My principal purpose in visiting Buenos Aires is to learn about its not-so-favorite son, Jorge Bergoglio, who still hasn’t visited Argentina since becoming Pope Francis. During my first few days here, I asked every Catholic I met to explain that anomaly. I got some blunt and brutal answers.
“We all know he is a son of a bitch,” said a former prosecutor to me. “We are ashamed of him. He represents our worst qualities.”
His friend chipped in that Catholics consider Francis “to be a fake, a make-believe pope,” not to mention, he added, an uncultured, ill-mannered flake.
The former prosecutor oozed contempt for Francis: “He knows nothing — not morals, not theology, not history. Nothing. Only power interests him.”
The description of Pope Francis as a power-mad ideologue is very widespread, I am finding. I spoke at length with Antonio Caponnetto, who is the Argentine author of several books on Pope Francis. “At seminary, his classmates called him ‘Machiavelli,’ ” he noted.
Caponnetto gives two reasons for why the pope has avoided his home country: one, at least half the country hates him, and two, Francis dislikes the supposedly “conservative,” pro-capitalist Macri regime. The latter reason is absurd: Macri is hardly conservative, as Argentine conservatives are the first to say.
On Wednesday morning, I visited with Santiago Estrada, Argentina’s former ambassador to the Holy See. He has been close to Bergoglio for decades, but he allowed that Bergoglio “hates businessmen.” He dislikes Macri, he said, not because Macri is a pillar of conservatism but because Macri is simply not as anti-business “as the pope.” Estrada was loath to criticize his friend, but he conceded that the pope’s promotion of molesting bishops has been “inexplicable.”
Why Pope Francis Hasn’t Visited Argentina, The American Spectator, 22 August 2019 (Bold is CMJ's for emphasis.)
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