Tag: Pope Francis

How Steve Bannon Tried to Destroy Pope Francis

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

How Steve Bannon Tried to Destroy Pope Francis

Another role, geopolitical in measure, entails McCarrick’s diplomatic entreaties to China, having at one point worked with President Jiang Zemin (1993-2003) to normalize relations with Rome. (The Cardinal later played a role alongside Pope Francis in the diplomatic backchannel that led to President Obama’s opening to Cuba, much to the chagrin of the conservatives.) The conservative wing of the hierarchy seeks to revive Cold Warrior strains of rhetoric about persecuted religious minorities, a gesture synoptic with the neocon saber rattling towards Beijing. For example, Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong has links with the CIA-backed National Endowment for Democracy and previously expressed public skepticism of Pope Francis’ diplomatic overtures to the mainland. In contrast, the liberals have a much more nuanced and pragmatic approach, perhaps in part due to realization that, unlike the days of the adamant Polish patriot upon Peter’s Throne, it is very unlikely that an indigenous Chinese Catholic popular movement will dislodge the Communist Party in the fashion of Lech Wałęsa and Solidarność three decades ago. (Where the secular cynicism of the neocon militarist impulse diverges from the theological wishful thinking of over-zealous believers and clerics waiting on the divine intervention of St. John Paul II is hard to determine.)

Let’s not allow Steve Bannon and ‘conservatives’ to legitimize extremism in Europe

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Let’s not allow Steve Bannon and ‘conservatives’ to legitimize extremism in Europe (opinion)

Steve Bannon, the former adviser to US President Donald Trump, recently won a legal battle with Italy’s culture ministry to set up a far-right Catholic political academy, a “school of gladiators” in his words, in an 800-year old monastery. Although the Italian ministry said it would appeal the decision, for now the academy is moving ahead. Benjamin Harnwell, founder of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which will run this nationalist academy, suggested in a recent interview that their intention is to shape the worldview of future populist leaders.

This Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, which will provide courses on politics, philosophy and economics (initially online and with US-based teachers), represents an additional far-right challenge to liberal and progressive values. The idea is to influence conservative thinking in the church and to counter Pope Francis’ pro-migrant — as well as what some have deemed a “liberal”—approach, as Bannon told NBC. But Bannon’s aim, it seems, is mainly to legitimize nationalism and right-leaning xenophobia, bolstering them with a radical, far-right philosophy.

Related:

Immigration and Islamophobia: Breitbart and the Trump Party

[2018] Steve Bannon goes to war with the Pope

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Just as few realize how left-wing Bannon can be, few realize how his Catholicism is at the core of his politics. He still attends mass regularly. Bannon is convinced that capitalism is not working any more because we in the West have jettisoned the Judeo-Christian values that stopped the bosses and the bankers treating people like commodities. To reverse this, these values – and not necessarily a belief in God Himself – are enough.
— Read on spectator.us/steve-bannon-war-pope/