By Marc Scully
22 April 2025
Pope Francis has died and eulogies are pouring in praising his concern for the poor, marginalized and dispossessed. Tell that to the thousands of young boys molested and sexually assaulted by Catholic priests. Pope Francis was supposed to clean up that criminality against children in the church but he did not and it prevails. Cleaning it up would have required turning offenders over to civil authorities for prosecution but Pope Francis continued to protect them. Pope Francis had an avuncular persona but contrary to the eulogies he does not have an inspiring history when it comes to standing with the oppressed.
Serious questions remain about his role during Argentina's Dirty War, an anti-communist rampage under the military junta from 1976 to 1983 when at least 30,000 people were disappeared or killed in the most barbaric ways like pushing them out of airplanes over the ocean. Those questions about Pope Francis' role don't go away and it isn't inappropriate to ask them just because he died.
Many are praising him to the high heavens as a friend of the Palestinians because in December 2023, two months after the onslaught of genocide, he objected to Israel's 'terrorism.' Actually he should have called it genocide but terrorism is a whole lot farther than the pope had ever gone before in taking issue with Israeli white supremacy and colonialism. Just a couple days ago, after nineteen months of genocide, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza and again described Israel's 'war' on Gaza as 'terrorism,' notably not calling it genocide despite mountains of evidence.
Pope Francis has a history of support to Israel. When he visited Israel in May 2014, he said a few Hail Marys at the apartheid wall as he passed by to meet with Israeli president Shimon Peres, one of the architects of Israeli colonialism and ethnic cleansing. He also participated in a ceremony to honor Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian atheist and founder of Zionism, at his grave in Jerusalem. When Israel engaged in seven weeks of carpet bombing Gaza just a couple months later in July and August 2014, the pope made no objections whatsoever but later affably hosted Shimon Peres at the Vatican.
We might ask what Pope Francis found so simpatico about Peres since it certainly was not his moral character. Most of the obituaries when he died described him as a schemer, an operator who did his best dirty work in secret, a guy no one in Israel liked or trusted despite his outstanding performance as a colonialist and terrorist. Wouldn't a man of God be more comfortable in the company of Palestinian freedom fighters?
In November 2017, during the genocidal siege against the Rohingya in Myanmar, Pope Francis paid a state visit to the country at the invitation of Aung San Suu Kyi & the military junta. Earlier that year in May, in the heat of the genocide against the Rohingya, the Vatican established full diplomatic relations with the generals which involved setting up an embassy at the Vatican and a papal nuncio (equivalent of an ambassador) in Myanmar. What doesn't the Vatican get about rendering legitimacy to a genocidal military state? Why would it choose to establish diplomatic relations whilst the military was engaged in genocide? Why would the Pope agree to make a state visit to Myanmar in the very midst of a genocide?
Charles Maung Bo, who Pope Francis had appointed Myanmar's Cardinal in 2015, asked the Pope to follow the junta's genocide protocol and not refer to the Rohingya people by their proper name but to use euphemisms. Pope Francis obliged the cardinal who was a rabid supporter of the genocide rather than excoriate him for compromising the Catholic church by complicity in genocide. Does that sound like a guy concerned about the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed?
We can go through other countries to show that Pope Francis' politics did not match his avuncular persona. In 2016, he appointed Mario Zenari, the papal envoy to Syria as the new Cardinal. Zenari was a collaborator with the Assad regime against the Syrian Arab Spring and used his religious position to legitimize the counterrevolution and all of its barbaric crimes. In 2017, Pope Francis paid a state visit to General Sisi in Egypt whilst Egyptian human rights groups were denouncing Sisi for political repression and for forcibly disappearing, incarcerating, torturing, executing tens of thousands of opponents to military rule. Pope Francis also supported Putin in the war against Ukraine, blaming NATO for provoking the war rather than denounce Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Genocide is a time when abstract pieties and empty rhetoric don't cut it. If Pope Francis called himself a leader of the faith, he had to act like a leader against genocide and not like a man lost in the wilderness, or worse, a flunky to state power. The Vatican needs to make an accounting for his compromises with tyranny before we do any RIPs.
(Photo is Shimon Peres greeting Pope Francis during the latter's trip to Israel in May 2014, by David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty Images)
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