Will Pope Leo XIV return the Catholic Church to traditional morality, or will he continue down the path laid by Francis, a pope who embraced liberation theology? The issue is existential for Western Civilization as a whole—and it appears that on the issue of Israel’s war with radical Islamists, the new Pope is following Francis.
Liberation theology is the single most destructive Soviet op ever hatched, for it overlays Marxism on Christianity. The two are incompatible, with Marxism morphing and misshaping Christianity.
The Left’s hollowing out of the church is perhaps the single most dangerous change over the course of the last half-century. Left-wing radicalism wearing around the flesh mask of Biblical values. Reverse it. Now. https://t.co/gDUXxC0uIq
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) January 21, 2025
Jon Pacepa wrote a decade ago:
Pope John Paul II, who knew the Communist playbook well, was not taken in by the Soviets’ liberation theology. In 1983, his friend and trusted colleague Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who at that time was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, discarded as Marxist the liberation-theology idea that class struggle is fundamental to history. The cardinal called liberation theology a “singular heresy” and blasted it as a “fundamental threat” to the Church.
Of course, it was and remains a threat — one deliberately designed to undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating religion to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.
Liberation theology creates a ludicrous moral high ground, elevating “love” over Biblical morality. It embraces immorality without requiring repentance and redemption. It ignores those parts of the Bible that will not tolerate sin, such as John 8, where Jesus, after saving an adulteress from stoning, commands her to “go, and sin no more.”
Likewise ignored is Romans 13:1-7, which says civil government “is ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God…”
The liberation theologians’ call to ignore American laws (e.g., to embrace illegal aliens and demand they not be deported) makes an utter mockery of Romans 13:1-7.
Perhaps the most immediately destructive aspect of liberation theology is its mix of suicidal, radical pacifism, the Jew hatred inherent in Marxism, and its uncritical treatment of Islam, the greatest threat to Western Civilization and Christianity since it broke out of the Arabian Peninsula over 1,000 years ago.
Until recently, the Catholic Church was not pacifist. For well over a thousand years, the Church embraced the Just War Theory that Saint Augustine first articulated in 426 A.D., based on Romans 13:4.
[The civil magistrate] is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
While Christianity calls on individuals to act with grace and forgiveness, when it’s necessary to protect civil peace and punish wickedness, government-sanctioned war is moral and required. This was true from the First Crusade of 1096 A.D., fought to beat back Islamic depredations against Christians in the Middle East, to World War II, fought to stop Hitler and his socialist war machine. In between, the Puritan Minister, Rev. Thomas Mayhew, used these passages to justify the English Civil War and set the religious basis for the oncoming American Revolution.
Pope Francis gutted the Just War theory during his papacy and embraced the antisemitism of a true Marxist. The Pope gave his imprimatur to Jesus displayed in a keffiyeh, suggesting ludicrously that Jesus was not a Jew.
With Christians under threat in the Middle East from Islamist repression, the Pope decided to celebrate Christmas with a political statement wrapping a Jewish baby in a keffiyeh. pic.twitter.com/XWXMoW11BJ
— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) December 9, 2024
And while Pope Francis regularly ignored Islamic attacks on Christians, refusing to comment on them, he obscenely opted to criticize Israel in the wake of Gaza’s medieval, barbaric, and genocidal October 7 attack, going so far as to call for ”the global community [to] study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people.” Such a broken moral compass points a path to doom for Christianity and Western Civilization.
Thus, it was troubling to see that the new pontiff seems to be following that same path:
Pope Leo XIV called for…an immediate ceasefire in Gaza with the release of hostages and delivery of humanitarian aid in his first Sunday noon blessing as pontiff.
“I too address the world’s great powers by repeating the ever-present call ‘never again war,’” Leo said from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica…
There is no denunciation of Hamas. There is no call for Hamas’s surrender to end the war or a call to release the hostages (although he prays for them). However, there is a call for Israel to feed the nation waging war against it. There is also no concern for the fading Christianity in Europe as radical Islamists flood in.
And there is a completely utopian “liberation theology” call for no more war, irrespective of human nature, human history, and the need to defend a nation. This idea, which is at odds with at least 1,600 years of church history, is especially ironic given that, on the day he was elected, the new pope chose to wear a pectoral cross containing relics from St. Augustine and St. Monica (Augustine’s mother).
We can hope and pray that Pope Leo XIV will eschew liberation theology and lead the Church back to its traditional values. But the signs are troubling that he may be merely a continuation of the disastrous Francis papacy.
YouTube screen grab (cropped).
Jesus Christ is King
