PopeWatch: Pope Peron

George Neumayr in Argentina continues to get an image of Pope Francis at complete variance from how Pope Francis is portrayed in the media:

One persistent and widespread story about Bergoglio is that he used bailing out bad priests as a form of leverage over them.

“Bergoglio would call up those investigating, say, a pederast priest and tell them to back off,” a Buenos Aires Church insider told me. “He then would inform the offending priest of his intervention and then use that to extract total obedience from him.” Many such priests were in Bergoglio’s debt.

Some have wondered why as pope Bergoglio has surrounded himself with so many crooks, creeps, and degenerates. But that is no mystery to Argentine Catholics. “He did the same as archbishop,” says one. “He uses their secrets to control them.” It was this nasty management tactic that led Bergoglio into an alliance with Theodore McCarrick and countless other abusers.

Argentine Catholics describe Bergoglio as an ecclesiastical Peron — a ruthless, socialism-addled chameleon willing to tell any lie and try any low tactic to preserve power.

“Peron used to say he is a weather vane, that he moved where the wind went,” a journalist said to me. “Bergoglio was like that too. On Monday he was a liberal. On Tuesday he was a conservative. On Wednesday he was a liberal again. And so on.”

To try and understand Bergoglio, I visited key places in his life in Buenos Aires — from where he was born to where he worked. I have to say it was a pretty dismal tour. My guide noted at the outset of our trip that much of the Bergoglio story rests on “lies” designed to boost the tourism industry. “It costs $100 to go on a Bergoglio tour,” he said. Needless to say, I didn’t see anyone on one of them. In an economy in which interest rates have risen to 75 percent, a hundred dollars is a major investment.

One stop on the tour is the confessional at the Basilica of St. Joseph, where Bergoglio supposedly decided to become a Jesuit. My guide laughed at that yarn. “The dates don’t even match up in the official accounts. In fact, he had decided years before,” he said. He added that Bergoglio’s reason for entering the order was not spiritual but political: he knew the order was rapidly moving to the left and he was eager to take that ideological journey.

Go here to read the rest.  No wonder the Pope’s life in Argentina has been portrayed in the vaguest of generalities. Go here for a good article by Sandro Magister in 2015 giving some background on the Pope as Peronist.  The coverage, or rather the non coverage, of the Pope’s life prior to him becoming Pope, demonstrates the usual Leftist bias of the media, and that “Catholic journalism” tends to be a very bad joke.