In my book Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education, there is a chapter titled “A Pope Away from a Perfect Life for the Jesuits.” The chapter documents in depressing detail the ways in which the Jesuits began to wage war with the pope following Vatican II. It describes how the 28 Jesuit campuses became the battlefields for a protracted war between the Jesuits and Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. From heretical theologians to social justice warriors lobbying for LGBTQ+ clubs and activities and student access to contraception and insurance coverage for abortion, Jesuit campuses had become contested terrain for Catholic teachings.
Beyond these campuses, the Jesuit war on the papacy is well documented in a number of books and articles—including Passionate Uncertainty, which pointed out that most within the Jesuit Order “denigrated and deceived” each of the popes, disobeying them as they waited for each pope to die in the hope that the next pope would leave the Order with a free hand to accomplish their new, more worldly mission of social justice. Believing themselves to be just a pope away from a perfect life of freedom from doctrinal constraints, Rev. Paul Shaughnessy, S.J., observed in an article titled “Are the Jesuits Catholic?” published in The Weekly Standard in 2002 that “the Jesuits became papists who hate the Pope and evangelists who have lost the faith.”
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This animosity toward the pope disappeared with the election in 2013 of one of their own Jesuit priests, Rev. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J. As a Jesuit priest from Latin America, Pope Francis was at the epicenter of the earliest days of Jesuit resistance to the pope following Vatican II when a small number of Jesuit priests became involved in the propagation of a new, more liberating and empowering theology that coupled theology with sociology and a dominant concern for the “here and now” rather than eternal salvation. A longtime Jesuit commitment to missionary work in Latin America became redefined when the Jesuits began to view their mission in more worldly terms.
Specifically, the Jesuits began to see their work as helping Nicaragua defeat the regime led by the Somoza family. Allying with Daniel Ortega and the Marxist Sandinistas, the Jesuits became leaders in what emerged as a violent Sandinista attack on the Somoza regime. The Jesuit alliance also involved alliances with Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Soviet Union.
The Sandinista leaders openly proclaimed their ultimate aim: to create a Marxist society in Nicaragua to serve as the beginning of a Marxist revolution throughout Central America. The Jesuits were integral to this goal. With more than 90 percent of the Nicaraguan population belonging to the Catholic Church, the Sandinistas knew that they needed to enlist the Jesuits and the Church to legitimate their activities. Liberation Theology provided the Sandinista revolutionaries with support because this theology “of the people” combined Christianity with the very aim of Marxism-Leninism.
Pope Francis came of age during these early days of Liberation Theology. He appears to have been shaped by the new theology promoted by Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest known as the “Father of Liberation Theology.” Author of A Theology of Liberation, Gutierrez viewed theology as “situational,” defining a “process not an outcome.”
Likewise, there was Franciscan Liberation Theologian Leonardo Boff, the chief promoter of the dream of a Marxist utopia in which the “people of God” became the new Church and made the rules of the Church. In Boff’s book—which was strongly denounced by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1985—Boff dismissed the hierarchical authority of the Church, mandating that “the sacred power must be put back into the hands of the people.” As Malachi Martin explained in The Jesuits,
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No teaching or directing authority would be allowed “from above,” from the alien, hierarchic Church. In fact, the very symbols of that Church had to be firmly rejected. Symbols and all else must come “from below.” From the people.
Concerned about this new theology of the “Church of the People,” Cardinal Ratzinger pronounced that Boff revealed “a profound misunderstanding of the Catholic faith as regards the Church of God in the world.” Likewise, Pope John Paul II wrote a letter to the Nicaraguan bishops denouncing the “People’s Church” in especially harsh terms:
This church born of the people was a new invention that was both absurd and of perilous character…Only with difficulty could it avoid being infiltrated by strangely ideological connotations along the line of a certain political radicalization, for accomplishing determined aims.
Today, the Church under Pope Francis has become infiltrated by the same strange ideological connotations. Pope Francis has resurrected both Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff and given Boff papal advisor status. The National Catholic Register has suggested that Boff has become a “spokesman” for Pope Francis “with some of his most audacious proposals.” Boff was a major contributor to the encyclical Laudato Si’ and most recently lauded Fratelli Tutti on his website. Of Laudato Si’, Boff claimed that “Great names in world ecology affirmed: with this contribution, Pope Francis puts himself at the forefront of the contemporary ecological discussion.”
