Pope Francis Was No Friend Of The Poor

Pope Francis passed away two days ago, on Easter Monday. He had been the leader of the Catholic Church for just over 12 years. He presented himself as a well-intentioned and deeply religious man, none of which I ever doubted. But good intentions are the paving stones of the road to hell. I often tried to find some positive things about Francis so that I could admire him. But unfortunately I think that his overall impact on the world and on the church was overwhelmingly negative.

Thinking that he was working to uplift the poor and downtrodden of the world, Francis accepted all the most destructive prescriptions of the international Left. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that acceptable in a man claiming to be a major religious leader and asserting moral authority to tell others how to lead a good life. After a century and more of the destructive horrors of socialism, people in major leadership roles in society have a responsibility to learn about that and understand it and not continue to spread it. Even with the Soviet Union long gone, Cuba and North Korea and Venezuela and China are still out there to observe. We have a responsibility to know about them — why they fail, why they perpetuate poverty, why their people suffer. Supposedly good intentions have long since ceased to be a sufficient excuse for ignorance of something so important.

In general, Francis embraced the collectivist view of economic relations. He began with advocating generosity and compassion toward the poor, but then took that to the next step and asserted the Marxist principle that private property is essentially theft. This is from his 2020 Encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” (We Are All Brothers):

119. In the first Christian centuries, a number of thinkers developed a universal vision in their reflections on the common destination of created goods. This led them to realize that if one person lacks what is necessary to live with dignity, it is because another person is detaining it. Saint John Chrysostom summarizes it in this way: “Not to share our wealth with the poor is to rob them and take away their livelihood. The riches we possess are not our own, but theirs as well.”

In multiple places, Francis blamed the ills of the world on what he called “unfettered” or “unbridled” capitalism, and asserted that the poverty of poor countries was caused by pursuit of money in rich countries. As an example, here is a piece in the Guardian from 2015 reporting on a speech that Francis had given in Bolivia:

Unbridled capitalism is the “dung of the devil,” says Pope Francis. . . . Quoting a fourth century bishop, he called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil,” and said poor countries should not be reduced to being providers of raw material and cheap labour for developed countries. . . . [Francis] said he supported their efforts to obtain “so elementary ad undeniably necessary a right as that of the three ‘Ls’: land, lodging and labour.”

If Francis ever recognized the critical role of private property in enabling the poor to lift themselves up out of poverty, I can’t find it anywhere.

Nowhere did Francis go more astray than on the subject of climate change. His 2015 Encyclical “Laudato Si” smacks of Gaia worship and Neo-paganism. It contains essentially every climate-related talking point of the environmental Left, and reads like it was ghostwritten for the Pope by Greenpeace. The Encyclical basically accepts the entire climate scam uncritically, perhaps most importantly the piece about climate change disproportionately harming the poor. Francis never figured out that expensive energy harms the poor far more than a degree of temperature one way or the other ever possibly could. Excerpt:

Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited.

Most recently, Francis had decided to weigh in in a big way on the issue of mass migration — and once again, he picked the wrong side. On January 21, shortly after President Trump’s second inauguration, Pope Francis reportedly sent him a congratulatory message, but at the same time called Trump’s plans for large-scale deportations of illegal aliens a “disgrace.” Axios reported on that day that Francis condemned “deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment ... .” In nothing that I can find did Francis ever recognize that there might be any limits to how many migrants America and the EU countries ought to take in. Was his position that once a migrant gets in, however illegally, then we are stuck with that person forever? It seemed never to occur to him that the poverty of the poor countries stems from failure of those places to honor rights in private property and free exchange (otherwise known as “capitalism” — or maybe “unfettered capitalism”).

Cardinals from around the world are now gathering in Rome to select Francis’s successor. Apparently Francis has appointed approximately two-thirds of those who will participate in this process. I hope that these people will have the good sense to back the church away from the woke adventures on which Francis embarked, but I have no confidence that that will occur.