We Catholics were deeply scandalized when Pope Francis sent then-Cardinal McCarrick (yes, the child molester now hiding from reporters) to negotiate a deal with Communist China. Its terms remain partly secret. That piece of transparency hearkens back to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Two apparent enemies inked a deal against the West, the secret provisions including the carve-up of free Poland.

Selling Out Chinese Christians

Among the public terms of the China deal, the Vatican surrendered its power to pick Chinese bishops. It turned that key right over to the atheist Communist Party, which cultivates collaborator priests it can trust. This deal, which hero of the faith Cardinal Zen called an “abandonment” of the faithful, “underground” Church, gained Catholics no new protections. In fact, the Chinese government has stepped up persecutions of Catholics and others. It’s demolishing churches, burning Bibles, and forcing churches to replace Christian images with Communist Chinese icons.

What did the Vatican gain? A whistleblower reports that $2 billion went from wealthy China to this cash-strapped, scandal plagued papacy. On a public level, Pope Francis gained an ally against the Trump administration, and the capitalist West.

Allying with China Against Trump’s America

After a whirlwind (carefully shepherded) tour of Potemkin China, the highest Church official on science and Catholic social teaching, Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, spoke out. He praised China as living out Catholic social teaching far better than … the U.S. under Donald Trump. Later, Sorondo proclaimed Francis’s “trust” for Communist China, and promised to recognize its claim over Taiwan. He announced that at a meeting of the regime’s organ thieves, who (Forbes reports) steal them from live political prisoners, especially Uyghur Muslims.

Some two million Uyghurs now languish in camps, some working as slaves making sneakers for Nike. Francis has never spoken out, either on the persecution of Christians or of Uyghurs.

Soros Money to Help Churches “Disrupt Trump”

Remember that Francis trashed Donald Trump as “not a Christian” and visited the U.S. on the eve of the 2016 election. The Leftist group PICO took $650,000 from George Soros to spin that as a campaign tour for Democrats. When that fact got leaked, how did Francis respond? He sent PICO an effusive message of support for its far-left Modesto Meeting in 2017. At it, 24 U.S. bishops, and Vatican cardinal (Peter Turkson) pledged to use churches to foil immigration enforcement. They urged all Catholics to “disrupt Trump.”

Silencing Pro-Life Priests, Boosting Pro-Gay Clerics

Now on the eve of another pivotal election, prominent U.S. bishops and their conference, the USCCB, make their sympathies obvious. This month, Father Frank Pavone, founder of Priests for Life, was ordered by his bishop to resign as a Trump campaign adviser. (A good priest, he obeyed.) Perhaps that was too political for the bishops?

No, it was just the wrong kind of politics. The Democratic National Convention featured a benediction by media figure and LGBT advocate Fr. James Martin, SJ. No flak from his Jesuit superior, or the local bishop, over that. When Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters tried to burn a historic Washington, D.C. church, the Catholic archbishop, Wilton Gregory, denounced Trump for visiting the church the next day. He slandered as outrageous, opportunistic politics Trump’s visit to the John Paul II Shrine the day after that. This, even though the visit had been planned for months, and Gregory had been invited.

Why lie about the president to help the Democratic party? Why ban a priest from publicly supporting Donald Trump, but allow another priest to take much more high-profile role helping the whole Democratic party?

A Secret Concordat with the Democrats?

I have a theory. Just as the Vatican under Pope Francis made a deal with an anti-Catholic regime, so the U.S. bishops have made a secret or tacit deal with the pro-abortion, anti-Christian Democrats. The bishops offer the Democrats political cover for the most pro-abortion platform adopted by any political group on earth. No restrictions on abortion, right up through birth. Our taxpayer money would go to pay for abortions.

Biden supports forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to dispense abortion pills, or else be forced to close their hospices for the elderly. He would narrow religious liberty for Christians across the board, and appoint judges to give that promise teeth.

The Church will cast a tattered Seamless Garment from the 1970s over all that. It won’t complain that his choice for vice president, Kamala Harris, started an effort (still ongoing) to imprison pro-life journalists. (Read my interview with David Daleiden, who reports on the early morning, SWAT-style raid on his home.) Harris punished those pro-lifers who exposed her campaign donor, Planned Parenthood, as illegally selling human organs, just as … those Chinese Communists with whom Bishop Sorondo hobnobs like to do. Are you seeing a pattern here?

More Immigrants, More Taxpayer Cash

What do the bishops get in return? If Biden suspends, as promised, all enforcement at our borders, quite a bit. Already, the bishops reap 40 percent of their annual budget from federal non-profit contracts, most of them serving immigrants (legal or not). If our nation is flooded with a new wave of illegals after January, that percentage might shoot up higher.

What better way to make up the weekly collections lost when bishops shuttered our churches? I suspect it rankles those clerics to be reliant at all on voluntary donations from grubby laymen, anyway. They seem to crave an arrangement like the one bishops have in Germany: Catholic laymen are taxed by the government almost 10% of their income, which goes to the church. Refuse? You’re excommunicated.

No Awkward Questions About Sex Abuse

But there’s an even darker side to this. Conservative Catholics like me have been calling for the Trump administration to launch a RICO probe, through the Department of Justice, into bishops shuffling sex abusers across state lines for decades. That probe would force the Church to cough up files on men like McCarrick. They might implicate their allies, such as Archbishop Gregory, who colluded with McCarrick in 2002 to exempt bishops (such as McCarrick) from penalties for abusing kids or hiding abusers.

Such a probe would strip the bishops’ lucrative non-profits of the right to bid for federal contracts. So 40% of their money would go poof, overnight. The money that sloshes around in the USCCB, helping it lobby for open borders, gun bans, and ever more welfare spending, would go somewhere else.

Kamala Harris: Tough on Pro-Lifers, Easy on Pedophiles

Why would the bishops think a Biden/Harris administration would keep them safe from such a probe? Just take a look at Harris’s record as District Attorney of San Francisco and California attorney general. As George Neumayr reports: 

Perhaps the deepest and most troubling mystery of Kamala Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor centers on the disturbing issue of sexual abuse of children by priests,” writes Peter Schweizer in Profiles in Corruption. “During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred despite the protests of victim groups.”

Harris ran against a local D.A. who’d been pursuing sex abusers. As Schweizer notes, cash started rolling into her campaign from rich liberal Catholics and law firms that worked with the Church. Harris wasn’t Catholic. But somehow wealthy donors with Church connections started fighting for her to win. According to Neumayr:

After Hallinan lost to Harris, the “fate of the investigation into Catholic priest abuse would dramatically change — and not for the better,” according to Schweizer. Harris quickly buried Hallinan’s abuse investigations: “Harris, who had been a sexual crimes prosecutor early in her career, moved in the opposite direction of Hallinan and worked to cover up the records.”

The Church Bought Immunity from Harris

Accusations of appalling child abuse of boys at an elite Jesuit prep school over decades disappeared in the Memory Hole. The Church saved millions in court costs and likely settlements. The abusers never came to light, and the victims were never acknowledged or compensated.

Harris turned her attention to more important causes, like imprisoning pro-life journalists.

And that’s why I think so many bishops are pulling for her and Biden. They can’t afford to let little things like baby parts, embattled nuns, abused kids, or American freedom and public order get in the way of meeting payroll. They really don’t want the light of day shining on the crimes of their past. That’s why to this day there has been no public report on how Theodore McCarrick rose to the top of the U.S. church. His appointees and allies still own and operate it today.

NOTE: After this column was published, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York announced he will offer a benediction at the Republican National Convention.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”