WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Umanita Nova #14-25 - On the death of the pope king. The populist mask of a monarch (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Rome under lockdown. Roads closed, squares militarized, snipers on the

roofs, anti-drone systems activated, destroyers ready on the Tiber. To
say goodbye to a foreign sovereign, Jorge Mario Bergoglio known as "Pope
Francis", the city was transformed into a theater of war. Alarms bounced
off citizens' cell phones like a new liturgy of anxiety, while the
entire population, unaware and helpless, found itself sequestered inside
its own city. And of course, as always, the ones who paid the bill were
the Italian citizens themselves, those who provide the Vatican's water
for free and who now also had to finance the funeral staging of yet
another monarch from beyond the Tiber.

Not only physical repression, but also cultural and symbolic: the Meloni
government has proclaimed five days of national mourning, masking a
precise political will behind religious mourning: to scale down,
obscure, extinguish April 25, Liberation Day, the celebration of
anti-fascism that the neo-fascist executive has never digested. In
Italy, the righteous dead can still be more useful than the living one
who fights.

Faced with this scenario, the hypocritical parade of the powerful took
place in all its squalor. Politicians from the right and the "left"
showed up at the funeral, kneeling before that symbol of power. Those
who were absent, if there were any, were only absent out of opportunism
and not conviction.

He is remembered as "the Pope of the poor", but Pope Francis, as Daniele
Ratti recalled in the previous issue, has never had the courage, nor the
will, to support Liberation Theology, which, in Latin America, sought to
weld together Christianity and the fight against oppression. Indeed,
history tells us the opposite: Jorge Bergoglio, in Argentina, has always
kept himself distant - or even hostile - to those experiences. He openly
condemned his Jesuit brothers who adhered to the ideals of Gustavo
Gutiérrez, Helder Câmara and Leonardo Boff. His vision of "charity" has
always been paternalistic, not revolutionary!

In 2004 he defined the introduction of sexual education in the schools
of Buenos Aires as "fascism". In 2010 he spoke of a "war of God" against
equal marriage. Far from openness and modernity: Bergoglio represented
the most conservative wing of the Argentine Church, the one that, as
recalled by the Uruguayan intellectual Alberto Methol Ferré, had let the
poor's drive towards liberation die out of fear of compromising itself
politically.

During Videla's military dictatorship, as journalist Horacio Verbitsky
denounces in his book "El silencio", Bergoglio's biography was closely
tied to the dark pages of the "Guardia de Hierro" and the disappearance
of two Jesuits, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. Far from being the
"Pope of the disappeared", his deafening silence towards a bloodthirsty
regime has a strong echo.

Ratti had the courage to say it without hypocrisy: a pope remains a
pope, that is, a reactionary. The Western media, in their eagerness to
always find a "good Pope", have swept Bergoglio's real positions under
the carpet.

Feminism? For him, it's just "machismo with a skirt". Homosexuality? To
be "cured with psychiatry" if it manifests itself too early. And the gay
lobby is one of the obsessions to be fought, even within the Church.
Women priests? A clear and irrevocable "no". Married priests? Only
"maybe," and only in "remote corners" like the Amazon. Abortion? A crime
worse than terrorism: doctors who practice it are "hit men for hire."

On the front of ecclesiastical pedophilia, Pope Francis has not been the
purifier we are told: he has defended and protected key figures in the
hierarchy involved in huge scandals. In Argentina, he tried to cover up
the case of the pedophile priest Julio César Grassi; as Pope, he never
found the time to meet Jean-Marc Sauvé, author of the report on abuse in
France.

When in 2015 the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo was hit by Islamist
terrorism, an attack that killed seventeen victims, Francis found a way
to "condemn" the attack... but immediately added that those who insult
the faith of others "should expect a punch." An elegant way of saying
that freedom of expression can be sacrificed in the face of religion.

In short, Jorge Bergoglio has certainly not changed the Church. He has
only updated the marketing. An iPad in his hand, a few populist
gestures, millions of followers on X (formerly Twitter, now owned by X
Holdings Corp., a company controlled by Elon Musk), and a ton of
rhetoric about the poor - rhetoric never translated into real political
action against the systemic oppression that the Church itself has
historically supported.

Pope Francis was not a "progressive." He was a conservative with a
smile, the human face of a rotten institution, which is saved only by
re-proposing itself with clever communication tricks. He fought against
every real form of liberation, from Latin America to Europe, and
defended until the end the patriarchal, authoritarian and violent system
that we call the Catholic Church.

For this reason today, while the powerful bow before his coffin, we
continue to bow only before those who truly fight to liberate the world.

'gnazio Fatina

https://umanitanova.org/category/2025/numero_14-2025/
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