Mike Pompeo As the 2024 Republican primary election approaches, get the engines revving with a book (entitled Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love) that doesn’t shy away from a sharp attack on foreign policy Pope Francis.
The former US Secretary of State even dedicates a chapter to “the hypocrisy of the Holy See” that he would have come to terms with during his 2018-2021 tenure. For Pompeo “politics alien”. Vatican affairs always leaned to the left” and refers primarily to the attitude shown towards China during this pontificate. It is no secret that the republican politician repeatedly opposed the Sino-Vatican provisional appointment agreed on September 22, 2018 bishops, to a public statement in a September 2020 article in First Things and the call Holy See not to renew him in order not to “endanger his moral authority”.
This intervention by the acting US Secretary of State caused a major standstill in the Apostolic Palace, so that the Pope showed up a few days later on the occasion of his visit to Rome she refused to meet him. The official reason was the inappropriateness of receiving political authorities who are on the campaign trail. But Pompeo – who was then preparing for the November 3, 2020 presidential election that ended in the disputed defeat donald trump – he must not have believed this motivation, and more than two years later he returned to these facts to make a fairly clear verdict on the Argentine Pope. “Reagan had John Paul II as an ally, we were involved with Pope Francis,” writes the former CIA director.
The tension between the US and the Holy See
Those present well remembered the tense climate between representatives of the Vatican Secretariat of State and those of the US Administration during the Symposium on Religious Freedom organized on September 30, 2020 by the US Embassy to the Holy See at the Hotel Roman Excelsior. The Secretary for Relations with States, Monsignor Paul Richard Gallagher At the time, he did not hide his anger at his American counterpart and accused him of wanting to instrumentalize the pope in view of the elections, and confirmed that this was one of the reasons for this Bergoglio he hadn’t wanted to have it.
For his part, Pompeo did not give in and also on this occasion reiterated the need to “oppose tyrannical regimes” and “support those who, according to the teaching of John Paul II, fight for religious freedom”. Reading the pages of his book today, the reconstruction of who interpreted this reference to the Polish saint – who also went down in history for his anti-communism – as an attempt to oppose him to Francis’ policy of dialogue with Beijing seems to be confirmation Find. Not coincidentally, Repubblica also reports, the Trump administration’s US Secretary of State also revealed that “one of my great allies was Cardinal Joseph Zen,” who told him in a phone call about the civil liberties situation in Hong Kong “that the failure of the Vatican was worse than the war”. Zen has been the biggest critic of the bishop-appointing agreement that Francis was granted in a recent private audience after a flagrant rejection that came at about the same time as Pompey’s trip to Rome.
The Race for the White House
The Republican politician’s criticisms of the Pope also include recalling their 2019 meeting where Bergoglio “acknowledged that it was the people of the world follow But then he changed the subject and called on the United States to align its policy on the southern border with the Christian call to help the weakest.” “He really didn’t understand the issue,” is Pompeo’s succinct verdict. The current pontificate could jeopardize his consensus among the Republican base of the Catholic faith in the event of his eventual participation in the primary. In fact, it’s no secret that Francis is little loved among American conservatives. The ranged fight the Pope had with him donald trump when, in his 2016 presidential election, upon returning from a trip to Mexico, he called “non-Christians” those who thought of building walls after receiving the angry backlash of the tycoon who accused him of getting involved in politics, he did not compromise the consensus of non-progressive Catholics that would later guide his election to the White House.
On the contrary, dissatisfaction with the current pontificate surfaced on some fringes of the Church – particularly in the States – after dealing with the death of Benedict XVI it could appeal to a possible candidate for the presidential nomination under the GOP banner. The mention of two popular figures among American conservative Catholics, such as John Paul II and Cardinal Zen, could attest to this.