Pope Francis needs to take tougher action against the United States’ most influential Catholic in Rome, Cardinal Raymond “Breitbart” Burke. The renegade cleric is not only undermining Francis’s reformist, compassionate papacy, and gospel teaching as it applies to refugees and Muslims, but the rebel prince of the church is also using his position within the walls of the Vatican to legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy, Stephen K. Bannon-style.
Simply put, the Vatican is facing a political war between the modernizing Pope Francis and a conservative wing that wants to reassert white Christian dominance.
Burke
was reduced to a ceremonial patron role at the Knights of Malta after a
power struggle at the ancient chivalric order, won by the pope last
month, following a spat over its humanitarian wing’s alleged
distribution of condoms. Losing the leadership battle and prestige at
the secretive society headquartered in Rome — Francis is appointing his
own special delegate above Burke — was seen as a papal rap on the
knuckles for the cardinal leading the charge against Francis’s writings
on communion for divorcees.
But the virulently anti-Islam (“capitulating to Islam would be the death of Christianity”), migrant-phobic, Donald Trump-defending, Vladimir Putin-excusing Burke
is unrepentant and even defiant, continuing to preside over a
far-right, neo-fascist-normalizing cheer squad out of the Holy See.
This Vatican operation, called Dignitatis Humanae, or the Institute for Human Dignity, whose advisory board includes two of the four cardinals openly challenging Francis on marriage and sexuality, is slavishly promoting Burke’s favorite American white Catholic nationalist, Bannon,
with star billing on its home page.
The institute’s top office-bearers,
Burke and his henchman, the media-savvy Breitbart contributor Benjamin Harnwell,
are also encouraging Benito Mussolini fan Matteo Salvini, of Italy’s
Northern League, and Muslim-baiting far-right Catholic poster girl
Marion Le Pen, the National Front “rising star” niece of party leader
Marine Le Pen in France.
As the Italian press first revealed, Burke
held a long meeting last week at his Vatican home with Salvini, a
fierce critic of the pope who wants to push refugees back into the sea
and close all mosques in Italy.
It was a flagrant political intervention
on the side of the extreme-right racist grouping ahead of the Italian
elections. Mysterious posters also appeared around the Vatican decrying a
sinister-looking pope’s “decapitation” of the Malta Knights order.
The
situation facing the Catholic Church raises alarming parallels with the
ideological warfare that split the Vatican in the 1930s when ethnic
nationalism was sweeping Europe under Mussolini and Hitler and when
fascist forces infiltrated the highest echelons of the church.
In 1937,
Pope Pius XI published an encyclical in German denouncing the Nazi
regime and its racism. The diatribe infuriated Hitler, but the focus was
more on Nazi persecution of Catholics than laws targeting Jews.
In
Italy, the Vatican had long made accommodations with Mussolini for its
own geopolitical gains, and Pius XI failed to quell widespread
institutional anti-Semitism in the church before it was too late.
When
Mussolini decreed in 1938 that
Italian Jews were to suffer a legal fate similar to those in Germany,
Pius XI tried to prepare a fresh encyclical deploring anti-Semitism and
racism, as revealed in historian David Kertzer’s book “The Pope and Mussolini,” he was double-crossed by pro-fascist forces in the Vatican working
in tandem with Il Duce.
Senior figures in the French Catholic Church
also collaborated with fascism in France, where the Vichy regime aided
the Nazis in deporting about 80,000 Jews to the death camps.
The lesson of history has not been lost on Francis. After President Trump’s inauguration, he warned that rising populism could produce a new Hitler.
But now, as Europe faces historic elections that could bring
extreme-right nationalists back into power across the continent for the
first time since World War II, he must act. The bellicose anti-Islam
invective being marshaled by figures such as Burke shares much in common
with the vicious anti-Semitism many Catholic clerics adhered to in the
1930s, when they saw Jews as a danger to the Christian West whose rights
must be restricted.
Burke, like Bannon, who says Islam is “the most radical”
religion in the world, makes no distinction in his
clash-of-civilizations frenzy between the Muslim faith’s diverse
currents and interpretations, and violent jihadist movements derived
mostly from Saudi-style Salafism.
Unsurprisingly, Burke says he is “very satisfied” with
Russian autocrat Putin’s “defense of life and family” and believes he
may have “converted” since his KGB days.
Yet, just as godless Communism
posed an existential threat in the past, the Catholic Church has nothing
to gain and everything to lose from cozying up to far-right extremists
from the United States to Europe.
They distort Christianity into an
exclusionary ideology in defense of nation and race, and unite a new
support base of Muslim-haters with historically anti-Semitic movements
such as the National Front that are anything but Christian, and often
neo-pagan.
The options open to the pope in dealing with Burke are limited. Excommunication
isn’t in the cards; Burke is not a heretic denying the Catholic faith.
Nor is Burke refusing to submit to the pontiff like French archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, who was cast out by John Paul II after his
ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X ordained its own bishops
rather than take directions from the Vatican.
However,
Francis, who has full authority over his cardinals, could fully remove
Burke from his remaining sinecure with Knights of Malta, call him in for
a pastoral correction on the issue of his unacceptable political
interventions, investigate Dignitatis Humanae with a view to shutting it
down for its subversive politicking,
and send the rebel cardinal back home to the United States.
As Burke
tries to run an insurgency and rebukes the pope for his doctrinal
“ambiguities,” with the backing of thousands of priests,
Francis could seize the agenda.
In time-honored papal tradition, he
could write an encyclical on the burning questions of populism and
nationalism, with specific reference to migrants, Muslims and Jews, so
priests including Burke know they are in breach of church teaching when
they try to act as power brokers for the international extreme right.
The stakes could hardly be higher, especially as the pope seems on a collision course with a Trump-Bannon White House that
has imposed a form of a Muslim ban and disparaged him during the
election campaign for daring to suggest that building a wall on the
United States’ southern border was un-Christian.
If the pope doesn’t put
the reactionary elements such as Burke and his cronies back in their
place, they could force a real schism during his papacy and leave the
church open to justifiable accusations it failed to stand up to enablers
of extremism and neo-fascism within its ranks.