Pope Francis, the fake “Peace Pope” and “Pope of the Poor,” kneels in thrall to U.S. finance capital—the world’s leading source of war, suffering, and racist exploitation. With the Catholic church facing steep declines in membership, child-abuse scandals and the loss of critical revenue, Pope Francis has been charged with forging an alliance with U.S finance capital. To deceive Catholics and progressive workers in general, the pope is espousing left-sounding ideas, ranging from an indictment of capitalist inequality to a call to the rich and powerful to take action against climate change.
But don’t be fooled. The Pope is no friend of the poor—and certainly no enemy of the capitalist bosses. In fact, his liberalization campaign reflects the growing influence of U.S. finance capitalists—the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class—within the church. By visiting the U.S., “His Holiness” hopes to steer Catholics and others toward backing the Democratic Party in 2016—the party that, at least for the moment, appears to be the bosses’ most reliable vehicle for expanding war and fascism. Francis’s job is to pacify workers who are disillusioned with capitalism and to restore their faith in reforming this rotten system.
This is nothing new. Going back to feudal times, the Catholic Church has used religion to promote and justify the agenda of the ruling class—along with its own vast business interests. Workers of the world need to see the Pope’s game for what it is: a charade to mislead workers and subvert revolutionary politics. Instead, workers need to channel their anger into support for the Progressive Labor Party, the only organization that can create revolutionary change. PLP fights for the total destruction of capitalism, not the phony cosmetic changes sought by the Pope.
The Catholic Church is in dire need of reform. In 2013, in response to a series of crooked Vatican bank deals and a declining membership base, the church replaced Benedict XVI—a German who’d joined the Hitler Youth—with the more liberal Francis.  But this wasn’t enough to check the church’s downward spiral. Francis has been forced to close schools and churches across the U.S. to pay billions in settlements in child abuse cases. Now he’s turning to U.S. finance capital for help.  
The Pope’s economic dealings reveal his priorities more clearly than his lofty words. In his effort to clean up the money-laundering Vatican Bank, he replaced Ernst von Freyburg, heir to a ship-building fortune from the Hitler era, with Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, a French-born executive at Invesco, a U.S. asset management firm. On June 25, even as he gave lip service to condemn the profit system’s greed, he blessed the heavyweight imperialist leaders of the phony “Inclusive Capitalism” movement, including Bill Clinton, the British Rothschilds, JPMorgan Chase, Prince Charles, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Pope’s lead advisor on the current refugee crisis is ultra-capitalist Peter Sutherland. After granting Francis an audience in June, Sutherland dictated the Pope’s bogus “humanitarian” stance, subsequently adopted by the capitalist rulers in Germany and other European nations as a means to discredit Russian bosses. Sutherland is the chairman of Goldman Sachs International and ex-chairman of British Petroleum. To protect their billions in profits, both Goldman and BP need the U.S. war machine to continue slaughtering workers in the Middle East.
On his U.S. tour, Francis is cheerleading for the Democrats and their campaign to keep hold of the White House. His position on global warming neatly dovetails with theirs, in contrast to the anti-science Republican deniers. Like Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, Francis backs Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which buys time for the U.S. bosses to build up for global war. The Boston Globe (9/13/15) foresees Francis making pro-Democrat inroads against the GOP on several levels:
Conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats have the most to gain, given the pope’s expected focus on issues such as immigration and the fight against climate change. Moreover, given perceptions that the U.S. Church has been moving into a steadily tighter alliance with the Republicans, anything that cuts in a different direction arguably helps the opposition.
So just where do the Pope’s big ideas come from?
In an address during a meeting organized by the Foundation for Sustainable Development, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church reminded key personalities from the fields of science, religion, politics, and economics that finding solutions to global warming is a matter of social justice, since “peoples, communities, men and women, are at risk” (Christian Today, 9/13/15).
The Foundation has cashed fat checks from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 1996.
The pontiff’s other travels reflect similar U.S.-friendly politics. In July, Francis paid a call on Evo Morales, Bolivia’s “socialist” leader. As Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper reported (10/14/14), Morales has “transformed Bolivia from an ‘economic basket case’ into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF.” Both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are controlled by U.S. finance capital; they were especially pleased when Morales lowered Bolivia’s legal working age to 10 years. The Pope is no friend of the working class.
As workers worldwide see more clearly that capitalism leads to mass poverty and imperialist war, the Catholic Church and the U.S. finance capitalist class are desperately looking for misleaders to stifle workers’ anger. Like his counterpart, Barack Obama, Pope Francis is the friendly face of this monstrous profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism — and its bosses, wars, racism, sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, PLP, can end capitalist atrocities and put cynical salesmen like Pope Francis out of business.