Francis and his Manchurian inspiration for the Amazon Synod

From Lifesite News:

"A 47 year-old photograph has surfaced showing the man who would become Pope Francis standing in a small group of people, one of whom is a Brazilian Liberation-theology proponent and priest who would become laicized and who is now widely credited for being the “theologian of reference” for the upcoming controversial Amazon synod. The picture takes on significance due to the claim of the laicized priest that Pope Francis remembered their meeting in 1972 and had recently sent him the photo. 

On August 5, Leonardo Boff placed on his twitter a picture from a conference that took place in San Miguel, Argentina on February 23-29, 1972 and that shows both Boff and then-Father Jorge Bergoglio, the later Pope Francis. Boff says that the Pope had just sent him this picture, recalling their time together. 

“In an exchange of letters, Pope Francis recalled our meeting in San Miguel-AR [Argentina] from 23-29/02/1972 and sent me this photo,” Boff writes.

This incident suggests that Pope Francis and Leonardo Boff have had a friendly relationship long before Bergoglio became pope in 2013. As a matter of fact, Boff claimedin 2016 – in an interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeigr – that Pope Francis is “one of us. He has turned Liberation Theology into a common property of the Church. And he has widened it.” 

‘You will be astonished what Francis will achieve’

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel days after Jorge Bergoglio's papal election, Boff revealed that he knew Bergoglio personally. “Yes, [I met him] a few years ago [sic], at a conference in Argentina. He made a wise presentation there, we liked each other immediately.” (It is not clear whether Boff refers here to the 1972 conference, which took place much earlier than only “a few years ago.”)

In that same 2013 interview, Boff announced: “He [Bergoglio] is now Pope. He can [do] everything. You will be astonished what Francis will achieve.” 

“But for that,” Boff continued, “there is needed a breach with traditions. Away from the corrupt Curia of the Vatican, toward a Universal Church. And toward new, central topics: the gap between the poor and the rich, the lack of justice. It is revolutionary what has happened there in Rome: a religious from Latin American is being elected onto the Chair of Peter.” 

Boff defends Pope Francis in the Spiegel interview against the suspicion that he is an “arch-conservative,” that he is opposed to contraception, married priests and a larger role of women in the Church. “The Vatican prescribed it that way, all high-ranking prelates had to file suit there. Nothing was to be questioned. But that can change now.”

Boff also predicts the longer-range agenda of Pope Francis, and does it just a few days after his election. When asked as to whether he had indications that Bergoglio “thinks in more liberal terms,” the liberation theologian answers: “Yes. A few months ago, for example, he explicitly permitted that a homosexual couple could adopt a child. He kept contact with priests who were rejected by the official Church because they had married. And he never let himself be distracted from his own line. And that was: We have to be on the side of the poor, and if need be, also in contradiction to those in power.”

Still in the year of 2013, Boff wrote a bookabout Francis of Assisi and Francis of Rome (i.e., Pope Francis), endorsing this Pope as someone who will “rebuild the Church” after an “ecclesiastical winter” and thereby inviting his followers to drop old disagreements of detail between his own Liberation Theology and the Theology of the People as it had been developed by the Jesuit Fr. Juan Carlos Scannone, among others, one of Bergoglio's important friends and teachers. 

‘I have given him my counsel’

Pope Francis, when visiting Brazil in July of 2013, was trying to meet with Leonardo Boff in person. In a German interview, Boff confirms this fact: “Yes, but only after he had concluded the reform of the Curia. In Rio, the Pope explicitly asked to receive a book from me. It was just published and is called  Francis of Assisi and Francis of Rome: a new Church spring? The Archbishop of Rio has given it to him.” Thus, Bergoglio reached out to Boff, not long after his election. Not long after that, the Pope asked Boff to help him write his encyclical Laudato si (published in 2015). Boff also says that Francis read some of his books: “More than that [reading Boff's books]. He asked me for material for the sake of Laudato Si. I have given him my counsel and sent to him some of what I have written. Which he has also used. Some people told me they were thinking while reading: 'Wait, that is Boff!'” 

Boff, in a 2013 interview with El Pais, insists that Jorge Bergoglio himself is a liberation theologian: “Francis is a liberation theologian elaborated by Scanone, who was the one who somehow sustained some attitudes of Peronism,” Boff then explained. He reminded his interlocutor that Bergoglio had been Scannone's student in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

As a matter of fact, Scannone himself happens to be in the same picture at the 1972 conference in Argentina which Pope Francis had just sent to Leonardo Boff. (We owe this information to Giuseppe Nardi from Katholisches.info in Germany.) Scannone was at the time the rector of the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology at the Jesuit College of San Miguel, Argentina, which explains his presence in the photo. 

Scannone is counted as one of the founders of the Theology of the People, and in an interview also shortly after Bergoglio's election, in May of 2013, he said about Bergoglio that “in Argentina, he defended what I call the 'Argentine line of liberation theology,' called by some 'Theology of the People,' and I assume that he will continue to promote it, without ignoring other theological orientations.”

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On fire to build man's world.

Malachi Martin, in his book “The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church,” says that, “Those who..know the history of Liberation Theology..may point out that Gutierrez’s work [Father Gustavo Gutierrez, author of A Theology of Liberation] was inspired by a 1968 Conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin, near Bogota, in Colombia, where the delegates highlighted the plight of the poor, and the needy to remedy their awful conditions…

Essentially, Liberation Theology is the answer to that summons to the Church codified so many years before by Maritain – to identify itself with the revolutionary hopes of the masses. The difference, perhaps, insofar as there is one, is that while Maritain adopted a theology of history built on a misapprehension of Marxist philosophy, Liberation Theologians adopted a theology of politics built on Soviet tactics. In essence, the propagators of Liberation Theology took the current of theological thought developed in Europe and applied it to the very concrete situations in Latin America. Suddenly, theological and philosophical theory became the pragmatic proposals and actual programs for changing the face of all social and political institutions in Latin America….

Liberation Theology turned its back on the entire scope of Scholastic Theology, including what was sound in Maritain. It did not base its reasoning on papal teaching, or on the ancient theological tradition of the Church, or on the Decrees of the Church’s Ecumenical Councils. In fact, Liberation Theology refused to start where Councils and Popes had always started: with God as Supreme Being, as Creator, as Redeemer, as Founder of the Church, as the One Who had placed among men a Vicar who was called the Pope, as Ultimate Rewarder of the Good and Punisher of the Evil. Rather, Liberation Theology’s basic presumption was ‘the people,’ sometimes indeed ‘the people of God.’ ‘The people’ were the source of spiritual revelation and religious authority. What mattered in theology was how ‘the people’ fared here and now, in the social, political, and economic realities of the evolving material world. The ‘experience of the people was the womb of theology,’ was the consecrated phrase.

At one stroke, therefore, Liberation Theology unburdened prepared and restless minds from an entire panoply of ancient concepts, dogmas, and mental processes governed by the fixed rules of Thomistic reasoning, and from the directives of the authoritative voice of Rome…Liberation Theology was no theology in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. It was not primarily about God, about God’s law, about God’s redemption, about God’s promises. Liberation Theology was interested in God as revealed today through the oppressed people. In God for himself, practically speaking, no genuine Liberation Theology was interested.

The second promise of Liberation Theology was even more exciting than freedom from Rome’s theology..” (The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, pp. 308-309).

Under the banner of “liberation,” many in the Church’s hierarchy began to enlist the Church’s resources to advance the Marxist plan of revolution. Having abandoned the Church’s supernatural mission – building the Kingdom of God, these confused clerics began to turn exclusively toward a new goal: that of building a new world centered on man, a City of Man.

Fr. Martin explains how the Jesuits succumbed to this apostasy: “Classical Jesuitism, based on the spiritual teaching of Ignatius, saw the Jesuit mission in very clear outline. There was a perpetual state of war on earth between Christ and Lucifer. Those who fought on Christ’s side, the truly choice fighters, served the Roman Pontiff diligently, were at his complete disposal, were ‘Pope’s Men.’ The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the Heaven of God’s glory. The enemy, the archenemy, the only enemy, was Lucifer. The weapons Jesuits used were supernatural: the Sacraments, preaching, writing, suffering. The objective was spiritual, supernatural, and otherworldly. It was simply this: that as many individuals as possible would die in a state of supernatural grace and friendship with their Savior so that they would spend eternity with God, their Creator…

The renewed Jesuit mission debased this Ignatian ideal of the Jesuits. The ‘Kingdom’ being fought over was the ‘Kingdom’ everyone fights over and always has: material well-being. The enemy was now economic, political, and social: the secular system called democratic and economic capitalism. The objective was material: to uproot poverty and injustice, which were caused by capitalism, and the betterment of the millions who suffered want and injustice from that capitalism. The weapons to be used now were those of social agitation, labor relations, sociopolitical movements, government offices…” (The Jesuits, p. 478).

In this light, we can better understand Pope Francis' speech before Congress. The Pope called on Americans to open themselves to the world and not to see things in terms of good and evil, the righteous and unrighteous.  This, of course, is unscriptural. (See 2 Corinthians 6: 14, 15 and Ephesians 5: 11 for example).

As Fr. Vincent Miceli, S.J., explained in his essay on Call to Action entitled “Detroit: A Call to Revolution in the Church”: “The following are some of the demands the Church simply cannot fulfill for such is not her mission: 1. Wipe out poverty, ignorance, prejudice and war. 2. Democratize the whole world. 3. Stop the sale of arms everywhere. 4. Back the E.R.A. as a constitutional amendment. Like her Saviour, the Church will not turn stones into bread, thereby becoming the Mother of Socialism or a millennium of this world..’


"..the 'theologies of liberation', which reserve credit for restoring to a place of honor the great texts of the prophets and of the Gospel in defense of the poor, go on to a disastrous confusion between the 'poor' of the Scripture and the 'proletariat' of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle. For them the 'Church of the poor' signifies the Church of the class which has become aware of the requirements of the revolutionary struggle as a step toward liberation and which celebrates this liberation in its liturgy." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the 'Theology of Liberation,'" No. 10).

The supernatural faith of Catholicism is being watered down for the sake of a new humanitarian religion.  Dialogue is key for this new religion which has abandoned the notion that we must, "Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good." (Romans 12: 29).