t think his support is worth much — which, to be fair, it isn’t.
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SubscribeHow about we condemn both China and Israel? Seeing as both states pursue reprehensible policies?
Exactly right.
The “moral equivalence” argument rises again. Because groups of people are being hurt, the powerful agents are the same.
China works with violent coercion to erase Tibetan and Uyghur cultures and people. Israel works to eradicate Hamas whose policies and actions are explicitly death to all Jews, and which openly celebrates its tactic of hiding among civilians.
I think the claim of equivalence is so lacking in reason as to be silly.
So the head of the Catholic Church despises Jews! In other news, scientists have discovered traces of ursine faeces in woods.
When you see a Pope, that when known as the Jesuit priest Jorge Bergoglio, collaborated with the military Junta of Argentina, is now being advised on geopolitics by Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who led developing countries to economic catastrophe, you realize that the moral stature of Christ’s Vicar isn’t what it used to be (if it ever was).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/14/pope-francis-argentina-military-junta
https://unherd.com/2024/07/jeffrey-sachs-pope-whisperer/
If what the Pope says is so irrelevant, why bother to write an article about it ?
The writer doesn’t claim outright irrelevance, but increasing irrelevance – there’s a considerable difference between the two (which a moment’s thought would identify) and upon which the article is based.
Why did you bother to read it, then, and waste time posting your comment/?
Meanwhile the mainstream media, catholic denominations, politicians and human-rights brigade stay silent about the appalling persecution and murder of Christians across the globe.
You’re right and it’s a disgrace. Francis also stays pretty silent about it.
Yes, the Pope should begin by protecting his own flock.
Doesn’t Damian just *love* Francis…
Maybe I should be more sycophantic towards the man who (among other outrages) tried to keep child abuser Grassi out of jail and lied about it; airlifted the financially corrupt predator Zanchetta into a job overseeing the Vatican treasury; rehabilitated the industrial-scale abuser McCarrick and the paedophile protector Danneels; and has yet to laicise his friend Rupnik, the suspected serial rapist of nuns.
The main takeaway from this article is the increasing irrelevance of the Vatican, just as we’re seeing with the CoE, and both entirely due to their own duplicity and refusal to apply the most basic aspects of Christian teaching to their decision-making process.
The Pope is, however, still a Catholic, since it was ever thus.
Don’t agree. The C of E is a tiny pimple compared to the tumour which is the Vatican. In fact, what the two cases show, as well as the antics of the Labour Government is simply…. Power corrupts.
Francis – worst Pope since Pius XI, or worst since de Medicis?
Impressed that you got to several hundred words when simple “yes” would have done the trick, Damian!
You mean that you could have intuited my points about the Beijing pact, Uyghur genocide and the sex-abuse cover-ups just by reading the word ‘Yes’? Or would you rather I hadn’t been tasteless enough to raise them?
The pope isn’t supposed to be up on current affairs and trendy opinions. He’s supposed to teach timeless truths and feed the hungry.
Current pope has been a star effer of the left since day one. Always wondered if Obama didn’t get to count the votes.
“That’s because in 2018 the Vatican signed a deal with Beijing that gave the Communist Party control over the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops in return for undisclosed benefits. The details remain secret.”
And here I thought the Catholic Church meddling in politics and signing secret pacts with powerful rulers in exchange for undisclosed benefits was a relic of the feudal age. Lo and behold, here we have the most ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ Pope to have ever occupied the Vatican handing his allegedly God given authority over to a tyrant who encourages his subjects to worship himself. Makes me wonder if the Pope is even a believer. He seems to follow the lead of globalist politicians more than he does the God whose authority he supposedly wields. One would think the Pope of all people would appreciate the age old wisdom that if you make a deal with the devil, you’re bound to get burned.
The founder of Christianity made it abundantly clear that his followers should avoid politics. “My kingdom is not of this world” and “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render to God the things that are God’s” are the essence of Christ’s radical emphasis on the preeminence of personal righteousness and individual spirituality over worldly power.
All of that was lost when Constantine welded the Church to the Roman state. Over the eons since, reformers here and there have struggled to rehabilitate the fundamental tenets of His teachings, while the Catholic Church remained an ossified, soulless, authoritarian, often corrupt power structure that confused liturgy, tradition, and group identity with spirituality.
Not only does the Pope have nothing useful to add to geo-political discussion; but in so doing he ignores the overwhelmingly obvious reality that, in these times, when legions of people stumble sadly through empty and aimless lives, his Church has failed miserably to illuminate their path or offer them hope or teach them to be moral individuals as opposed to mimetic adherents of group-think. The Pope is but a magnificent example of virtue signaling. His job should be to devote himself to making the Church a conduit to bring the hope of Christ to individuals. That is the only justification for the Church to exist.
Many of us rightly point out how secularism foolishly over-reached to its current progressive madness and corroded the foundations of morality. But some of the responsibility for the crises of our culture resides in churches populated by priests, bishops, cardinals, pastors, vicars, and ministers who, during the cultural revolution of “drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll” were themselves too morally weak to do anything except triangulate how they could join in the fun–even if it meant grooming children as their victims. If the Pope wants to participate in the moral events of our age he should look to clean up his own house first.
Well said, sir.
Of those “43,000”, how many were Hamas? One? None? Presumably, Israel has not managed to kill even one Hamas terrorist over the course of 14 months of war? How clever of them!
For one with standards to regard the zionist state as anything but a monstrosity, requires one to ignore 30 odd massacres, an ethnic cleansing and countless acts of terrorism perpetrated by the zionists. No. the Pope is not applying double standards in this instance.
Pope Francis was a uniquely almost freakishly bad choice for Pope. Where was the Holy Spirit during the last Papal election? Your last sentence says it all.