Pas d’ennemis a gauche at the Vatican?

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 19, 2022

This week Pope Francis has expressed his concern about the war in Ukraine, the famine in Somalia, and the fire in a Coptic church in Egypt. Last week he spoke about the rights of Canada’s indigenous peoples, the war in Ukraine again, and a fire in Cuba.

But on one noteworthy public issue the Pope has been silent: the arrest of a Catholic bishop in Nicaragua.

Inside sources in Rome say that the Vatican has been working quietly, diplomatically, to secure the freedom of Bishop Alvarez, since police of the Ortega regime surrounded his chancery building two weeks ago. But in that is the case, we could add “ineffectively” to that list of adverbs, because today the police staged a pre-dawn raid and took the bishop into custody. Prompting this immediate response from the Vatican:

[Crickets]

Pope Francis is not shy about promoting his favored political causes, such as immigration and climate-change action. But he has been remarkably quiet about overt repression of Catholicism, and even assaults on Catholic prelates, by certain regimes. The embattled Catholics of Nicaragua are crying out for public support from Rome, and to date have received none. The neighbors in Venezuela have been making the same pleas to Rome for years, as the government there does battle with the Catholic hierarchy. Again the Vatican has preferred the softer, diplomatic approach. And in China, the loyal Catholics of the underground Church—and their great champion, Cardinal Zen—have pleaded for the Pontiff at least to hear their complaints. No such luck.

Is it a coincidence that in each of these cases, the Vatican has avoided public criticism of a leftist regime? Is there any case, in the past nine years, when the Vatican has issued a tough public scolding of a Marxist government, or eschewed public criticism of a rightist regime? Even in the case of the Ukrainian war, Pope Francis has never condemned Russian aggression.

Pope Francis condemns capital punishment. But the world’s foremost practitioner of the death penalty—China—is never a focal point of Vatican statements on the issue. The Pope speaks often against human trafficking, but does not refer to the country most infamous for the use of slave labor—China, again. The Pontiff exhorts nations to curb carbon emissions, but does not address the immense problems created by the world’s most egregious polluter: China. Instead a close papal ally makes the preposterous suggestion that China is the best example of Catholic social teaching in action!

We American Catholics could not avoid noticing that for four years, many papal statements on immigration seemed to be crafted as subtle (or in some cases unsubtle) jabs at the Trump administration. Now we are waiting for similar public challenges to the Biden administration, as it promotes unrestricted abortion, escalates the gender wars, and threatens the existence of Catholic institutions.