The Dictator Pope By Peter West

     Among the claims made by Marcantonio Colonna in The Dictator Pope: the Inside Story of the Francis Papacy, (Regnery, 2018), is that the Pope helped finance the Clinton election campaign as the Pope did not want Donald Trump, who on the face of it was opposed to the insane globalism of the Pope, to win. The money came from Peter’s Pence which was supposed to help the needy – you know, migrants. According to Colonna:

“Those who are shocked to hear Francis described as a dictator would not question the fact that he is the most politically minded pope to come to the throne for many centuries. This characterization is not a libel of his enemies but is emphasised by so unqualified an admirer as Austen Ivereigh. We need to understand that the key to Francis’s reckless style—the indifference to reform, the tyrannical acts, the feverish quest for popular approval—is that his prime concern is not in fact the government of the Church.

Ivereigh has traced in detail Francis’s ambition to make himself a political world leader; he set out with a bombastic vision of the “decadence” of Europe which would be exploited by Latin America to reassert itself, and his dream was to rally the continent into “la patria grande” (the great fatherland) to challenge the imperialist dominance of the United States. This objective was behind his appointment as secretary of state of Cardinal Parolin, who had been a much-praised papal nuncio to Mexico and Venezuela, and he was set to work to bind the continent together under the aegis of the Holy See.
The actual results have been analysed by an Italian journalist:

“The image of Francis, who had chances to establish himself as “moral leader of the continent” . . . is rapidly going into crisis, despite the outstanding work of the Secretary of State Parolin: in Cuba . . . Vatican diplomacy is stumbling; in Colombia the peace referendum was lost ruinously because the country’s Protestants sabotaged it; in Venezuela all political sides agree that the Vatican’s peace-making effort has worsened rather than improved the situation; and finally in Brazil, after the success of the world youth day, Rio de Janeiro has a mayor who is a Protestant bishop, anti-Catholic, and above all critical of the Episcopal Conference.”

The election of Donald Trump shattered the assumptions on which Francis’s political strategy was based. With all its macho Latin American rhetoric, the plan depended on the presence in the White House of a liberal president willing to abase himself (or herself) to Latin American claims. It collapses before a president whose response to troublemakers beyond the Rio Grande is to build a wall against them. That is why in 2016 Pope Francis staked all his chips on a Clinton presidency. Those around him, beginning with Cardinal Parolin, told him that Donald Trump had no hope of winning, and on Francis’s orders the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See helped finance Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. (It is now being said that the money used for it came from Peter’s Pence, the donations of the faithful made supposedly for charitable purposes.) Francis also intervened in the campaign by word, implicitly accusing Trump of not being a Christian. When Trump won, Francis was furious with his advisers. This may be one reason why Cardinal Parolin has lost favour: he proved himself fallible on predicting political outcomes in the United States, and he has failed to deliver the goods in Latin America.”

     Everyday I find yet another reason to celebrate my decision to leave the Catholic church. I know that this will be a hard decision for my brothers and sisters in the Faith, but I can see no way. At present the rot is too deep, if not total.
  https://www.amazon.com/Dictator-Pope-Inside-Francis-Papacy/dp/1621578321