Steve Bannon has launched his latest crusade against the kindness and world justice that Pope Francis promotes as part of his gospel. Acting as sort of a Barbour jacketed Don Quixote, Bannon now has taken on the entire world of Catholicism and joined conservatives taking up arms against Pope Francis’ inclusive vision of a church that is less focused on divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality and more on alleviating the suffering of the poor.
Bannon now has appointed himself as the avatar for the views of arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI who, who resigned in 2013 over a blistering series of scandals involving his own role in child molestation and fostering an atmosphere of permissiveness amongst the homosexual clique of priests in Rome whom he has persecuted tirelessly in his official role by seemed to ignore on his own turf. This story was obsessively covered by the Italian press for years but totally ignored in the press here at home.
Bannon has found an ideological ally in conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former archbishop of St. Louis who was demoted by Francis and has supported calls for the Pope’s resignation.
Burke and Bannon reportedly met at the Vatican in 2014 and are building an incubator for budding right-wing ideologues in Italy. Bannon described the project as "an academy that brings the best thinkers together" to train "modern gladiators."
But Bannon is not alone in criticizing the pontiff. Rafts of conservative Catholics, from bishops to lay theologians to firebrand pundits, have attacked Francis. Other American theologians have openly attacked Francis for “devaluing the doctrines of the church.”
The center of the anti-Francis backlash is in the U.S., according to Massimo Faggioli, a liberal professor of theology at Villanova University. "There is no question about that," he said.
Francis, the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, was a trailblazer and an outsider from the start, and the elevation of an Argentine brought a new “geopolitical perspective” and priorities to the papacy, Faggioli said.
While Benedict saw Catholicism’s future squarely within the Western world, Francis has espoused a vision of “global Catholicism” in which issues of social justice are paramount.
John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown, said this reformist impulse has rankled church traditionalists. Accustomed to favorable treatment from the Vatican, many American Catholics saw themselves sidelined by Francis' progressive agenda.
To moderate and liberal Catholics, such weaponization of the sex abuse crisis is aimed at undermining Francis. His critics want to tarnish “the affection people have for him as pope,”
So, Bannon continues to unleash his medieval world-view in a strange combination of piety and hucksterism. One of his chief allies, the Vatican’s former ambassador to America, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, wrote a letter last August claiming that Francis had covered up misconduct.
“Homosexual networks” within the clergy, Viganò wrote, were responsible for the high incidence of abuse and were “strangling the church.” Alan Platt of Annandale University sums it up: “Bannon has now turned his attention away from humping the legs of world dictators to now taking on the Pope. He now wants to re-define the teachings of Jesus. Talk about a God complex”.