Pope Francis

[Jan Klimkowski]

Robert Parry tells it like it was.

And is.

On the Payroll
In other words, yes, the U.S. government was covertly organizing and funding the activities of the supposedly "independent" internal opposition in Nicaragua. And, according to more than a dozen sources that I interviewed inside the Contra movement or close to U.S. intelligence, the Reagan administration had funneled CIA money to virtually every segment of the internal opposition, from the Catholic Church to La Prensa to business and labor groups to political parties.
"We've always had the internal opposition on the CIA payroll," one U.S. government official said. The CIA's budget line for Nicaraguan political action separate from Contra military operations was about $10 million a year, my sources said. I learned that the CIA had been using the Church and Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo to funnel money into Nicaragua.
Obando was a plodding but somewhat complex character. In the 1970s, he had criticized the repression of the Somoza dictatorship and expressed some sympathy for the young Sandinista revolutionaries who were trying to bring social and economic changes to Nicaragua.
However, after the murder of El Salvador's Archbishop Romero in 1980 and Pope John Paul II's repudiation of "liberation theology," Obando shifted clumsily into the anti-Sandinista camp, attacking the "people's church" and accusing the Sandinistas of "godless communism."
On May 25, 1985, he was rewarded when the Pope named him Cardinal for Central America. Then, despite mounting evidence of Contra atrocities, Obando traveled to the United States in January 1986 and threw his support behind a renewal on military aid to the Contras.
All this made a lot more sense after factoring in that Obando had essentially been put onto the CIA's payroll. The CIA funding for Nicaragua's Catholic Church was originally unearthed in 1985 by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, which then insisted that the money be cut off to avoid compromising Obando further.
But the funding was simply transferred to another secret operation headed by White House aide Oliver North. In fall 1985, North earmarked $100,000 of his privately raised money to go to Obando for his anti-Sandinista activities, I learned from my sources.
I was also told that the CIA's support for Obando and the Catholic hierarchy went through a maze of cut-outs in Europe, apparently to give Obando deniability. But one well-placed Nicaraguan exile said he had spoken with Obando about the money and the Cardinal had expressed fear that his past receipt of CIA funding would come out.

Again, Bergoglio is either a moral coward or complicit.

In either case, he is not fit to be the custodian of the gospel of Jesus, to be Pope.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was a priest with moral courage, and told the truth:

In less than three years, more than fifty priests have been attacked, threatened, calumniated. Six are already martyrs -- they were murdered. Some have been tortured and others expelled [from the country]. Nuns have also been persecuted. The archdiocesan radio station and educational institutions that are Catholic or of a Christian inspiration have been attacked, threatened, intimidated, even bombed. Several parish communities have been raided. If all this has happened to persons who are the most evident representatives of the Church, you can guess what has happened to ordinary Christians, to the campesinos, catechists, lay ministers, and to the ecclesial base communities. There have been threats, arrests, tortures, murders, numbering in the hundreds and thousands. . . . But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked. That part of the church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defense. Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor.

Óscar Romero, Speech at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, Feb. 2, 1980

For telling the truth and siding with the poor in a very real sense, Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered by a team led by one of America's favourite fascists, Roberto D'Aubuisson

D'Aubuisson was known as "Blowtorch Bob", due to the sadistic glee with which he used a blowtorch whilst torturing (official language "interrogating") anyone with a functioning moral conscience.

Archbishop Oscar Romero may have been fit to be the custodian of the gospel of Jesus Christ. To be Pope.

But that was never going to happen.

Instead, the Catholic Church in latin America sold out the "liberation theology" priests and sided with the United Fruit Company & its successors against the poor.

Here's an appropriate song: