Pope Francis is pushing an “anti-American” and “anti-American worldview” via “hysterical leftist agitprop,” said The Stream’s Senior Editor John Zmirak on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Zmirak made his comments during an interview with Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Describing the pope as “angry” and “not exceptionally bright,” Zmirak cast the pope’s politics as supportive of furthering global convergence of governance:
[Pope Francis] talks a good game about humility in discourse and openness, but that’s a bit like when Venezuela speaks about people’s democracy. It seems to be an empty slogan for a very angry, not exceptionally bright or subtle South American politician who happens to have found himself in a position with a huge bully pulpit which allows him to express an anti-American, anti-free market, really anti-Western worldview that seems to make a fetish out of poverty and loves the idea of global government overruling the wishes of voters.
Pope Francis’ “open borders” advocacy for the admission of economic migrants and ostensible refugees, said Zmirak, is solely targeted at America and Europe. The pope’s use of biblical anecdotes towards this end, he added, amounts to the use of “hysterical leftist agitprop”:
He seems to want open borders for Western countries. He never talks about Mexico needing to let in everybody for El Salvador. No, it’s the United States that doesn’t have a right to have borders. Europe doesn’t have a right to have borders. The most shocking thing, back in 2013, he went to the city of Lampedusa in Sicily, a little town, a little place, it is so overwhelmed with economic migrants from North Africa that the migrants now outnumber the residents of the city. He gave a talk in 2013 where he compared Europeans who didn’t want to accept Muslim migrants, he compared them to Cain who killed his brother in the Garden of Eden and Herod who slaughtered the children of Bethlehem. This is not rational discourse. This is not theology. This is hysterical leftist agitprop of the kind that you read in Venezuelan government newspapers.
In an article entitled, “Were Jesus, Mary, and Joseph ‘Palestinian Refugees’?”, Zmirak similarly addresses contemporary left-wing politicization of biblical stories used to support the status quo of Islamic immigration to Europe and the broader West.
The pope’s tenure has been “tyrannical” and “autocratic” in terms of its internal management of church personnel, said Zmirak:
He has introduced profound confusion into the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexuality. The Catholic Church has had a particular stance on divorce and remarriage only for about, oh, two thousand years, and Pope Francis is trying to change that. Bishops who have criticized him or tried to stop him, he has sidelined them, forced them to retire, [or] persecuted them. There’s a new book out called The Dictator Pope, about how this pope is being much more tyrannical and much more autocratic in his exercise of power than any pope in recent memory.
Immigrants — not just Western governments and societies — have obligations, said Zmirak, both of commission and omission:
[Migrants should] obey the law, assimilate to the culture, pay taxes and respond with gratitude to the hospitality they have received, not start up rape zones or create no-go zones in the city, or try to impose sharia law, or become permanent clients on welfare, or turn Texas from red to blue, or try to impose socialism and legal abortion throughout the United States. The real position of the Catholic Church is a centrist one, and this pope is trying to push it radically to the left. He doesn’t have the right to do that, he doesn’t get to make this stuff up. He is bound by the teachings of the Church.
“It’s not his Church, it’s Jesus Christ’s Church,” said Zmirak of the pope’s use of the papacy. “The Church doesn’t exist as a service agency to the papacy; it’s the other way around.”
Zmirak is the author of the new Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.
Breitbart News Tonight airs weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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