[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

Pope Leo XIV met Arnold Schwarzenegger at the papal summer residence, and then urged the green faithful to undergo a “true ecological conversion” and to “listen to the cry of the Earth.”

The new pope quoted his predecessor’s condemnation of climate unbelievers who have chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change” and “ridicule those who speak of global warming”.

Then he blessed a chunk of ice.

The elevation of environmentalism to the level of doctrine, the pseudo-pagan deification of the earth and the implication that those who do not believe in the environmental movement are heretics who need to undergo a conversion “that transforms both personal and communal lifestyles” which he equated to a conversion to Christianity and the claim that failure to participate in made it impossible for anyone to call themselves “disciples of Jesus Christ” were radical positions, but the real radicalism lay in the infrastructure of leftist political organizing.

Pope Leo’s attacks on ‘climate blasphemy’ were accompanied by a meeting with “environmental activists” and urgings for “everyone in society” to put “pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls.”

If anyone thought that the scenes out of Castel Gandolfo in early October were a one-time event they were soon followed by an exact replica as the pope met with American pro-illegal alien activists, who put on a show, complete with letters from illegal aliens and a video presentation.

“The Church cannot stay silent before injustice,” Pope Leo said, and urged the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is already pro-illegal alien, to take an even stronger stance against immigration enforcement. “I mean, even within the conference, there are challenges. That’s one place they should be … I wish they were stronger in their own voice,” he complained.

The scenes roughly a week apart signaled that Pope Leo intends to pull the Catholic Church even further leftward than his predecessor and that he intends to operationalize its resources to pressure governments, including the United States, to adopt his radical political positions on global warming, open borders and other elements of the leftist program..

In recent weeks, Pope Leo, who started out promising to unite the church, championed illegal mass migration, defended a pro-abortion Dem, claimed that anyone opposed to open borders could not be pro-life, upheld the sacredness of environmentalism and denounced the free market in terms that sounded drawn from socialist texts rather than traditionally Christian ones.

His apostolic exhortation didn’t just call for aiding the poor, but launched a vitriolic attack, blaming poverty on “ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation” accusing supporters of free enterprise of maintaining a “dictatorship that kills”, complaining that they “they reject the right of states… to exercise any form of control.”

What “forms of control” was Pope Leo proposing? Most European nations are already socialist to varying degrees, have high taxes and offer extensive government services. A clue can be found when he suggests that the greatest problem is the “the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized.” ‘Equality’ would then mean that all of us should live at the consumption level of Sub-Saharan Africa and the state should take as much from us as would make that possible.

This isn’t Catholicism: it’s Communism complete with a smattering of Marxist talking points.

Pope Leo sneered at those who believe that “a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty” and attacked ‘trickle down economics’, claiming that “the poor are promised only a few drops that trickle down”, advocating a resolution of the “structural causes of poverty” which he described as “inequality”. The pope called for “unjust structures” to be “eradicated” and rejected a “specious view of meritocracy” by expecting people to aspire to self-improvement.

Wealth redistribution doesn’t help the poor, as the Soviet Union demonstrated, but it does punish people for their success and it’s a useful vehicle for transforming the world.

And that appears to be what Pope Leo wants. Even when it would destroy the Catholic Church.

In between his push for global warming and mass migration into the United States, Pope Leo issued a call to do everything possible to enable the Muslim conquest of Europe.

Even as Muslim boats carrying military age male migrants were penetrating European coastlines, Pope Leo warned that “those boats… cannot and must not find the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination!”  All were called on to “work in the service of migrants” without “stereotypes and prejudices”. Or apparently self-defense and survival.

“To migrants I say: know that you are always welcome!” he declared, despite the ravages that Islamic mass migration had already inflicted on Europe, claiming that this would sustain a “Christianity that is more open, more alive and more dynamic” when in reality it was dooming a Christianity that was already on the decline to subservience to a hostile invading religion.

This followed his endorsement of Lampedusa, an Italian island, on the front lines of the Muslim invasion of Europe, as a positive symbol, rather than the new ‘Gates of Vienna’, condemning “loud arguments, ancient fears and unjust policies” by those who oppose mass migration, and celebrating the Muslim invaders as “seeds from which a new world longs to sprout.”

These ‘seeds’ would wipe out Christianity, but to Pope Leo, as to many liberal Christian and Jewish clergy, Christianity and religion in general appears to be a means to a leftist end. When religion is just a vehicle for social justice and the sum of its teachings amount to little more than an imperative to build a more ‘just’ society through the prescriptions of Marxism, the religion and its institutions can be sacrificed on the altar of social justice so that a better world may arise.

But what is striking about Pope Leo is how his rhetoric tends to be wedded to leftist activist groups and how much it seems like a collection of NPR talking points rather than religious ones.

After coming out for open borders, global warming, Muslim mass migration, and a pro-abortion politician (while also taking the time to condemn the Trump administration for renaming Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War, Pope Leo still found the time to celebrate the media.

Meeting with a media group, Pope Leo urged citizens to “value and support” the mainstream media, condemning “unfair competition” and “clickbait”, and claiming that it serves as a “bulwark” against “post-truth”. The term, like so many others, was revealing, having come into vogue among liberals around the Brexit/Trump era and was used to justify mass censorship.

“If today we know what is happening in Gaza, Ukraine, and every other land bloodied by bombs, we largely owe it to them,” the pope claimed. If anything, we know very little about what is actually happening in Gaza and Ukraine because of the media’s propaganda.

Considering the media’s attacks on the Catholic Church, Pope Leo’s enthusiasm for the church’s enemies seems a little odd, but it’s not at all surprising for a dedicated leftist.

Pope Leo’s championing of the media is convenient because all of his positions are cliches that could just as easily have appeared on an hour of NPR minus the theology and references. To know what his position on any issue is, don’t open the bible, open the New York Times.

Conservative Catholics hoping for a more moderate post-Francis papacy have found themselves stuck with a man who may be the most radical pope to date and whose American background makes his politics all too familiar and all too trite. But the growing radicalism has been matched by Pope Leo’s weaponization of radical groups to move forward his agenda.

And that agenda is bad for America, bad for the Catholic Church and bad for Christianity.