THE LAST USEFUL IDIOT:

It is evident by now that the pontificate of Francis has two linchpins, religious and political. The religious one is the shower of mercy that purifies everyone and everything. The political one is the battle on a worldwide scale against "the economy that kills," which the pope wants to fight together with those "popular movements," his definition, in which he sees the future of humanity shining.

One has to go back to Paul VI to find another pope wedded to an organic political framework, in his case that of the European Catholic parties of the twentieth century, in Italy the DC of Alcide De Gasperi and in Germany the CDU of Konrad Adenauer. To this European political tradition, which moreover has faded away, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is an outsider. As an Argentine, his seedling ground is another one altogether. And it has a name that has a negative connotation in Europe, but not in the pope's native land: populism.

"The word 'people' is not a logical category, it is a mystical category," Francis said last February, on his way back from Mexico. Afterward, interviewed by his Jesuit confrere Antonio Spadaro, he adjusted his aim. Rather than "mystical," he said, "in the sense that everything the people does is good," it is better to say "mythical." "It takes a myth to understand the people."

Bergoglio recounts this myth every time he calls around him the "popular movements." He has done it three times so far: the first time in Rome in 2014, the second in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in 2015, the third last November 5, again in Rome. Every time he rouses the audience with endless speeches, of around thirty pages each, which when put together now form the political manifesto of this pope.

The movements that Francis calls to himself are not ones that he created, they preexist him. There is nothing overtly Catholic about them. They are in part the heirs of the memorable anti-capitalist and anti-globalization gatherings in Seattle and Porto Alegre. [...]

Meanwhile, however, the populist South American leftists for whom Bergoglio shows such a liking are going through one downfall after another: in Argentina, in Brazil, in Peru, in Venezuela.

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