ROME — When Stephen K. Bannon was still heading Breitbart News, he went to the Vatican
to cover the canonization of John Paul II and make some friends. High
on his list of people to meet was an archconservative American cardinal,
Raymond Burke, who had openly clashed with Pope Francis.
In
one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and
book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon — who is now President
Trump’s anti-establishment eminence — bonded over their shared
worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West
weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed
themselves as unjustly ostracized by out-of-touch political elites.
“When
you recognize someone who has sacrificed in order to remain true to his
principles and who is fighting the same kind of battles in the cultural
arena, in a different section of the battlefield, I’m not surprised
there is a meeting of hearts,” said Benjamin Harnwell, a confidant of
Cardinal Burke who arranged the 2014 meeting.
While
Mr. Trump, a twice-divorced president who has boasted of groping women,
may seem an unlikely ally of traditionalists in the Vatican, many of
them regard his election and the ascendance of Mr. Bannon as potentially
game-changing breakthroughs.
Just
as Mr. Bannon has connected with far-right parties threatening to
topple governments throughout Western Europe, he has also made common
cause with elements in the Roman Catholic Church who oppose the
direction Francis is taking them. Many share Mr. Bannon’s suspicion of
Pope Francis as a dangerously misguided, and probably socialist,
pontiff.
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Until
now, Francis has marginalized or demoted the traditionalists, notably
Cardinal Burke, carrying out an inclusive agenda on migration, climate
change and poverty that has made the pope a figure of unmatched global
popularity, especially among liberals. Yet in a newly turbulent world,
Francis is suddenly a lonelier figure. Where once Francis had a powerful
ally in the White House in Barack Obama, now there is Mr. Trump and Mr.
Bannon, this new president’s ideological guru.
Trump’s Campaign Chief
In August, Donald J. Trump shook up
his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring
Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, as the
Republican campaign’s chief executive.
By AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER on Publish Date August 17, 2016.
Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters..
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For
many of the pope’s ideological opponents in and around the Vatican, who
are fearful of a pontiff they consider outwardly avuncular but
internally a ruthless wielder of absolute political power, this angry
moment in history is an opportunity to derail what they see as a
disastrous papal agenda. And in Mr. Trump, and more directly in Mr.
Bannon, some self-described “Rad Trads” — or radical traditionalists —
see an alternate leader who will stand up for traditional Christian
values and against Muslim interlopers.
“There
are huge areas where we and the pope do overlap, and as a loyal
Catholic, I don’t want to spend my life fighting against the pope on
issues where I won’t change his mind,” Mr. Harnwell said over a lunch of
cannelloni. “Far more valuable for me would be spend time working
constructively with Steve Bannon.”
He made it clear he was speaking for himself, not for the Institute for Human Dignity,
a conservative Catholic group that he founded, and insisted that he
shared the pope’s goals of ensuring peace and ending poverty, just not
his ideas on how to achieve it.
Mr.
Bannon publicly articulated his worldview in remarks a few months after
his meeting with Cardinal Burke, at a Vatican conference organized by
Mr. Harnwell’s institute.
Speaking via video feed from Los Angeles, Mr. Bannon, a Catholic, held forth
against rampant secularization, the existential threat of Islam, and a
capitalism that had drifted from the moral foundations of Christianity.
Graphic
Pope Francis’ Race Against Time to Reshape the Church
Can the 79-year-old pontiff appoint enough like-minded
cardinals to ensure that his vision of the Roman Catholic Church will
endure after he dies?
That
talk has garnered much attention, and approval by conservatives, for
its explicit expression of Mr. Bannon’s vision. Less widely known are
his efforts to cultivate strategic alliances with those in Rome who
share his interpretation of a right-wing “church militant” theology.
Mr.
Bannon’s visage, speeches and endorsement of Mr. Harnwell as “the
smartest guy in Rome” are featured heavily on the website of Mr.
Harnwell’s foundation. Mr. Trump’s senior adviser has maintained email
contact with Cardinal Burke, according to Mr. Harnwell, who dropped by
the cardinal’s residence after lunch. And another person with knowledge
of Mr. Bannon’s current outreach said the White House official is
personally calling his contacts in Rome for thoughts on who should be
the Trump administration’s ambassador to the Holy See.
During
Mr. Bannon’s April 2014 trip he courted Edward Pentin, a leading
conservative Vatican reporter, as a potential correspondent in Rome for
Breitbart, the website that is popular with the alt-right, a far-right
movement that has attracted white supremacists.
“He
really seemed to get the battles the church needs to fight,” said Mr.
Pentin, the author of “The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?” a book asserting
that Pope Francis and his supporters railroaded opponents. Chief among
those battles, Mr. Pentin said, was Mr. Bannon’s focus on countering a
“cultural Marxism” that had seeped into the church.
Since
that visit and the meeting with Cardinal Burke — an experience that
Daniel Fluette, the head of production for Breitbart, described as
“incredibly powerful” for Mr. Bannon — Mr. Trump’s ideological
strategist has maintained a focus on Rome.
Mr. Bannon returned to direct the documentary “Torchbearer,”
in which the “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson contemplates the
apocalyptic consequences of an eroding Christendom. Mr. Bannon also
reunited with old friends, including Breitbart’s eventual Rome correspondent, Thomas Williams.
A
former priest, Mr. Williams said that he used to have arguments with
Mr. Bannon about whether the pope subscribed to a hard-left brand of
liberation theology, with Mr. Bannon calling the pope a
“socialist/communist.” Mr. Williams said he usually defended the pope,
but that recent statements by Francis convinced him “Steve turned out to
be right. That happens more often than not.”
Mr. Bannon’s private thoughts about the pope have at times surfaced in public.
On May 23, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Williams spoke about Pope Francis on the radio program Breitbart News Daily.
Discussing
a Breitbart article about the new mayor of London titled “Pope Hails
Election of Sadiq Khan, Celebrates Mass Muslim Migration Into Europe,”
Mr. Bannon suggested that the pope “seems almost to be putting the
responsibility on the working men and women of Italy and Europe et
cetera, that they have to go out of their way to accommodate” migration.
Was the pope a global elitist, Mr. Bannon asked, “two or three steps removed from this?”
Many
critics of Francis express similar views, but they are often scared to
express it for fear of retribution from the pope, who, they say, has
eyes and ears all over the Vatican.
Instead,
the pope’s critics anonymously papered Rome over the weekend with
posters of a grumpy-looking Francis above complaints about his removing
and ignoring clerics and cardinals. “Where’s your mercy?” it asked.
Conservatives
and traditionalists in the Vatican secretly pass around phony mock-ups
of the Vatican’s official paper, L’Osservatore Romano, making fun of the
pope. Or they spread a YouTube video critiquing the pope and his
exhortation on love in the family, “Amoris Laetitia,” which many
traditionalists consider Francis’ opening salvo against the doctrine of
the church. Set to the music of “That’s Amore,” an aggrieved crooner
sings, “When will we all be freed from this cruel tyranny, that’s
Amoris” and “It’s the climate of fear engineered for four years, that’s
Amoris.”
Cardinal
Burke — who has said that the pope’s exhortation, which opened the door
for divorced Catholics remarried outside the church to receive
communion, might require “a formal act of correction” — has been unusually outspoken in his criticism of Francis. Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon declined to comment for this article.
Just weeks ago, the pope stripped Cardinal Burke of his remaining institutional influence after a scandal exploded at the Knights of Malta,
a nearly 1,000-year-old chivalrous order where he had been exiled as a
liaison to the Vatican. The pope had removed the order’s grand master
after he showed disobedience to the pope. There was a sense in the order
that the grand master followed the lead of Cardinal Burke because he
projected authority, a power that stemmed in part from his support by
the Trump administration, one influential knight said.
Cardinal
Burke has become a champion to conservatives in the United States.
Under Mr. Bannon, Breitbart News urged its Rome correspondent to write
sympathetically about him. And at a meeting before last month’s
anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, Cardinal Burke
received the Law of Life Achievement, or Nail award, a framed replica of
the nail used to hold the feet of Christ to the cross. According to
John-Henry Westen, the editor of Life Site News, who announced the award, the prize is awarded to Christians “who have received a stab in the back.”
Despite Mr. Bannon’s inroads in Rome, Mr. Burke and other traditionalists are not ascendant in the Vatican.
The
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest who edits the Vatican-approved
journal La Civilta Cattolica and who is close to the pope, dismissed
their criticism as the stuff of a noisy but small “echo chamber.”
He
also played down the effect of Mr. Trump’s ascent on the standing of
Francis’ opponents in the Vatican, saying it was only on a “level of
image” and “propaganda.”
The
pope will maintain his direction and not be distracted by fights
against those trying to undercut him, Father Spadaro said. “He moves
forward, and he moves ahead very fast.”
He
added that Mr. Trump’s ban on immigrants from certain Muslim countries
was “opposite” to the pontiff’s vision for how to foster unity and
peace. The pope, Father Spadaro said, is doing everything he can to
avoid the clash of civilizations that both fundamentalist Muslims and
Christians want.
Indeed, the pope does not seem to be slowing down.
Days
after the election of Mr. Trump, in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican
officially elevated new cardinals selected by Pope Francis who reflected
the pope’s emphasis on an inclusive church — far from the worldview of
Mr. Bannon and Mr. Burke.
“It’s
not that he is just bringing new people in that think maybe like him,”
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the influential new cardinal of Chicago, said
after the ceremony. “He is transforming the church in making us rethink
how we have done things before.”
That
transformation was evident later in the evening, when the old
conservative guard came to pay their respects to the new cardinals.
João
Braz de Aviz, a powerful cardinal close to the pope, walked around in
simple cleric clothes, the equivalent of civilian dress among all the
flowing cassocks. Asked whether the ascent of Mr. Trump would embolden
Mr. Bannon’s allies in the Vatican to intensify their opposition and
force the pope to take a more orthodox line, he shrugged.
“The
doctrine is secure,” he said, adding that the mission of the church was
more to safeguard the poor. It was also, he reminded his traditionalist
colleagues, to serve St. Peter, whose authority is passed down through
the popes. “And today, Francis is Peter.”
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