Another Pope has dropped dead, only this time it's the left who seems to be all busted up over it. Don't get me wrong, I guess I get it. On the surface, Francis did seem like a pretty woke dude. He certainly said all the right things about capitalism, climate change, Israeli apartheid, and the like. If you simply read his headlines over the last decade, he actually comes across as a more consistent leftist than anyone still shilling for the Democratic Party. But there is a very big difference between talk and action, especially when you're running a church whose sins extend to the Dark Ages and include complicity in multiple genocides, and it doesn't take a particularly deep dive beneath the headlines to recognize that Pope Francis was very much a part of that tradition. In fact, the saddest fact about his death is that if you're morning this motherfucker right now, the grift worked.
Not that you need to crucify yourself for this mistake with another fresh helping of Catholic guilt. Even by Vatican standards Francis was a master showman, posing as a humble ascete while operating a parochial empire spangled by more pilfered jewels than a Liberace theme park. I hate to admit it, but the bastard almost had me going for a minute there too with his whole Yoda in charge of the Death Star routine, and I'm a genderqueer anarchist who was molested by two priests before I was old enough to spell my own name correctly.
And that's the thing; the really sick and really mean thing. All of us wanted to believe the Church could become magic again. The Vatican knew this, and Pope Francis was selected specifically to tell us what we wanted to hear while his friends continued to literally rape and pillage the faithful with reckless abandon.
The painful truth that we all need to swallow is that Pope Francis was not some kind of egalitarian maverick savior figure. If that were true, he wouldn't have been handpicked to begin with by the exact same right-wing creeps who put Benedict in power less than a decade earlier. Pope Francis was more of a kind of spiritual custodian put in place to mop up the mess of a blasphemous temple drowning in the cesspool of its own sins. Think of him as a kind of Catholic Obama, sent to polish the image of a toxic brand while doing everything in his power to strengthen its lethal capabilities.
In order to even come close to understanding such a vexing creature, it is important that we remember exactly who Francis was before he was Francis and exactly where the church was when he was selected to play the part. Before the Papacy came calling Francis was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit cardinal relatively unheard of outside of his native Argentina, but inside Argentina this man's reputation was very different than what it would very rapidly become on the world stage. Bergoglio was a leading figure in the Argentine Church during a very Catholic junta's Dirty War on left wing dissent that would see some 30,000 people vanish without a trace by the early eighties, many of them priests and lay workers.
The good Cardinal would claim that he was actually secretly playing both sides of the fence, providing fascist dictators with the holy veneer they relied upon to maintain power while clandestinely working to free their prisoners. We may never know for sure, but many victims of the junta continue to accuse Francis of playing an active role in its crimes at a time when Pope John Paul had very publicly devoted himself to routing the left-wing contagion of Liberation Theology from the Church.
Either way, Bergoglio's rebirth as Pope Francis came at a time when the Catholic Church was collapsing beneath the weight of its own towering rap sheet. Back in 2013, the Church's involvement in a massive conspiracy to protect the sexual predators deeply imbedded among its ranks just kept expanding with every filthy new detail that seeped from the cracks of the Vatican walls. The then current Pope Benedict's role as John Paul's point man at the top of the cover-up had just recently been exposed, as had his involvement in protecting pedophiles closer to the bottom during his tour as Archbishop of Munich. He would become the first pope to step down from his perch of power since Gregory XII retired in 1415 to end a civil war within the Church.
Much like Obama, the newly leftist Pope Francis hit the ground apologizing to a world walking away from an empire in flames. In fact, Francis never really stopped apologizing and with the scandal still growing as more and more of the Catholic Church's victims came out of the closets we had been locked in, he had plenty to apologize for.
When an investigation in France revealed that an estimated 330,000 children had been systematically abused by over 3,000 priests over a period of 70 years, Pope Francis apologized. When a grand jury exposed a similar conspiracy across six dioceses in my home state of Pennsylvania, Pope Francis apologized. When a trip to Ireland, home to nearly 15,000 victims, not to mention a veritable gulag archipelago of despotic orphanages, industrial schools, and laundries, nearly resulted in a riot, you better fucking believe that Francis apologized.
But what the hell did Francis actually do? What concrete actions did this humble emperor actually take to prove that he and his newly woke church where actually remorseful? The truth is, not much. When Francis came to power in 2013, he made a very big show of setting up a panel of experts to advise him on how to tackle the crisis. It took them six years just to reconvene for the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church in 2019 and the only real concrete measure to come out of this much vaunted shindig was a single decree ordering all priests and nuns to report abuse and cover-ups to Church authorities with zero orders to report them to anyone outside of the Church.
That's it. Nothing else. An order to report abuse back to a leadership that has already been publicly exposed to be guilty of engaging in it. In what universe is this an acceptable response to the largest child sex ring in recorded history? Even in America's horrid compulsory public school system the accused are removed until an outside investigation can prove them innocent. As we speak there are thousands of clergy accused of abuse still serving in parishes and schools across the globe while the Vatican performs their own investigations with zero oversight and zero transparency. If Francis were anything but a sweet-talking crook with a borderline personality, then he would order a zero-tolerance policy removing offenders and their handlers immediately.
But the sins of Pope Francis don't end with empty apologies. They include his long history of publicly defending the clearly guilty. This includes Francis' close personal friend, Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who Francis openly sided with after being accused of sexual misconduct before falling conveniently silent when he was found guilty at trial. This includes Francis' very outspoken defense of Chilean Bishop Juan Barres, accused of actually being present during the abuse of minors and failing to report it. Francis not only called the accusations "slander", but he refused to even send the Vatican's top expert on sexual abuse to investigate until a massive public backlash that included some of his own cardinals forced him to make an about-face and reluctantly declare that he had "misjudged" the situation.
And then there was Cardinal George Pell, Francis' own anti-corruption czar, handpicked after years of swirling accusations of abuse and cover-up in Australia where the man had served as Archbishop of both Melbourne and Sydney. Pell would ultimately be imprisoned for 13 months in 2019 for abusing minors and was only released when Judges decided that his accusers' testimonies were not enough to legally prove his guilt. These accusers never recanted their accusations and Francis never retracted his support for the accused, giving Pell safe haven in the Vatican both during his investigation and after his release. The Pope even imparted the final blessing at this creep's funeral in St. Peter's Basilica in 2023, just six years after Australia's Royal Commission released a report proving that men like Pell presided over at least 4,444 incidents of child sex abuse between 1950 and 2010. I use the word "proving" because every single act was reported to church authorities and zero action was taken.
As I write these words, I am livid, not just with Francis and the empire of child rapists that he spent the last decade trying to revamp as a socialist love-in, but at the droves of leftists who have piled up on the streets, ten people deep, to kiss this man's casket because he said something charming about human rights. Who fucking cares? I was one of the children raped by the kind of men Francis died defending and I went to the far left for shelter when I had no place left to go. I went to a movement supposedly devoted to the protection and empowerment of the powerless against the powerful. There is absolutely no excuse for eulogizing this man without acknowledging the well recorded fact that he was a fucking monster and there is quite simply no excuse for the continued existence of the Catholic Church.
We all know what this institution represents. It's not like their graveyard of innocents is a secret. This is an ancient imperial cabal that hijacked Christianity and turned it into a bulletproof mask of sanity for every genocidal butcher from Constantine to Ronald Reagan. These are the people behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, Ante Pavelic, and General Franco. These motherfuckers hid Hitler's gold, set up ratlines that freed his most heinous henchmen, and blessed the Latin American death squads they trained.
I remain a Christian of sorts as well as an anarchist, albeit a decidedly post-left one. I continue to pray to the Virgin Mary as I explore other feminine energies among the Celtic traditions of Wicca and Druidry. I also continue to draw strength from Catholic iconoclasts like Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul among more obnoxious apostates like Max Stirner, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakunin. But we can no longer afford to actively fool ourselves into venerating a church defined by evil or a fraud defined by covering it up.
At a certain point, we have to burn the church to save the cross. A thousand years of this shit is long enough. We must do as Jesus did and turn over the tables in the temple of emptiness, and that includes the ones occupied by corpses like Francis.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs Influenced by this Post
* Crucify by Tori Amos
* Family Man by Nitzer Ebb
* Wake Up by Arcade Fire
* What About Us by Ministry
* War by Sinead O'Conner
* Sin by Nine Inch Nails
* Bad Catholics by the Menzingers
* Suffer the Children by the Smiths
* Hurt by Johnny Cash
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