The
left loved the Pope when Francis willingly submitted to the dictates of
political correctness and seemed to have adopted Chesterton’s famous
“crazy Christian virtues”.
Now
his admirers and faithful remember him as the Pope of the peripheries,
of mercy, of inclusion, of openness to others, of the solitary mass in
St. Peter’s during the pandemic, of the “people” (his best moment was
instead when he went to visit what remains of the Christians in Iraq).
They mourn this Pope for his funny anecdotes and that mischievous look,
as well as for his reputation for being “in step with the times.”
For
Bergoglio (before he became Pope Francis, he was known as Jorge Mario
Bergoglio), Europe was the past. He did not understand it and did not
want to understand it. He did not like Europe. And he said it every day
for twelve very long years.
The Pope who did not go to Notre Dame for the reopening.
The
Pope of “human brotherhood” with Imam Al Tayeeb, who called on Islam to
unite against Israel, who legitimized terrorism on the basis of the
Koran and called for the death of “apostates,” meaning those who convert
to Christianity.
The
Pope who said on October 7 “they killed someone” and brought relations
with the Jewish world to the lowest point in a strange convergence
between Christian anti-Judaism and Muslim anti-Jewish hatred. While
Benedict XVI took a stand in defense of Western culture and pledged to
strengthen “collaboration with the sons and daughters of the Jewish
people,” his successor expressed distrust of the West and support for
Israel’s declared enemies.
The Pope who “punch-punched” the (dead) cartoonists after the Charlie Hebdo
massacre (“it’s normal, it’s normal”). Why did Francis speak in a way
that would make him identifiable as the guardian of the self-defense of
the “dignity of religions” (only Islam is violent) rather than the
guardian of the sacredness of life and the right to freedom of
expression?
The
Pope who, faced with the most significant episode of intolerance
towards Christians that has occurred in Europe since the Second World
War, the slaughter of Father Hamel in Normandy, said that Islamists are
looking for “money” and that if one must speak of “Islamic violence” he
also wants to speak of “Catholic violence”.
The
Pope who said that “there is an Arab invasion of Europe, a social fact,
but how many invasions has Europe known in the course of its history
and has always known how to overcome itself and move forward to finally
find itself as if enlarged by the exchange between cultures”.
The
Pope who managed to explain that "the idea of conquest" is an
integral part of Islam as a religion, but also of Christianity.
The Pope who met Greta, fueling a ridiculous and anti-Western environmentalism. The Pope who said that "I don't feel like calling China anti-democratic". The Pope who called the migratory upheaval "alarmist propaganda". The Pope who, contrary to all the facts, said that "poverty fuels terrorism".
The Pope who compared migrants in Europe to Jesus and the Jews that Herod was hunting. The Pope who attacked politicians who defend the Christian roots of Europe. The Pope who said that Europe has a "multicultural" identity. The Pope who called the West "a civilization of barbed wire and slavery". The Pope who equated migrant centers to “concentration camps” and “lagers”. And this was the most serious lie.
It
does not matter that, once the comparison was cleared, even Erdogan
approached the Jews under Nazism - or that, if Hitler exterminated 6
million Jews, in 2020 in Europe there were 87 million migrants (alive
and well).
In
his writings and speeches, Francis always presented only one truth.
That of the gentile migrant denied entry to a rich and despicable
Western country. He rejected the idea that these influxes of migrants
could also be a source of problems for the receiving countries. He saw
only the advantages of “diversity.” But Islam has not yet produced civil
societies, states, institutions, and a culture of rights that are equal
to those of the West and as desirable to millions of people.
“John
Paul II remains the Pope of freedom, who played a decisive role in the
fall of the Soviet Union and the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War,”
writes Nicholas Baverez, a student of the philosopher Raymond Aron.
“Benedict XVI was the Pope of reconciliation between faith and reason,
which he sought to erect as a barrier against the return of religious
fanaticism. Francis is the Pope of resentment toward Europe and the
West.”
I
don’t know if Michel Houellebecq is right when he writes that “the
Church is engaged in suicide”. But a certain cultural dhimmitude is the
great blind side of the Bergoglian pontificate, whose aspiration for
peace met with the will to power of his interlocutors. Satisfying all
the requirements of the “South of the world”, decolonial and destroyer
of the “privileged whites”, did not Bergoglio follow in the footsteps of
the worst autocrats who manipulate this new mobilizing ideological
figure, the “West”?
Benedict
XVI discovered that the price of conviction is unpopularity. Francis
discovered that the price of compromise is disorder. History
remembers the expression “better the turban than the tiara” by Gennadio
Scolario, leader of the powerful Latinophobic and Turcophile Byzantine
party, who preferred to hand the Byzantines over to the Turks and to the
definitive yoke of dhimmitude rather than ally himself with Rome, rival
of Constantinople.
I
don’t know if history will remember Francis as “better the turban than
the West,” but if Wojtyla went to Warsaw during communism and Ratzinger
to Regensburg during the clash of civilizations, I struggle to find
light in Bergoglio where he, in the West, saw only shadows.