Steve Bannon Carries Battles to Another Influential
Hub: The Vatican
By
JASON HOROWITZ FEB. 7, 2017
To see this photograph, go to the URL: Pope
Francis leading a prayer at the Vatican in late January. The pope’s agenda has
made him a figure of unmatched global popularity, especially among liberals.
Credit L'Osservatore Romano, via Reuters
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.
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.
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.
To see this photograph, go to URL: Stephen K.
Bannon has sought alliances with those in Rome who believe that Pope Francis is
taking the Roman Catholic Church in the wrong direction. Credit Hilary Swift
for The New York Times
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.”
© 2017 The New York Times Company
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