Please forgive me, dear reader, for burdening you with another piece on the doings of our very unusual Pope, but I just cannot bear it. Is there nothing to which Francis’s public relations team will not stoop? Do they feel no shame at the exploitation of gravely ill children to depict Francis, with the aid of the fawning liberal media, as the Pope of Mercy who is waging a Revolution of Tenderness? I am referring to an infuriating, blatantly staged video of Francis and the wife of Mexico’s President, Angelica Rivera, administering oral medication to a child at Federico Gomez Children’s Hospital, where poor children with cancer, genetic deformties, and neurlogical disorders come for treatment. Herewith a still shot:
This poor child hardly needed Francis to squeeze a few drops of medicine into his mouth in front of cameras, as opposed to a simple private visit in the hospital. But Francis’s handlers evidently determined that he needed to be seen doing something like this in order to serve the narrative of Francis the Healer, whose “miraculous kiss” on the head made “a noticeable difference” in another child’s brain tumor, according to the embedded media sycophants who failed to credit multiple rounds of chemotherapy. (Francis is constantly
.be" target="_blank">kissing and hugging babies and small children, but he never seems to administer a blessing to any of them.) Moreover, the boy hardly needed to be held up to the medicine dropper by Rivera, a former actress in TV soap operas who married President Enrique Peña Nieto after divorcing her first husband, with whom she has three children, and then obtaining a very fishy annulment from the Archdiocese of Mexico City in a scant two months. But Rivera needed to be seen holding a sick child in order to serve her own narrative: the First Lady Who Really Cares. By the way, Rivera’s marriage to Peña Nieto is the subject of great controversy in Mexico, including an investigative report by a leading Mexican journalist, Carmen Aristegui. Arestgui alleges that the annulment of Rivera’s first marriage, to Jose Alberto Castro, was patently groundless because it was based on the alleged invalidity of a wedding ceremony performed on the beach by Mexico’s famed “priest to celebrities,” Fr. José Luis Salinas, when in fact there had been a prior church wedding officiated by another priest and the ceremony on the beach was merely a blessing of the prior wedding for publicity purposes.
When Fr. Salinas blew the whistle on the rigged annulment, the Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Roberto Rivera, not only failed to address the irregularity of the proceeding but attempted to destroy Salinas by suspending him and forbidding him to reside in Mexico City according to a sentence of the archdiocesan tribunal, rendered while Salinas was sick with cancer and without representation or an opportunity to defend himself. With the support of Bishop José Andrés Salinas Corral, however, Fr. Salinas was able to have this sentence overturned by the Roman Rota, which pronounced it “a travesty of justice.” Salinas, whose letter of protest to Francis went unanswered, died of cancer last October.
While in Mexico City, however, Francis scolded an audience of bishops and priests concerning “the gloomy mist of worldliness” and warned: “Do not allow yourselves to be corrupted by trivial materialism or by the seductive illusion of underhanded agreements; do not place your faith in the ‘chariots and horses’ of today’s Pharaohs.”
These expressions of disdain for worldliness, corrupt agreements and high and mighty rulers did not prevent Francis from hobnobbing with Mexico’s President and his suspiciously acquired wife, or warmly embracing the same Cardinal who turned a blind eye to her dubious annulment, tried to destroy the priest who protested it, and covered up the crimes of priests who molest altar boys, only to be promoted by Francis to a high Vatican post.
Some things never change, and one of these is the consistent lack of correspondence between Francis’s words and his deeds.
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Christopher A. Ferrara: President and lead counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Inc., Mr. Ferrara has been at the forefront of the legal defense of pro-lifers for the better part of a quarter century. Having served with the legal team for high profile victims of the culture of death such as Terri Schiavo, he has long since distinguished him a premier civil rights Catholic lawyer. Mr. Ferrara has been a lead columnist for The Remnant since 2000 and has authored several books published by The Remnant Press, including the bestseller The Great Façade. Together with his children and wife, Wendy, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.