As we inch toward war and fascism in much of the West while spouting the rhetoric of peace and love set to Jingle Bells, will it be hands across the water, or Trumpian walls against the sky; a “reconciled diversity”, or the Republic of Scapegoating?
The Pilgrim of Peace and the Bloviating Billionaire are going after the same thing: hearts, minds, and yes, souls. What they have on offer couldn’t be further apart. The latest incarnation of God and Mammon is the Cool Pope and the Shameless Capitalist.
Let’s start with Pope Francis.
An interesting resume. The pope, whose friends back in South America know him as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was briefly a bouncer. (I’m betting that when he was just plain Jorge, he never ran into anyone at the bar as tough as the Jesuits.)
Those old skills might yet come in handy as Pope Francis battles the ultraconservative Catholics who once called him a traitor to his faith. That was back in the days when he was still the largely unknown archbishop of Buenos Aires.
According to National Geographic, when the future pope walked past the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, he said this about its formidable walls. “How can they know what the common people want when they build a fence around themselves?”
Whether a rebel or a revolutionary, time will tell, but Francis is certainly an agent of change. The Pope, who took his papal name from the champion of the poor and the founder of the Franciscans, made a debut that would have pleased Saint Francis of Assisi. His is a no-frills papacy — to the extent that that is possible as the spiritual leader of over a billion Catholics world-wide in an institution that nearly as old as Jesus.
No splendid robes, no scarlet cape over his shoulders or magnificent stole sown with golden threads like his predecessors. He dresses in plain white. He wears a plastic watch. Although he certainly has his Swiss Guard, he ultimately leaves his security to God – no bulletproof vest, and no bulletproof glass when he rides the popemobile — despite the 1981 attempt to kill John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.
That means taking grave risks, but Francis is willing.
“It is true that going out onto the streets implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the street and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.”
When Pope Francis finished his first address to the adoring masses gathered to greet him at the Vatican, he skipped the limo ride. Instead, he rode the bus back to work with the other Bishops.
In a way, the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican is the original Trump Tower. Pope Francis never moved in. Instead, he chose to live in the Vatican’s guest-house. The Casa Santa Marta is certainly no flophouse. But it isn’t the penthouse suite in the Trump Tower either.
What does it all mean? Nothing more than a small but symbolically noteworthy sign that this Pope is uneasy with the Church’s ostentatious wealth. That, and his compassion for the dispossessed that used to have him wandering the poorest slums in Buenos Aires to offer what solace he could – face-to-face. As he put it in his first encounter with the international media, “How I would like a church that is poor and for the poor.”
Inside the Curia, the administrative apparatus of the Holy See, this pope is kicking up dust: Consequences for bishops convicted of failing to report child abuse; an investigation into corruption in the Vatican Bank, or as it is somewhat facetiously known, the Institute for the Works of Religion; the beginning of a conversation on lifting the ban on Communion against divorced Catholics whose marriages were not annulled; and even the possibility that celibacy might be dropped as a requirement for entering the priesthood.
While the ultra-orthodox head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, might be mortified at such possibilities (like a lot of the Vatican Old Guard), the Pope has a short answer: “God is not afraid of new things!”
But where The Pope meets The Donald is on secular matters. Francis champions a church that stands up on social and political issues. The Vatican gave treaty recognition to Palestine at a time when Western governments have abandoned millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza to hopeless misery in refugee camps for decades. He has decried what he calls the new colonialism in Africa. He has said that Muslims and Christians are “brothers and sisters.” And he has also denounced the “idolatry” of money and the cult of consumerism.
The Donald holds the view that too much is never enough — a fact nicely captured in his cover-shot in the September 7, 2015 issue of Bloomberg Business Magazine. There, he is surrounded by a pile of cold, hard cash — the patron saint of the uber-wealthy. Had Trump been there when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he probably would have kept on dancing around the Golden Calf.
Here’s what Pope Francis had to say about that Bible story: “The worship of the ancient Golden Calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”
Running for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party in 2016, Trump has almost become the Golden Calf — an amalgam of what his critics say is the very worst of American and human values. If he is iconic, then he is the icon of an increasingly empty society.
Yet it is those values which Trump puts forward as the way to make the United States “great” again. The rich know best. By that, Trump apparently means denominating worth only in wealth, taking a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, bending everyone else to America’s interests, and creating an even more virulent strain of American exceptionalism than the one the country already suffers from.
And with his promise to create a super-military that no one would dare challenge, there are dark historical resonances. He sounds like Benito Mussolini invoking the spirit of the Roman Empire just before marching into Ethiopia — a fascist draped in red, white, and blue who wants to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”
That dovetails with walling out the Mexicans as rapists and thieves, stopping spending on the “global warming hoax”, and ordering a “total and complete shutdown” of all Muslims entering the United States. As Hilary Clinton observed this week, ISIS has a new master recruiter and his name is Donald Trump.
Just as Pope Francis runs on love and hope, The Donald has his own energy source. The fuel that has propelled him to the front of the Republican race for president, and maybe eventually to the White House, is a high-octane blend of fear and greed, with a smattering of hate tossed in.
There is history here. Fear allowed September 11, 2001 to be leveraged into a world-wide war on terror that has killed millions, wasted trillions, and, by all indications, increased the terror threat.
Fifty years before 9/11, fear allowed a ruthless U.S. Senator to convince his fellow citizens that communists had infiltrated every level of American life, including Hollywood and the federal government. Thousands of people were put under suspicion, others were blacklisted, and lives were ruined by a serial liar who had found America’s dark hot-button— fear.
Will the Donald find it again, or be upstaged by the bouncer from Buenos Aires who became Pope? It costs a billion dollars to run for President; getting to be Pope — priceless.
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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