Donald Trump, who has publicly criticized Francis, has not interfered as his surrogates, who include former White House strategist Steve Bannon; Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis; Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States; and others have conspired with the powerful fascist-oriented Opus Dei sect of the church to undermine Francis’s authority. Trump’s eyes and ears inside the Vatican – US ambassador to the Holy See Callista Bisek Gingrich – is the wife of Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a convert to Catholicism, and a major Trump political ally.

Francis, a former bar bouncer in a tough working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, has not been a shrinking violet whe       n it comes to fighting back against his right-wing enemies. Francis’s Italian parents were escaping Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule when they emigrated to Argentina. For Francis, defending the church against the fascist Opus Dei and its allies is a battle worth fighting.

Francis’s enemies have taken a page from the Trump political book. Francis vowed to clean up the church of pedophile priests but he has been charged by his right-wing enemies, including Vigano, Burke, Bannon, Opus Dei, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and from behind the scenes – Benedict – of tolerating pedophiles and homosexuals in the church. This is the same sort of gaslighting to which Americans have become all-too-accustomed under Trump.

In order to limit Cardinal Burke’s international reach, Francis suspended him from the post of patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), an autonomous international charity entity in Rome that issues its own passports and maintains diplomatic relations with 107 countries and maintains permanent observer status at the United Nations. In 2017, Francis came to the assistance of the Grand Chancellor of the SMOM, Albrecht von Boeselager, after discovering that Burke and Opus Dei were conspiring to oust Boeselager, a member of a German royal house, as Grand Chancellor. Burke and the rightists wanted to sack Boeselager for distributing condoms to people in Myanmar. Francis suspended Burke and appointed Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu as the Pope’s special envoy to the SMOM. Francis is now assured that with Boeselager and Becciu as his eyes and ears inside the SMOM, the rightists and Opus Dei are checkmated when it comes to using the diplomatic offices of the SMOM for their own purposes. Francis also banned the right-wing Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate from conducting public masses in Latin. As far as limiting the power of the rightists inside the Vatican City State, Francis appointed Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga from Honduras as his enforcer to rid the Vatican hierarchy of the pro-Benedict faction, as well as pedophile enablers and financial fraudsters, money launderers, and embezzlers.

Francis told the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica” that Roman Catholic officials have often been “narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers,” adding, “the court [the Vatican curia] is the leprosy of the papacy.”

On October 1, 2019, Francis ordered Vatican police to seize documents, computers, and portable electronic devices from the Vatican Secretary of State and the Financial Information Authority, the latter the financial watchdog of the Vatican. In addition to these two offices, Francis has also placed the Institute of Religious Works (IOR), the so-called “Vatican Bank,” under increased supervision and control. The IOR has been misused in the past for a number of covert operations, including the funding of several right-wing Central Intelligence Agency-linked terrorist groups and death squads in Latin America, particularly the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA), or “Triple A.”

Francis was also instrumental in denying to Bannon and Burke the use of a 13^th century monastery, the Certosa di Trisulti in Collepardo in central Italy, as a training academy for neo-fascist political operatives from around the world. Bannon’s Brussels-based international “neo-fascisti” grouping, called “The Movement,” had made a deal with a group connected to Burke, the Institute of Human Dignity, or Dignitatis Humana Institute, to lease the 800-room monastery for political training. Burke is the president of the institute’s board of advisers, which provides a direct link between Burke and Bannon. Eleven Cardinals, all opponents of Francis, are on the board of advisers, including Walter Brandmuller; Edwin O’Brien, former Archbishop for the US Military Services and a proponent of the “Just War”; Robert Sarah, the former Archbishop of Conakry, Guinea and an opponent of large scale immigration; Peter Turkson of Ghana; Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith of Colombo, Sri Lanka; including US military intervention in Syria; and Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a former Bishop of Kong Kong and leading opponent of China’s policies. Benjamin Harnwell, a noted conservative British Catholic, is the President of the Institute’s Board of Trustees. Bannon is both a member of the Board of Trustees and a patron of the institute.

Bannon called the proposed school the Academy for the Judaeo-Christian West. The Institute of Human Dignity and its British connections has led many to believe that it is also politically connected to the increasingly powerful Catholic wing of the British Conservative Party. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was baptized Catholic and the Speaker of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is affiliated with right-wing Catholic circles.

From the outset, Francis understood that the Bannon training academy would bot only be targeting progressive forces around the world but also his papacy. It was fortuitous for Francis that Nicola Zingaretti, the president of the Lazio region, in which the monastery is located, condemned the lease by Bannon’s group. Zingaretti is a member of the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party, which includes former Christian Democrats and Socialists.

The coup de grace against the fascist academy came in May of this year when it was discovered that the 19-year lease guarantor, a person purporting to be an official of the Jyske Bank of Gibraltar, had forged the lease guarantee letter. On May 31, 2019, the Italian Ministry of Heritage annulled the lease. The forged letter and the financial fraud concerns that led Francis to order files seized from the IOR and the Vatican Secretariat of State are indications that the Catholic right-wing, including Opus Dei, are not conceding defeat but are doubling down using any means necessary, even if they are illegal.

There is little doubt in Rome that Pope Francis and his allies were working as hard as they could to ensure that after the fall of the coalition government of the far-right League or “Lega” and the populist Five Star Movement, Lega leader and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini would not be able to form a new government. Instead, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement formed a center-left coalition and Salvini was relegated to the opposition. It has been reported in Rome that Francis appointed Cardinal Pietro Parolin as a special envoy to combat the influences of the neo-fascists in Italy and throughout the European Union. And Francis has picked up an important ally in Forza Italia, the party of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, now a member of the European Parliament.

Bannon, Burke, and their allies gambled on winning control of an ancient monastery, the SMOM, and the Italian government. Pope Francis saw their bid and raised it. Francis’s royal flush has sent the neo-fascisti forces of Opus Dei, Bannon, and Salvini into a much-weakened opposition. The moral of the story for the fascisti is to never underestimate a one-time bar bouncer. Francis has been as effective in ousting the far-right from their perches of power in Rome as he once was in ejecting unruly drunks from bars in Buenos Aires.

Donald Trump’s intermittent political “Svengali,” Stephen Bannon, has set about providing a support umbrella to a growing neo-Nazi and fascist alliance that he calls “The Movement.” Ironically, Bannon, who claims to lead a populist cause against globalism, is using globalist tactics to coordinate his goal of bringing to power and sustaining far-right governments in Europe, the Americas, the Pacific Rim, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Undoubtedly, Bannon is using the experience he acquired as an executive for the extremely globalist Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs, to push his worldwide far-right political agenda.

Bannon has established a secretariat for The Movement in Brussels and a training academy for a far-right army of political leaders and activists at the Trisulti Charterhouse, an 800-year old Roman Catholic Cistercian Order monastery in central Italy. Bannon aims to create a right-wing version of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which is an organization that supports neo-liberalism and corporatism around the world.

From his newly-acquired headquarters in Trisulti, Bannon, who claims to be Catholic, has declared war on Pope Francis I. In an interview with NBC News on the grounds of the Vatican, Bannon declared that Francis’s “liberalism” was destroying the Catholic Church and he blamed the pontiff for the plague of pedophilia that has befallen Catholicism.

In fact, it is Bannon who has been linked to pedophilic activities, including the use of a rental house in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida – leased by him and his former wife, Diane Clohesy – that was the scene of the alleged production of methamphetamines and pornographic films. The famed underwater cinematographer Lawrence Curtis, who rented the home after the Bannons moved out, told Shareblue Media that “the house was used to film pornography, had a constant flow of men, women — and even children — at the house and that blatant drug use was occurring at all hours of the night and day.”

Bannon’s previous stint as vice chairman of the Hong Kong-based video gaming company, International Gaming Entertainment (IGE), had connections to a Hollywood pedophile ring involving principals of IGE and another company, Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).

Using the typical gaslighting tactics employed by the Trump administration – projecting on to enemies accusations made against them – Bannon appears to have enlisted the support of former Pope Benedict XVI, who has remained silent in retirement after being forced from the papacy in the church’s pedophilia scandal, to attack Pope Francis.

In a recent letter, his first public pronouncement since stepping down as Pope in 2013, Benedict issued forth from his secluded apartment on the grounds of the Vatican a litany of conservative Catholic attacks against “liberalism” in the church. Benedict’s points were suspiciously like those of Bannon, who happened to be in Rome when the former pope penned his letter.

Benedict blamed liberal tendencies in the Catholic Church for pedophilia problems, not the code of silence employed by himself and his fellow archbishopric right-wingers who presided over pedophile priests being transferred from diocese to diocese to avoid civil criminal prosecution. Benedict’s blaming the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of Pope John XXIII and the 1960’s “sexual revolution” for all the church’s present woes is pure “Bannonism,” the type of far-right codswallop usually found in the ruminations of Internet hate sites like Breitbart News, for which Bannon was served as editor.

It was Benedict’s pre-papal stint as the powerful chief of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that allowed major figures in the church, including Australian Cardinal George Pell – now imprisoned in Australia after his conviction for pedophilia – to get away with protecting pedophile priests from criminal prosecution. Church officials in the United States, Chile, Ireland and other countries conspired with Benedict in what was, perhaps, one of the largest criminal conspiracies in history.

Pope Francis has, unlike Benedict, taken a much firmer stance against pedophilia plaguing the priesthood. For example, Francis recently stripped the politically-influential former Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, of both his cardinal status and priesthood. McCarrick has powerful friends in right-wing circles, including the pro-fascist Catholic order, Opus Dei, which counts the former Blackwater mercenary firm’s founder, Erik Prince, among its supporters in the Washington area. Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary for Donald Trump.

Bannon’s Movement, with its secretariat in Brussels, is under the aegis of Mischaël Modrikamen, leader of the Belgian People’s Party, a right-wing Zionist-oriented Walloonian party that is allied with right-wing parties in Flanders, Italy, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Spain. It would appear, at first glance, that Modrikamen, who is Jewish, would have nothing to do with neo-Nazi grand alliances. The interwar years of the 1930s are replete with examples of cooperation between Zionists and Nazis, including, for example, the “Transfer Agreement” between the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Palästina Treuhandstelle (Palestine Trustee Office or Haavara), the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and Adolf Hitler that saw Germany grant permission and exit visas for German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in return for cash transfers into Nazi coffers. Other areas of cooperation were seen in Hollywood, where Jewish movie moguls agreed, for a period during the 1930s, to tamp down anti-Nazi motion pictures that were deemed offensive to the Third Reich.

Modrikamen helped introduce Bannon to like-minded fascists, who prefer the loaded title of “populists,” around Europe. For Bannon, setting up a training academy for fascist cadres is a major milestone for his global right-wing crusade. Bannon plans to teach future fascist leaders a history of the world that is focused on white European “Judeo-Christian” superiority over other religions and peoples, particularly Islam and Muslims. It is such a fractured view of history that prompted deadly terrorist attacks by Bannon’s fellow-travelers in Oslo in 2011; Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; Quebec City, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017; Annapolis, Maryland in 2018; and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.

Bannon may have stepped over the legal limits in his attacks on Pope Francis from Vatican and Italian soil. The Holy See is a recognized nation-state by the United States and Francis is its internationally-recognized head of state. The US accredited US ambassador to the Vatican is Callista Gingrich, the wife of Republican former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich. Bannon’s involvement as a private citizen in what amounts to a blatant attempt to create a political rift within the Vatican hierarchy and the overthrow of the Holy See’s head of state is a violation of the Logan Act of 1799, a law that forbids private US citizens from making foreign policy, without authorization, on behalf of the United States government.

The Logan Act is very clear:

“Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Bannon is also in clear violation of the US Neutrality Act, which forbids American citizens from participating in hostile acts against nations with which the United States is at peace.

Bannon cannot have it both ways. If Soros, Bannon’s nemesis, has been guilty of violating the Logan and Neutrality Acts, so, too, has Bannon.

Bannon appears to be comfortable in his new surroundings of the Trisulti monastery. However, based on his flagrant violation of US law, Bannon should, instead, be enjoying the confines of a US Bureau of Prisons cell in the United States.

His Holiness the Pope did not of course make a public statement about the meeting, but the NATO publicity machine (a large and remarkably expensive organisation) made up for that omission by announcing that he and his distinguished visitor discussed global issues of common concern, including the conflicts in Syria and the wider Middle East, the importance of protecting civilian populations from suffering, and the importance of dialogue in international affairs to reduce tensions. The Secretary General also stressed that climate change could pose a significant security risk.

It is remarkable that His Holiness engaged in such discussions with the titular head of an enormous nuclear-armed military alliance, and it would be interesting to know what Mr Stoltenberg thinks about climate change in the context of international security.

The meeting was intriguing in other ways. It will be recollected that in February 2016 Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church met with Pope Francis in Havana and that Western media headlines included “Pope Francis Handed Putin a Diplomatic Victory” which was as absurd as it was trivial. But even The Economist headline was similarly slanted and amusingly asked “Did the Pope Just Kiss Putin’s Ring?”

This set the tone for other comment, but one thrust of its reporting was especially revealing, as it pointed out in shocked — shocked — tones that the Pope had “made clear in his interview before the meeting that on certain issues he agrees with Mr Putin and disagrees with America and its allies”. How truly dreadful that the Pope dares to be even-handed and ventures to disagree with the western world about international affairs.

The Economist further noted that “On Libya, where Western powers helped to bring down former dictator Muammar Qaddafi, the pope was explicit: ‘The West ought to be self-critical.’ And he continued that ‘In part, there has been a convergence of analysis between the Holy See and Russia’.” The Economist did not mention the unpalatable fact that the ‘western powers’ — the US-NATO military alliance — bombed and rocketed Libya to a catastrophic shambles and created a base for Islamic terrorists. Perhaps the Pope had taken note of that merciless Blitz, and of the fact that under the dictator Gaddafi the Catholic community in Libya had lived peacefully while now it is suffering gravely.

As recorded by Christian Freedom International, “The upsurge in attacks on Christians in Libya since the Obama / Clinton supported ouster of Gaddafi is of grave concern. CFI condemns these abductions, killings and attacks on Christian property in what is becoming an increasingly inhospitable region for Christians.” Perhaps Pope Francis raised this unpalatable fact with the devout Mr Stoltenberg, a graduate of Oslo Cathedral School who, it should be remembered, was prime minister of Norway when its air force “carried out about 10 percent of the NATO airstrikes in Libya since March 31 [to the end of June 2011].”

The revelation that the Pope has had the temerity and moral realism to “disagree with America and its allies” is not altogether surprising, but the report that “on certain issues he agrees with Mr Putin” must have shaken Mr Stoltenberg, whose fundamental stance is that “Russia is trying to kind of re-establish spheres of influence along its borders and for me this just underlines the importance of strong NATO, of strong partnership with other countries in Europe that are not members of NATO.”

Mr Stoltenberg believes that because Russia wants to establish — or, more accurately, maintain — spheres of influence along its borders then it must be discouraged or even stopped from doing so. This is confrontational, and it is unsurprising that His Holiness has made it clear that the Vatican is not an unconditional supporter of Washington’s Pentagon and its sub-office at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Mr Stoltenberg may not have read the address to the US Congress by His Holiness in 2015, when he said ‘We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome. Let us remember the golden rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.’ As reported, ‘The line drew instant, thunderous applause from Democrats, followed with some hesitation by Republicans, a pattern repeated throughout the address.’

In his talk to Congress Pope Francis veered from the Stoltenberg line that Russia’s desire to maintain peaceful ‘spheres of influence’ around its borders must by definition be wrong and unacceptable when he pointed out that ‘there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.’

As President Putin observed in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera “we are not expanding anywhere; it is NATO infrastructure, including military infrastructure, that is moving towards our borders. Is this a manifestation of our aggression?” No, it is not — except in the eyes of such as Mr Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg makes many visits round the world, including head-of-state-style attendance at the UN General Assembly in New York, where he had discussions with, among others, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; and his most recent stopover was in the United Arab Emirates on October 19. There, while committing NATO to an Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme with the UAE he “praised the UAE for its role as a valuable NATO partner in projecting international security and stability: from Kosovo, to Afghanistan to Libya.”

Perhaps Mr Stoltenberg’s meeting with the Pope affected his short-term memory. He ignores the unpalatable facts that in Kosovo, as Freedom House reports, there has been “little progress in strengthening its statehood,” while Afghanistan verges on total anarchy and, as noted above, US-NATO’s war on Libya destroyed the country. These are far from being examples of “security and stability” as Mr Stoltenberg would have us believe them to be, but self-delusion knows no borders.

When Stoltenberg was made head of NATO, President Putin considered him to be a “serious, responsible person” but warned with prescience that “we'll see how our relations develop with him in his new position.” Unfortunately that apprehension concerning future developments has been more than justified. During a trip to Washington in April, Stoltenberg told the Washington Post correspondent Karen de Young, that “NATO has to remain an expeditionary alliance, able to deploy forces outside our territory,” which is a plain unvarnished statement of expansionism. The Pope summed it up when he quoted the Bible’s advice to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ but it is unlikely that Mr Stoltenberg could ever bring himself to abide by such wise advice. More confrontation lies ahead.

As the summer began and for many months before that, it seemed that the 2016 presidential election would be mind numbing and dreary.

On the plus side, it had been clear for some time that Bernie Sanders and/or Elizabeth Warren would rail against inequality — and, as news of developments in Greece, Spain and elsewhere broke through the media haze, against austerity as well. But nobody expected much to come of it. The plutocrats would call the shots — they always do.

As it turned out, only Sanders decided to run. Warren was not being coy; she really meant it when she said “no way.” Because she is younger than Sanders and Protestant, and because she has lady parts, she might have made the impending contest with Hillary Clinton more competitive than Sanders can. She would probably not have made it more substantive, however; and neither is there reason to think that her views on America’s role in the world are any better than Sanders’. In any case, the issue is moot.

Then Donald Trump barged in upon the scene; and, last week, under the media’s never ending gaze, Pope Francis came to the United States. Suddenly, electoral politics seemed less dull.

The Pope tried hard to stay above the fray, and the effects of his visit have already largely dissipated. But his example did expose the fatuousness of American politics, while putting the six Catholics running for the GOP nomination — Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum – in perspective. A ray of light flickered briefly in a landscape otherwise bleaker than Purgatory.

Francis is gone and his trip to the United States will soon be forgotten; Trump is still here. The conveyors of conventional wisdom are now suggesting – or hoping? — that the Donald has peaked, and that, before long, the effects of his candidacy will dissipate too.

Don’t count on it, though; the evidence doesn’t back them up.

But even if they are right, Trump has already had a major effect on the Grand Old Party. He has put all its candidates for the presidency, regardless of creed, in their place – not, Lord knows, by the force of his example, but by revealing, in a way that even the most blockheaded Republican cannot deny, that, were the Catholic view of the afterlife correct, every last GOP candidate would be on the fast track to Hell.

In a slightly saner world, no one would need a real estate magnate or a Pope to call attention to the glaring deficiencies of the men — and woman — running for the GOP nomination. Even in the actual world, MSNBC has that covered.

In any case, this is not quite the message that the Donald and the Pope conveyed. Their “teachings” are no less obvious — only less acknowledged and discussed.

In the normal course of events, America’s “manufacturers of consent,” themselves part of the problem, would just as soon have kept it that way. But with Trump and Francis, they never stood a chance.

To be sure, countless others have been making similar points for a very long time — with great cogency and little tangible effect. Trump and Francis got through, even to the willfully obstinate, because they speak with an authority that recalcitrant liberals, centrists and right-wingers cannot dismiss, no matter how much they wish they could.

The obvious point that Trump pressed upon the electorate is that American politics is corrupt; that the Democratic and Republican Parties are, for all practical purposes, owned by plutocrats who, by throwing money around, get public officials to do their bidding.

This is not exactly news; it is high on the list of reasons why we Americans find politics distasteful and alienating, and why so many of us have little or nothing to do with it.

But, as a plutocrat himself who, over many years, has bought more than his share of political influence, Trump can honestly say that he has been there and done that. His testimony drives the point home because, as a beneficiary of a corrupt system, he can evince authentic disdain.

Francis’ list of obvious truths runs longer; and his truths are, or ought to be, even more troubling to plutocrats.

It must gall them no end when someone tells Americans, gently but in ways that they cannot ignore, that, among other things: capitalist development is causing ecological ruin; that our consumer culture diminishes the quality of peoples’ lives; that the arms industry is a moral abomination; that the inequalities that are rampant in our society offend human dignity; that capital punishment should abolished; that prisoners should be rehabilitated, not degraded; and that we should welcome asylum seekers and economic migrants, not shoo them away.

Trump disparages Hispanics and other immigrants, while Francis accords them respect. He is, after all, a voice of the global South, its Spanish-speaking regions especially.

However, the Pope is not beyond according second-class status to an even larger portion of the human race: its women.

Francis is not mean-spirited about it, the way that Trump is. But, as the leader of a patriarchal institution, he has duties to perform, and norms to uphold, that prevent him, or any Pope in the foreseeable future, from treating women and men equally.

The sexes may be equal in the mind of God, for whatever that is worth; but they are not equal in the Church, and neither are they equal in the “teachings” of the Church – especially those that have to do with reproductive rights.

These days, this is the Church’s, and therefore Francis’, original sin. Because women who cannot control their own reproduction cannot control their lives, they cannot fully attain the dignity that they are due. Insofar as the Church gets its way, women remain at the mercy of men – individually and collectively.

Since the Pope is a kinder man than Trump, his ways of speaking about the human beings whose social and political disadvantages he is committed to reinforcing are less noxious.

This is an important difference; vile words validate vile impulses, and there is no telling how much harm Trump’s words will do.

In the end, though, the Donald’s effects on American politics may actually be more salutary than the Pope’s.

The Pope made some dim witted, self-righteous Republican politicians look even more ridiculous than they already do. But Trump has already done the GOP irreparable harm. If he keeps it up, he just might do that wretched party in.

Then, regardless of his intentions, the Donald would be more worthy of canonization than a thousand Junipero Serras — not only because if there really were a God and a Heaven and a Hell, Serras, a perpetrator of cultural and physical genocide, would already be rotting in Hell’s lowest circles, but also because nothing that could come out of the coming electoral season could be more beneficial than the infliction of mortal harm upon the GOP.

Serras deemed the native population of California sub-human. Who knows what Trump thinks about the peoples of Mexico and Central America? Probably, he doesn’t know himself; he may not care enough to think anything at all.

It is a good bet, though, that he harbors no particular animosity, no matter how vicious his words and deeds. For him, as for the Godfather, “it’s not personal; it’s business.” His business now is to get himself elected by telling Republican primary voters – characters out of Morons R’Us — what they want to hear.

Telling all kinds of stooges what they want to hear has been the Donald’s modus operandi from the moment he started wheeling and dealing. It is called “working the room.”

On the other hand, anyone who saw the Pope in action knows that he is a man of deep convictions.

But with patriarchal power deeply entrenched in the Vatican and throughout the Church, Francis probably could not do much, even if he wanted to, to get women into the priesthood, or to change the Church’s positions on marriage or abortion or contraception.

Does he want to? There is no reason to think that he does. The Pope is Catholic, after all; and Catholicism’s commitment to patriarchy is not just political. To a degree that is extreme even within the Christian fold, it is also theological. If Francis has any problem with that, he has shown no sign of it; plainly, the College of Cardinals had no inkling.

But who cares what he thinks! Even more, who cares what Trump thinks!

In an ideal world, nobody would, of course – unless one or the other of them could come up with compelling arguments. Francis would have a hard time doing that on matters pertaining to the patriarchal institutions and attitudes of the Church he leads. Trump would have a hard time doing that on anything at all.

But in the actual world, Trump’s money – and the fact that his opponents in the Republican primaries are buffoons, even scarier than he – makes it necessary to take him seriously.

With Francis, the situation is more complicated.

***

Any religious tradition that has been around for a long time has resources that equip it to survive and flourish as circumstances change.

The Church of Rome has been around for nearly two millennia. From its beginnings as a persecuted sect of Palestinian Jews, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It went on to survive heresies and schisms, pagan invasions, conflicts with Islam and other non-Christian faiths, and epochal transformations in the ways that economies and societies are organized.

It has withstood wars, social and political upheavals, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of modern science, the Enlightenment, the emergence of democratic political institutions and the influence of modern political ideologies. In recent decades especially, it has accommodated to wide-ranging cultural transformations.

In theory, though not always in practice, the papacy leads the Church – controlling its “commanding heights – but that institution too has had a long, complicated, and often sordid past. The intrigues and hypocrisies associated with it are legion.

Popes do lead, but they seldom take the lead. When they have in the past, it has been mostly to establish mechanisms intended to foster ideological conformity. These have included torture, corporal and capital punishments (of the cruelest and most unusual types), censorship, and public displays of submission to ecclesiastical authority.

Most of the more congenial changes in Church policies have been launched outside the papacy’s sphere of influence – often outside the Church’s ambit altogether.

Popes sometimes acquiesce to changes for the better, but they seldom initiate them. There is no reason to expect that Francis will be an exception.

On the other hand, the Church does have a long record of helping people in distress – especially the poor and the infirm. All religions do. When as throughout most of human history, there were no secular institutions capable of filling that role, there was no alternative.

It has been pointed out many times that, for Catholics, helping others has always had more to do with saving souls – their own and the souls of the people they help – than with ending poverty or otherwise changing the world for the better. This was, for the most part, a distinction without a difference when it seemed that the poor would always be with us.

However, in the modern era, poverty has had more to do with the maldistribution of wealth than with its scarcity. Yet, to an exceptional degree, the old ways of thinking have held on in Catholic circles.

In practice, though, it can be a small step from charity to solidarity with “the wretched of the earth.” In the global South, the connection has been made time and again.

With few exceptions, the Church hierarchy has been on the wrong side of these developments, doing its best to quash “liberation theology” and the social movements upon which it draws, and which it inspires. Could Francis be turning the page on that sad moment in the history of the Roman Church?

It is more than likely. He certainly seems at peace with similar expressions of solidarity in the developed world.

Perhaps of all the things that Pope Francis said while in the United States, his praise of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, is the most amazing – not least because, before a joint meeting of the House and Senate, he put her, along with Thomas Merton, in the same category as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

Those two were once reviled throughout the nether regions of the American political universe.   But they have both, by now, become American icons to such an extent that even the most abhorrent Republicans sing their praises.

No doubt, many of the Senators and Representatives to whom the Pope’s speech was addressed didn’t even know who Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton were.

The hapless commentators on CNN and the other networks had a tough time too. They barely mentioned Day’s progressive politics, her pacifism, or her social activism; and the more learned among them had to scramble to point out that, having once had an abortion herself, Day came in time to endorse a “pro-life” view. It was a nice try, but they could hardly mitigate the essential point.

With Day and Merton, the Pope went out on a limb. But his words were in line with the letter and spirit of longstanding Church teachings.

For as long as capitalist development has been undermining forms of life that the Church holds dear, there have been strains of Catholic theology that promote what is sometimes called “the social gospel.”

The rationale has mainly been conservative, not liberationist, but with capitalism causing all that is solid to melt into air, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, the difference is often moot.

Francis pushed the limits, but he did not venture out far into alien territory. On the other hand, his pleas for tolerance, notwithstanding their anodyne veneer, were anything but old school.

***

The Pope endorsed tolerance generally – and religious pluralism in particular — on principled liberal grounds.

In one sense, this is like praising Lincoln and King; tolerance has always been a central tenet of the American civil religion, always honored, even if not always observed.

In another sense, though, the Pope’s case for tolerance was remarkable enough to cause anyone with a sense of history to be amazed.

He pressed his case most directly in the speech on religious liberty that he delivered at Independence Hall.

Protestant know-nothings and socially conservative Catholics have lately debased the idea of religious liberty, construing it as an individual’s or business’s or institution’s “right” to opt out of duly enacted laws and regulations – provided they do so for religious reasons.

Days after the Pope returned to Rome, news leaked out that he had met secretly in Washington with Kim Davis, the lachrymose Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same sex marriage licenses, despite the law and despite being ordered to do so by the courts. Davis’ defiance has made her a hero to the Protestant know-nothings and the social conservatives in the Catholic fold.

There are now reports that he was hoodwinked by rogue bishops or perhaps by lower level staff people at the Vatican’s Washington Embassy. Maybe so; more likely he felt obliged to placate the right-wingers in his flock.

This would not be surprising: clergy are notorious for speaking out of both sides of their mouths. At least Francis had the decency to keep his meeting with Davis a secret – for a while. This was shrewd. Associating his message with Kim Davis et. al. would have taken the luster off his Independence Hall speech.

What the US Constitution defends, and what Francis endorsed in Philadelphia, is a cornerstone principle of philosophical liberalism; one that is opposed, conceptually and historically, to the theory and practice of a Church that has proclaimed, since its inception two thousand years ago, that, in the words of Saint Cyprion of Carthage, there is no salvation outside its domain — extra Ecclesiam nulla salus est.

This doctrine may not entail intolerance – Catholics could, after all, hold that people have a right to condemn themselves to eternal torment — but it plainly encourages it.

The contrast with liberalism is extreme. Tolerance is the cornerstone of liberal political philosophy. Adherence to its principles, and to the spirit behind them, is paramount in the liberal worldview.

The core liberal idea is that people should be free to believe anything they like so long as, in so doing, they do not harm others. It then follows that religious identifications are, or ought to be, of no political significance; that religion is a matter of private conscience only.

In the liberal view, the state has a duty to prevent coercive interference with the exercise of religion and, of course, to protect the rights of those who would be free from religion altogether. Beyond that, church and state go their separate ways.

If the religious convictions of an agent of the state, like Kim Davis, oblige her to become a conscientious objector in a way that makes it impossible for the state to enforce its own laws, the proper recourse for her would be to resign her office, not to defy the law.

Perhaps the Pope met with Davis to remind her of this, and also of her duty, as a Christian, “to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”   Somehow I doubt it, however.

If indeed he did know what he was doing, he was more likely tossing the social conservatives in his flock a bone. In view of how many of them there are, that would be a judicious thing to do – regardless of his personal views. Doing it on the sly was judicious too.

Classical liberalism focused on relations between individuals and the state.

Contemporary strains of liberal theory endeavor to take identity issues into account as well – to uphold individuals’ liberties while, at the same time, “celebrating” their (cultural) differences.

In his Independence Hall speech, Francis identified implicitly with this strain of liberal theory – insisting, to new immigrants and others entering the American melting pot, that integration into American society, and respect for individuals’ liberties need not, and should not, entail homogenization.

He urged immigrants to be proud of their cultures and to celebrate their differences, and he urged descendants of immigrants to welcome new arrivals, and to acknowledge the contributions they make.

Take that – Ted Cruz et. al.!

Of course, the Church has always been good on cultural diversity issues. It is a Church of many peoples and many cultures, after all. But, in its view, there is only one true doctrine. There can be no diversity there.

This is why, from Day One, the Church has been doing its best to enforce doctrinal conformity. And it is why a liberal Pope is a sight to behold.

Yet, there it was – at Independence Hall and at other venues on the Pope’s US tour.

Francis can’t take all the credit; he is riding a long wave. In modern times, the Church has had to accept religious diversity to survive. It has done so, for the most part, grudgingly. But even this has been changing. A more enthusiastically liberal turn has been in the works at least since the Second Vatican Council.

By now, the Church has changed so much that, in most peoples’ minds, it is no longer marked by the intolerance it demonstrated repeatedly over almost the entirety of its existence.

Even so, for a Pope to endorse religious pluralism so boldly is remarkable. In devising intolerant ways and means, the Church of Rome had been without equal in the entire history of the world; it set the gold standard. And yet now its leader tells us all to get along. What would Torquemada think?

It is enough to give us something to think about the next time some wit repeats the old quip: “is the Pope Catholic?”

***

Papal words have effects – for a brief moment, they relieved the American political class, and the many Americans who were paying attention in the streets and on TV during the Papal visit, of the dead weight of our decrepit political scene.

Unfortunately, this effect won’t last – uplifting feelings are soon forgotten.

Still, what Francis had to say was helpful because he is a good man, aMensch –his, and his Church’s, on-going problem with women notwithstanding.

To be sure, there was an air of hypocrisy around it all, especially around the Pope’s vaunted humility – symbolized by that comparatively tiny Fiat, surrounded by a battalion size motorcade of monster SUVs. Apart from the fawning commentators on the cable news networks, who did they think they were kidding?

And, for all the Pope’s fine words about the harm global warming is doing, and his warnings of the evils perpetrated in and through financial markets, Francis has yet to lift a finger to cause the Vatican and other Catholic institutions to divest from corporations involved in fossil fuel industries.

For the Church as much as for Donald Trump, business is business. In recent decades its business – at least insofar as the Vatican Bank is concerned — has been, if anything, the sleazier of the two.

Is anyone surprised? Hypocrisy is and always has been the medium in which godliness flourishes.

But all this pales before a stubborn fact that cannot ultimately be denied: that Francis represents a brand whose sell-by date expired centuries ago.

Therefore, apart from their merits, which, in Francis’ case, are considerable (patriarchal attitudes aside), why should a Pope’s words be accorded special weight? It is a question worth pondering.

Is it because he is a religious leader and therefore a “holy man?” Anyone following the Pope’s visit on TV would have heard this said many times. But it is an odd explanation – and not just because reasons for according special attention to the words of the “holy,” or for taking them seriously at all, are dubious at best.

The world is full of holy men (rarely women), after all. Even if we exclude those who are identified with traditions that most Americans and other Westerners deem unkosher – Muslims, for instance, and Hindus, Buddhists, and so on – there are still quite a few left.

Because Francis is a modest man, he would surely agree that there are many, even in his own flock, who are holier than he.

So that cannot be the reason; not the whole reason, anyway.

As with so much else, mainstream media is partly to blame. CNN in particular had not gotten so worked up over anything since they set out almost a decade and a half ago to drum up support for the Bush wars — by showing the Twin Towers collapsing over and over again.

There were important things happening in the world last week – some of them at the UN where the news cameras were primed and ready to report on any and all Popish activities.   CNN was too busy morphing into the Catholic Channel to notice.

Civility played a role too, especially in leftish quarters. It is a sign of the times that what passes for a Left in the United States these days has become cloyingly respectful. Where once there were “pigs,” now there are “officers”; where “fuck the army” was once a proud slogan, liberals now “support the troops.”

And where revolutionaries used to talk of advancing human happiness by strangling kings and aristocrats on the entrails of priests, only “new atheists” and other thoughtless boors would even think of deriding anything having to do with “Judeo-Christian” religiosity.

Other religions aren’t cut quite so much slack; Islam is cut no slack at all. But it is telling that large chunks of Washington, New York and Philadelphia were put into long periods of lockdown for the convenience of priests while Francis was present, and that it all transpired with hardly a grumble reported.

Even people who would rather swim through vomit than pray in a Catholic church think that it would have been churlish – like blaming babies for being annoying or puppies and kittens for soiling inside the house – to complain about the checkpoints and surveillance they had to endure.

The fact that the Pope’s message, though obvious, comes as a breath of fresh air at a time when our elections are bringing out the worst in the worst of us must also be factored into any explanation for the rock star reception that Francis received.

And there is also the fact that we Americans, deprived of a feudal past and born into a country with traditions based on Enlightenment thinking, are crazy about pre-modern, pre-Enlightened institutions and rituals – the sillier and more anachronistic the better.

How else to explain the similarly bizarre fact that Americans go gaga over the British monarchy? Surely not because the Queen of England is also the head of a Church and the Defender of a Faith. Most Americans don’t even know that about her.

The mania around the Pope’s visit is one thing. The deeper mystery is why there is still a Papacy – and indeed a Church – at all? God is dead. All the world’s theistic religions – not just the one that the Pope leads – lost their reason for being long ago.

Or did they? Might it not be that, appearance aside, their reason for being is not and never really has been to worship some purported divinity; that instead it has always involved fundamental human needs that humankind has so far been unable to address in more intellectually satisfactory and morally defensible ways?

There must surely be some plausible explanation, other than the patently ridiculous ones that the worlds’ religions themselves put forward, for their resilience in the face of the plain untenability of their beliefs and the bizarre nature of the practices that they use those beliefs to underwrite.

There must be some worthwhile function these religions serve. Either that or the worlds’ peoples are even more insane than the most pessimistic among us think.

We live in a world in which, for example, “pro-lifers,” toeing the Catholic line, can put an utterly blameless and, estimable organization like Planned Parenthood in mortal jeopardy on the strength of heavily doctored videos about fetal tissue donations, while the Church of Rome, a proven haven for child molesters, is praised to the skies for its moral probity and constructive influence upon the world.

Did any of those hapless CNN explainers, commenting on the Pope’s every move, bother to point out that the reason why Francis had to stay at the Charles Borromeo Seminary when he was in Philadelphia, rather than at the nearby Cardinal’s residence as a visiting Pope normally would, is that the Philadelphia archdiocese had to sell the stately mansion where generations of Cardinals and arch-bishops used to live in order to pay off litigants in sexual molestation cases? They might also have mentioned that, for the same reason, the Church had to sell off some of the land around the Seminary itself.

Yet it is the conventional wisdom in alarmingly many circles – not just in the Republican caucus in the House and Senate — that the Church exemplifies all that is good in the world, while Planned Parenthood is the work of the devil.

Does it get crazier than that?

Part of the explanation, of course, is that God is not quite as dead as He ought to be; that there are still plenty of pre-Enlightened souls around. This is hardly news. All a clear-headed observer has to do is look at the Republican base to see that we are not yet done with the Dark Ages in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

But this is only part of the explanation.   The deeper issue is what “God” means these days for true – or not so true – believers.

In some cases, the answer is clear – the Nation, or the ethnic group, has come to take the place that God once filled. This is how, for example, Judaism survives among practicing Jews whose heads and haberdashery have evolved beyond the standard common in backwards quarters of Eastern Europe four centuries ago.

Despite its commitment to universality – “catholic” means “universal” – the Catholic Church in the United States and other countries settled by immigrants from the four corners of the earth has also served as a vehicle for asserting and maintaining ethnic identity.

It has served similar functions too in parts of the world where Catholic communities coexist with or exist close by non-Catholic communities. This consideration too must be taken into account.

Is it all just a harmless folly, a useful psychological crutch? Maybe sometimes, when religious passions remain matters of private conscience only.

It is very different, though, when they motivate murder and mayhem, as they often do when tribal identities and other worldly idols take the place formerly occupied by a no longer living God.

However, even when religions are benign atavisms only, they are hardly blameless, inasmuch as it offends human dignity for people who should know better to hide from reality by being mired in what Immanuel Kant called humanity’s “self-imposed nonage.”

If nothing else, ordinary human decency obliges adult men and women to face reality squarely – even in a world as debased as ours, a world that takes the likes of the Clintons and Bidens and Donald Trump, and Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination, seriously.

***

While the Pope was in the United States, I made a point of watching Luis Buñuel’s “Milky Way,” one of the greatest anarchist-surrealist films ever made.

Buñuel follows the trek – through space and time — of two pilgrims en route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

At one point, the pilgrims find themselves at a “spectacle” performed on the grounds of a Catholic girls school, as their bourgeois families picnic on the lawn outside.

One of the pilgrims sees and hears – in his head – anarchists executing a Pope by firing squad. As it happens, the actor playing the Pope bore an uncanny resemblance to Francis – or rather to the Francis of a few years ago, before he moved to Vatican City and started gaining weight.

A man from a family sharing food with the pilgrims hears the rifle shots too. He asks if there is a firing range nearby. The pilgrim replies that it was just him dreaming of anarchists shooting a Pope. The man then tells him, with a note of sadness in his voice, that one could live forever and never see anything like that.

Meanwhile, the youngest group of girls is on stage, reciting one or another tenet of Catholic dogma in a litany that follows the formula: “and if anyone should deny that…., as determined at the Council of …., in ….., qu’il soit anathème, let him be anathema.”

The scene then changes to a dungeon where Inquisitors are passing judgment on doubters and other tormented souls.

The Pope’s visit did cast a ray of light upon an otherwise dreary electoral landscape, but Buñuel’s purchase on Popery was nevertheless salutary – if only for putting all those good Popish vibes in perspective.

Ditto for a New Yorker cartoon that I saw around the same time that pictures the future President Trump meeting with military officials. The caption reads: “Look, lets just nuke them and build something terrific.”

How pathetic is it that, in this electoral season, a Pope – perhaps the best of all possible Popes, but a Pope nevertheless — and an egomaniacal real estate developer have been, so far, the only antidotes to gloom!

The Bishop of Rome made no mention of US war-making and conflict. Silence is tacit acceptance, or even complicity. And when one of the world’s foremost religious leaders keeps silent, that is as good as a blessing for the warmongers.

Washington is, by far, the world’s greatest war-maker, having conducted wars, subversions, coups, covert insurgency and counterinsurgency operations in almost every year over the seven decades since the end of the Second World War, as documented by American historian William Blum.

Yet Pope Francis – Argentinian-born and from a continent that has been ravaged by Washington state-sponsored violence – did not speak truth to power while addressing the US Capitol. If Francis had excoriated the US rulers for their habitual warmongering, he may not have received applause and standing ovations, but the Pope would have at least spoken the truth at a critical juncture.

Pope Francis seemingly opted for discretion as being the better part of valour. A less charitable view is that the leader of the Catholic Church lacked the courage to speak out in defence of millions of victims of US-sponsored wars. He told the chamber of the House: «Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion».

But it’s not enough to merely describe «a place of violent conflict». What about specifying the causes of conflict such as regime change or coveting natural resources? What about actually citing the governments that are responsible for unleashing, orchestrating and fuelling violence? It’s not as if there is no evidence. Far from it, the evidence of criminality is replete.

This is where the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, shows more mettle that the Catholic Pope. In recent days, Ayatollah Khamenei addressed Muslims making the annual Hajj pilgrimage by condemning the United States as the main «source of war, bloodshed and devastation in the world».

This is not a subjective matter of one «political perspective» at variance with another. It is an objective factual reality. The US government is the primary source of war and violence in the world over many decades, as the reference above to William Blum attests.

Currently, the US is primarily complicit in sponsoring a covert war in Syria, along with a coterie of allies and client regimes. Given Washington’s primacy as the most powerful political entity, it consequently bears the most responsibility for the devastation in Syria. Up to 12 million people have been made homeless in a four-year conflict, which has resulted in some 250,000 deaths.

Elsewhere, in the past week, more than 230 civilians have been massacred in Yemen by the foreign military coalition headed up and armed by Washington. The fighter jets and bombs dropped on Yemen by Saudi pilots and other Arab nationals are supplied and coordinated by the American military. Washington has also provided the political and diplomatic cover for the six-month-long slaughter in that country. Make no mistake, this is a US-sponsored criminal war on the people of Yemen. Whole families have been massacred in residential homes deliberately targeted by American warplanes. Hospitals, aid convoys, schools, markets, water and power utilities have all been bombed, putting 80 per cent of Yemen’s 24 million population in dire humanitarian plight. Only three days before the Pope addressed the US Congress, 30 civilians were reported killed by American-led coalition air strikes in the provinces of Hajjah and Ibb.

In his address to Congress, Pope Francis did partially condemn the international arms trade. But his words were vague and scarcely directed at the US in particular, as they should have been.

Here is what the Pope said: «Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimise and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world. Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade».

Pope Francis’ point would have been more powerful and closer to the truth if he had specified the US as the world’s biggest arms supplier whose top clients include the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies who together are committing heinous war crimes in Yemen – at the very same time that he was speaking to Congress. Francis should have condemned the US government for its criminality in no uncertain terms. Yemen provides the irrefutable, horrendous facts to support such a condemnation.

The Pope missed a crucial opportunity to confront corrupt power. His vacuity only serves to obscure the bloodied hands of the perpetrator.

Following his speech on Capitol Hill, the New York Times reported thus: «Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, challenged Congress, and by extension the mightiest nation in the world, on Thursday to break out of its cycle of paralysis and use its power to heal the ‘open wounds’of a planet torn by hatred, greed, poverty and pollution».

So, according to the top US media outlet, the Pope is urging Washington to «heal the world». In other words, the Pontiff ends up reinforcing arrogant American «exceptionalism» as a delusion that the nation is a force for good, instead of being a rampant source of violence across the globe.

Pope Francis may be a breath of fresh air compared with his predecessors from his humble embrace of the poor and socially marginalised.

But he still retains the stench of sycophancy towards the world’s biggest criminal state-sponsor of war and terrorism. God Bless America indeed.

He was speaking about his determination “to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world,” when he said this:

Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.

Those were fighting words, especially given where he spoke them. The U.S. is by far the largest arms supplier in the world, with domestic manufacturers selling more than $23.7 billion in weapons in 2014 to nearly 100 different countries. During the Obama administration, weapons sales have surged to record levels, in large part due to huge shipments to Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The weapons sales to Saudi Arabia include cluster bombs and other munitions being used to hit densely populated areas, schools, and even a camp for displaced people in Yemen.

And a healthy chunk of those arms sales — especially to Israel and Egypt — are heavily subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer.

Congress, which could have blocked any of this, went along happily — in no small part because of the approximately $150 million a year the defense industry spends on lobbying and direct campaign contributions.

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, praised the Pope’s comments as “a refreshing change from the antiseptic language that too often surrounds discussions in this country concerning the global arms trade.”

Hartung wrote in an email to The Intercept:

The recognition that arms sales can result in the spilling of “innocent blood” for profit is a far cry from the cover stories so often used to justify multi-billion-dollar arms deals — that they promote “stability” and are only for “defensive purposes.” As the country that reaps the most money from the international arms trade, the United States bears a responsibility to take the leadership in curbing weapons trading around the world. A good start would be to cut off U.S. supplies to Saudi Arabia until they stop engaging in indiscriminate bombing in Yemen, which has caused a humanitarian catastrophe of the highest order.

Hartung’s research shows that the volume of major arms deals concluded by Obama in his first five years far exceeds the amount approved during the eight years of the Bush administration.

U.S. firms make up seven of the top 10 arms-exporting companies, with Lockheed Martin and Boeing coming in at numbers one and two. Also in the top 10: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, United Technologies and L-3 Communications.

In June, the State Department announced it was lifting the freeze it imposed on the repressive government of Bahrain, despite recent human rights abuses including arbitrary detention of children, torture, restrictions for journalists and a brutal government crackdown on peaceful protestors in 2011.

And in August, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he would even further speed up U.S. arms sales to Gulf countries. As part of his attempt to reassure Gulf states alarmed by negotiations with Iran, he said the U.S. “had agreed to expedite certain arms sales that are needed and that have taken too long in the past.”

Thursday’s speech was not the first time the Pope has spoken out about the arms trade. He referred to it as “the industry of death” in a talk with Italian schoolchildren in May. “Why do so many powerful people not want peace? Because they live off war,” he said.

“This is serious. Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms and sell them to one country for them to use against another country,” he said. “The economic system orbits around money and not men, women. … So war is waged in order to defend money. This is why some people don’t want peace: They make more money from war, although wars make money but lose lives, health, education.”

Dan Froomkin, theintercept.com

French President Francois Hollande announced that on January 11, he would march in solidarity on the streets of Paris along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, and the ISIL-enabling Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davitoglu. All of these leaders, facing huge popularity problems at home, were able to use the terrorist attacks in Paris to bolster their own flagging electoral profiles. In addition to the unpopular leaders, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, European Council President Donald Tusk, and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker were also scheduled to march in Paris in the grandiose «photo op» to help honor a magazine staff that often lampooned many of these leaders with cartoons that were almost always of a sexual nature.

Once again, the alleged perpetrators of the recent attacks, Franco-Algerian brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, who were said to have murdered 12 people, including the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, and Franco-Senegalese Amedy Coulibaly, said to have killed hostages at the supermarket, were well-known to the French police and intelligence services. It was claimed by one of the supermarket customers that Coulibaly said proclaimed that he was from Mali and that he supported ISIL and Palestine. The Kouachis’ names were even included on the American «no-fly list».

The fact that the Kouachis had been involved in recruiting and training jihadist volunteers to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria and had earlier been involved in recruitment efforts for jihadist armies in Iraq and Yemen should have placed a surveillance net over the two brothers. But, as in a previous case in France involving an alleged jihadist terrorist who allegedly killed people at random, the Kouachi brothers, as well as Coulibaly, who was also well-known to the police, were permitted to obtain weapons and other materials without tipping off law enforcement. Coulibaly actually met with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009. Coulibaly worked at a Coca Cola plant in the poor «banlieue» of Grigny, outside of Paris. Coulibaly was one of ten workers selected to meet personally with Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace to discuss youth employment issues. As with the U.S. Secret Service and the American president, French security thoroughly vets those who meet with the French head of state, which makes Coulibaly’s selection to meet Sarkozy even more perplexing. «Le Parisien» quoted Coulibaly as being excited over his meeting with Sarkozy and hoped the French president might help him find him a good job. Coulibaly is said to have first met Cherif Kouachi in 2010. However, Coulibaly supposedly converted to radical Islam while serving time in prison in 2005 for armed robbery. It was in prison that Coulibaly became an adherent of Djamel Beghal, said to be a Franco-Algerian member of Al Qaeda who, in 2001, tried to blow up the U.S. embassy in Paris. Out of all the unemployed and under-employed youth in France, the French president’s security team decided to vet a known follower of an Al Qaeda member to enter the Elysee Palace to meet with Sarkozy. As the French say, «incroyable!»

Pre-attack knowledge by the authorities of an alleged perpetrator was certainly the case in the Merah affair in March 2012 when Mohammed Merah, a French national, was killed by French police. Merah was accused of killing three French paratroopers in Montauban and three students and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. It was later discovered that not only did the French Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI) maintain a thick dossier on Merah, but that French intelligence tried to recruit him as an agent. Merah traveled with ease to Afghanistan and Pakistan with the foreknowledge of French intelligence. The then-governing conservatives of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the opposition, now ruling, Socialist Party conspired to cover up Merah's links to French intelligence.

The Kouachi brothers are said to have returned from Syria this past summer, where the CIA and French intelligence have been backing Islamist guerrilla groups battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The similarities of the Kouachis and Coulibaly to Merah are amazing. All were known to French intelligence before they allegedly carried out their terrorist attacks and all had connections with Al Qaeda groups and affiliates.

Ever since the 1980 time-bombing of the Bologna train station that killed 85 and injured over 200, Western European «false flag» operations have become fairly standardized «boiler plate» operations. This was certainly the case with the three-man professional military assault carried out in a precision manner by the alleged Islamist terrorists on the Paris editorial offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo. Although the two Kouachi brothers, killed by police at a warehouse north of Paris, are said to have carried out the attacks on the newspaper, there is still no explanation of what happened to the third gunman. A third suspect in that attack, a brother-in-law of the Kouachis named Mourad Hamyd, voluntarily turned himself in to the police after he heard his name broadcast by the media. However, Hamyd, 18, was in school at the time of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

The attack on the Bologna train station began the age of modern false flag attacks. Although in 1980 the Italian government and media originally blamed the bombing on leftist radical Italian guerrillas, it was, in fact, carried out by an underground fascist cell that obtained the bomb materials from hidden caches belonging to the secret NATO «stay behind» paramilitary network known as «Gladio». 

Gladio was intended to mobilize guerrilla forces to fight the Soviets in the event of a ground war in Europe. Weapons and materials were hidden underground and in caves throughout Western Europe for future guerrilla assaults on occupying Soviet troops. However, Italian rightists and Zionists attempted to use the discredited Mitrokhin Dossier, allegedly obtained from KGB files, to pin the blame for the Bologna attack on the Soviets acting in concert with radical Arabs, including Palestinian groups. It was later discovered that it was the CIA that funded such news stories in a psychological warfare operation against the Soviets and the Arab countries. From his Paris jail cell in 2005, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the famed terrorist known as «Carlos,» revealed that it was the CIA and Mossad that carried out the Bologna bombing and that the Mitrokhin Dossier was being used to «falsify history». Other independent accounts have proven Carlos’s allegation.

Ever since Bologna, the tell-tale signs of Western intelligence false flag operations are extremely evident in attack after attack. By sticking to the same doctrine for over 40 years, Western intelligence fingerprints are becoming as clear as day.

One such tell-tale sign of a false flag operation is the convenient discovery by police of evidence linking attacks to the perpetrators, be they unknowing double agents or patsies who believe in whatever cause has been dangled before them.

One sign of a false flag operation is that «evidence» linking the intended perpetrators to the crime scene is always discovered. French police claim they were able to pin the attack on Kouachis, because Said, the eldest brother, left his French identification card in a black Citroen used as a getaway car. Police would not say whose identification card they found. Some French security experts warned that the ID card may have been purposely planted in the car to confuse the police. Police also conveniently found Molotov cocktails and Islamist jihadist flags inside the getaway car. Alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta's passport was supposedly found in pristine condition in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

Often, the true perpetrators of false flag attacks are masked. This was the case with the three reported gunmen who killed the Charlie Hebdo staff. 

There are always other attacks in the region to confuse police. For example, while French police were concentrating their search for the gunmen from northern Paris to the Belgian border, a French police woman was shot and killed in Montrouge, south of Paris. French authorities were quick to say the events south of Paris and at Charlie Hebdo were not linked. Later, it was announced that the two events were linked. Some witnesses at the warehouse and at the newspaper office were convinced that the masked men who turned out to be terrorists were actually counter-terrorism special troops. One man at the warehouse who escaped injury said he shook hands with one of the masked terrorists who he believed was a special policeman. At the same time French police launched their hostage-freeing operations at the warehouse and kosher supermarket, a hostage situation at a jewelry store in Montpellier, in the south of France, was being reported. Police soon said that situation was not connected to the events in the Paris region. Nevertheless, the Montpellier situation conveniently added to the fear factor.

The events in France have given a boost to anti-Islam immigration movements throughout Europe, from the PEGIDA movement and Alternative for Germany (AFD) party in Germany, to the National Front in France, and the UK Independence Party in Britain. Coming so soon after France’s UN Security Council vote to recognize Palestine as a state and the rising political fortunes of the pro-Israel National Front, a «price tag» attack on France, masked as a jihadist terrorist operation, cannot be ruled out.

Some parliamentarians were disgruntled that a religious leader was permitted to address what is supposed to be a secular institution, and that the Catholic pontiff was interfering in political matters. The truth is, however, that the pope was not being political enough. 

On the face of it, the 77-year-old head of the Catholic Church may have sounded as if he was upbraiding the EU, especially on the issue of immigration. But his speech was a cop-out of the political cause of the immigration crisis – namely EU policies. Instead, he confined his concern, somewhat piously, to symptoms of the problem, rather than the root cause. 

The Argentinian-born Pontiff, who assumed the papacy in March 2013, told European parliamentarians in emotive language: «There needs to be a united response to the question of migration. We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery.»

He added: «The boats landing daily on the shores of Europe are filled with men and women who need acceptance and assistance».

Fair enough, Pope Francis had a point about the reprehensible indifference of the EU towards accommodating immigrants. 

UN figures show that there is indeed a humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean. In the same week that the pope was speaking in Strasbourg, some 600 immigrants had to be rescued while on a freighter ship that ran adrift between North Africa and Sicily. 

This year, the UN High Commission for Refugees reckons that over 160,000 people have so far tried to sail across the Mediterranean to European shores. Last year, the total figure was 60,000, which itself was a big increase on previous years. This huge increase in the number of migrants trying to reach Europe over the past year has resulted in a surge of deaths at sea, from boats capsizing or running adrift.

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that more than 3,200 migrants have died so far this year while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. Many more hundreds are simply missing and unaccounted for. 

Most of the victims are heading to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, which is only 113 kilometres from Tunisia. The Italian island has become known as «the gateway to Europe» among migrants. Packed into crowded, dilapidated vessels by unscrupulous human traffickers, the refugees are prey to the vagaries of the sea. Many of the boats run short of fuel or have no-one to properly navigate them. 

Last year, in one of the biggest tragedies, 366 people died when their vessel foundered off Lampedusa in October 2013. That prompted the Italian authorities then to mount an ongoing sea-rescue operation known as Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). It is believed that the operation has saved as many as 100,000 people who had become distressed at sea. But at a cost of €100 million a year, the Italian government closed down the naval rescue mission last month. It is now feared that the death toll in the Mediterranean will rise dramatically as a result.

A major reason why Italy had to call off the salvage operation was that the EU baulked at providing funds to assist. With the Italian economy roiling from its own fiscal woes, Mare Nostrum was axed. One of the most recalcitrant EU governments was Britain. London argued that the rescue effort was «acting as a pull factor» for migrants who felt that their chances of safely crossing the Mediterranean were improved because of the Italian navy’s presence. 

Humanitarian critics deplored the British logic as «callous». And not just the British attitude, but the whole EU central bureaucracy’s. 

Karl Kopp, a consultant for the German refugee organisation ProAsyl, told Deutsche Welle last month that the European Commission was simply not doing enough. «After Lampedusa a lot of people said the dying must end, it must never happen again. Now we know that the flow of refugees has increased in the face of crises around the world and more people are dying. We are appealing to the other players in Europe – to the EU Commission, to government leaders – to create some legal routes to Europe,» said Kopp.

Note that this campaigner touches on the fulcrum of the problem – «refugees increasing in the face of crises around the world» – but did not explicitly delve into the heart of the matter. Namely, what crises, where exactly are the crises, and who is fuelling them? It turns out that it is the EU – the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 – that is the guilty party. In other words, the EU has largely created this immigration disaster, and it is the EU that is now scandalously turning its back on the human catastrophe of its own making. 

This central point was completely misunderstood or ignored by Pope Francis in his remonstration with the Strasbourg Parliament last week. 

The main national groups that are piling onto leaky boats and desperately seeking refuge in Europe are from Syria and Libya, according to monitors. Other nationalities include Eritrea and Somalia. But it is refugees from Syria, Libya and other North African countries that have led to the surge in migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean. It is believed that other African refugees include those from Mali and the Central African Republic, who make their way north via human trafficking networks to the Libyan or Tunisian ports eventually for Europe.

This flow of refugees is correlated with the spate of armed conflicts that have erupted in these countries over the past three years. 

Britain and France are the two main European governments that have been most responsible for fuelling the conflict in Libya when they led the NATO bombing of that country during 2013 and the eventual toppling of the Gaddafi government. Other European members of NATO also bear responsibility for unleashing the humanitarian and political chaos prevailing in Libya. 

Likewise in Syria, it is Britain and France that have spearheaded the European destabilisation of that country with their covert support for the international mercenary groups trying to overthrow the Assad government. Along with the United States, the Europeans have destroyed Syrian society from their covert regime-change operation that has led to eight million people – a third of the population – being displaced. Most of the Syrian refugees are currently subsisting in miserable camps in neighbouring Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. But many are also making their circuitous way to Europe. 

France has gone it alone with military interventions in its former colonial possessions of Mali and the Central African Republic during the last year and in the Ivory Coast two years before that. France may claim a legal mandate under the dubious rubric of «combating terrorism» but many legal experts argue that the rash of French neo-imperialist interventions across Africa are unlawful. No-one has an exact figure, but it is estimated that French-led destabilisation of these three African countries alone has resulted in over a million refugees, many of whom try to migrate to Europe to escape the violence and deprivation. 

This is the crux of the matter. The European Union is being assailed by a crisis of illegal immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Thousands of these desperate people are being exploited by heartless modern-day slave traders and thousands are dying in watery graves – while the EU bureaucracy and member governments like Britain and France erect fortress-like barriers. 

Pope Francis is correct to rebuke European callousness towards immigrants. But the solution is not for Europe to merely be more accepting and assisting of immigrants. The solution is for the EU and its principal members in London and Paris to stop fuelling conflict in the Middle East and Africa and hence to stop the flow of millions of refugees. 

The British government might lecture about «pull factors» over the now-cancelled Italian sea-rescue operation. But what about British and French «push factors» creating a flood of refugees from their criminal military machinations in the Middle East and Africa?

Now if the pope had excoriated the real EU cause-and-effect of the immigration crisis during his address at Strasbourg then he really would have weighed into politics with a virtue. 

And while he was at it, the pope could have added that one million refugees have also been instigated in Eastern Ukraine over the past year – by the EU-backed terror operations of the Kiev regime.