UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Pope Francis appears to give much higher priority to protecting the interests of his Big Oil associated donors in the Middle East than to protecting Catholic children from priest sexual abusers enabled by his unaccountable bishops. The pope’s top financial adviser, for example, is a former Chairman of BP, which has significant Middle East oil interests. This, and similar Vatican donor connections, seem to influence the pope’s current approach of dangerously calling for another Middle East military invasion and imprudently provoking Muslim Turkey over 100 year old World War I atrocities involving Catholic Armenians. These connections may even affect the pope’s expected encyclical on global warming.
The pope recently provoked Turkey needlessly over a century old controversy, only a few months after the pope visited Turkey to promote religious harmony. Turkey’s leaders have warned the pope, among other things, suggesting the Vatican has its own skeletons to keep hidden. With the pope’s still Secret Archives of Vatican dealings with Nazis and Fascists, including over assets stolen from Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as the Vatican’s current sex abuse and financial scandals, Turkey has a point. Why did the pope provoke Turkey, and why now?
Meanwhile, the pope and his Council of Cardinals (C9) continued at their latest meeting to pay lip service to holding bishops accountable for child abuse facilitation. This is 30 years after Fr. Tom Doyle’s searing “dead on arrival” secret report on pervasive priest child abuse to Pope John Paul II and US bishops. The C9, in effect, once again did nothing of substance, upon reviewing briefly the “do nothing results” so far of the pope’s “go slow” abuse commission. Public objections by two prominent psychiatrist child abuse experts and two abuse survivors, all commission members, forced the C9 to at least go through the motions of a discussion two years into Francis papacy. The four members had traveled from their home countries to the pope’s residence, but the pope avoided meeting with them. So much for “mixing with the sheep”!
Turkey is an a tough position. Syrian civil war refugees are pouring over one border, and threatening Kurdish forces are battling Islamic State (ISIS) forces near another border. As ISIS forces currently engage in fierce battles for control of Iraq’s largest oil refinery, Big Oil and its allies, including some prominent Iraq War US neocons and seemingly the pope as well, are stepping up efforts for another Western military incursion in the Middle East. Many of the Iraq War neocon cheerleaders, including Paul Wolfowitz, are now advising Jeb Bush, the likely papal preference in next year’s US presidential elections. Please see the related video here,
[Reuters]
As Ray McGovern, a Jesuit educated former CIA advisor under six US Presidents, astutely noted recently: “… the neocons are nothing if not resilient. Despite their grotesque disasters, like the Iraq War, and their disappointments, like not getting their war on Syria, they neither learn lessons nor change goals. They just readjust their aim, shooting now at Putin over Ukraine as a way to clear the path again for ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran. …” . Please see McGovern’s superb and informative, “Neocon ‘Chaos Promotion’ in the Mideast“, here,
and see also “Jeb Bush seeks tips from wide cast of foreign policy experts” here,
[Reuters]
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