Good morning kids. Hope you all had a blessed Easter Sunday. And of course the big news this morning is that Pope Francis has died.

I want to be very careful what I write and how I phrase my thoughts because the last thing I want to do is offend my dear Catholic brothers and sisters. Regardless of the background, and it is a very checkered background indeed of this Pope, he was the head of the Catholic church, and his death coming as it does at the end of the Easter holy week, makes writing this column all the more problematic.

Yet, that said, His life and background defined who he was. And by looking at this summary of his words and actions from the invaluable Discover the Networks makes it crystal clear, and this excerpt is just the bullet point intro:

*Calls on America to welcome illegal immigrants fleeing persecution in their homelands
*Characterizes capitalism as an economic system “where the powerful feed upon the powerless,” and which leads inevitably to “the greedy exploitation of environmental resources”
*Asserts that the “inequality” inherent in capitalist economies constitutes “the root of social ills” and “eventually engenders … violence”
*Believes that “the bulk of global warming” is due to “the great concentration of greenhouse gases” generated by “human action”
*Opposes the death penalty and life-in-prison

From my perspective, until the very end he was essentially the same unreconstructed Argentinian Communist he always was. It's not that he embraced and promoted secular political causes, it's that the causes he embraced were at the forefront of a movement that sought the dismantling of the Church he was supposed to lead and antithetical to his beliefs about humanity, inclusiveness, justice and the lofty ideals he supposedly championed.

Most horrendous was his embrace of Islam, as Islam ramped up its ongoing 1,500-year war against infidels, including the Church all over the world and most brutally in one of the last major bastions of Catholicism in the world, central Africa.

As he welcomed and embraced the most radical imams to the Vatican he made no mention of their bloody rampage, and yet insisted that the Western world and Catholics commit societal suicide by erasing their borders, destroying the greatest engine of prosperity the world will ever know, free market capitalism, and accepting the global warming/climate change lie as the excuse.

Also, his views on homosexuality and transsexualism in service to that dissolution were not merely the echoing of the sentiment of loving the sinner and hating the sin, but also as yet another assault on the Church from within. Perhaps if the Pope spent less time on demanding the faithful accept teachings antithetical to traditional Catholicism, he would have better served the faithful in defending them instead of defending the forces of darkness and evil seeking their destruction.

So an extremely flawed man who held the title of Pope has passed, and it will be up to the Lord to render His final judgement.

I certainly hope and pray that the next Pope is someone, who like John Paul II not only understands but perhaps like him at one point actually lived under the boot of and then stared down the face of evil. It would be most appropriate that Francis' successor be his diametric opposite. Given what's going on in the world today, it would be a Divine blessing, and I would be thrilled to see one of the cardinals from Nigeria, whose flock has and continues to be decimated by Boko Haram and its allies be elected.

I have no idea what the internal politics are of the Vatican and college of cardinals. Given the twisted politics of far too much of the Western and putatively Christian world, insofar as the infection known as Wokism, Perhaps the best we can hope for is not another Pope Fiction, communist in Papal drag. I don't think they'll have the stones to elect someone who will be as vocal in calling out Islam as Francis was in apologizing for Islam while denouncing the advancement of Western civilization over the past two millennia.

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