Why would Pope Francis visit Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the home of horrific violence committed by drug cartels, to pay honor to immigrants who died attempting to cross illegally into the United States, while his visit to Cuba, where many people have died trying to escape, did not feature one word honoring those dead?
Could it be that Francis was using the opportunity to once again champion his Marxist liberation theology and bash the evil United States for its capitalist underpinnings?
You bet it could.
According to Reuters, Francis walked through flowers toward a cross “erected… in memory of migrants who have perished trying to reach the United States just a stone’s throw away.”
Yup, it’s our fault.
Francis continued, “We cannot deny the humanitarian crisis. Each step, a journey laden with grave injustices: the enslaved, the imprisoned and extorted; so many of these brothers and sisters of ours are the consequence of trafficking in human beings…Injustice is radicalized in the young; they are ‘cannon fodder,’ persecuted and threatened when they try to flee the spiral of violence and the hell of drugs. Then there are the many women unjustly robbed of their lives.”
He concluded with this peroration: “Let us together ask our God for the gift of conversion, the gift of tears, let us ask him to give us open hearts like the Ninevites, open to his call heard in the suffering faces of countless men and women. No more death! No more exploitation!”
Of course, Francis had some other words of condemnation for capitalists: “[But] the prevailing mentality puts the flow of people at the service of the flow of capital, resulting in many cases in the exploitation of employees as if they were objects to be used and discarded. God will hold the slave-drivers of our days accountable, and we must do everything to make sure that these situations do not happen again.”
Last September, Pope Francis spoke on the National Mall, where he explained, “Thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities. Is this not what we want for our own children? 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.’”
“God will hold the slave-drivers of our days accountable, and we must do everything to make sure that these situations do not happen again.”
Pope Francis, bashing capitalism once again
The New York Times reported last May:
As pope, Francis has expanded the roles of centrists sympathetic to liberation theology, such as Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, in contrast to the clout once wielded in Latin America by conservative cardinals like Alfonso López Trujillo of Colombia, who died in 2008. “Trujillo represented the thinking that liberation theology was a Trojan horse in which communism would enter the church, something that is finally coming undone with Pope Francis,” said Leonardo Boff, 76, a prominent Brazilian theologian.
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