The Catholics Who Hate Joe Biden—And Pope Francis

 The Catholics Who Hate Joe Biden—And Pope Francis

Some of Trump’s most committed Catholic supporters have leveled dark charges against Biden as they battle to sway the vote in crucial swing states. And wait until you hear what they think of the pope.

from, The Atlantic, by Tish Durkin

The president has aligned his reelection campaign with a proudly revanchist corner of the Church, one unfamiliar to many American Catholics, even those adamantly opposed to abortion. This faction’s positions on women, gay people, Muslims, immigration, socialism, and climate change are much closer to those of pro-Trump white evangelicals than to those of liberal Catholics, whom they consider not to be Catholics at all. Far from being bothered by Trump’s scuffles with the pope—Francis has called the president’s immigration policies “not Christian,” Trump has called him “disgraceful” for saying such a thing, and so on—these ultraconservatives applaud the attacks on the leader of their Church. To them, Francis is the embodiment of abhorrent modernist, globalist, even secularist values.

The effective leader of this part of the Church, which is both superglued to certainty and whirring with conspiracy, is Carlo Maria Viganò. “So honored by Archbishop Viganò’s incredible letter to me,” Trump tweeted in early June, to little general notice. “I hope everyone, religious or not, reads it!” Later, during one of the several White House interviews he has granted to EWTN, the conservative Catholic television network, the president lauded Viganò as a “great gentleman,” who’d written “a tremendous letter of support from the Catholic Church.”....

As Pope Francis might be at pains to point out, Viganò doesn’t speak for the Church. Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as the papal nuncio, or representative, to Washington, D.C., in 2011, a post he occupied until 2016, when he entered an exceedingly active retirement, lobbing grenades at Benedict’s more liberal successor. The most sensational of these was Viganò’s 2018 call for Francis to resign ...

Read the whole story here:  The Atlantic