Pope Francis’s Communist Mentor

Jim
Society & Culture
Pope Francis

Pope Francis grew up in socialist Argentina, an experience that left a deep impression on his thinking. He told the Latin American journalists Javier Camara and Sebastian Pfaffen that as a young man he “read books of the Communist Party that my boss in the laboratory gave me” and that “there was a period where I would wait anxiously for the newspaper La Vanguardia, which was not allowed to be sold with the other newspapers and was brought to us by the socialist militants.” The “boss” to whom Pope Francis referred is Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. He has described her as a “Paraguayan woman” and a “fervent communist.” He considers her one of his most important mentors. “I owe a huge amount to that great woman,” he has said, saying that she “taught me so much about politics.” (He worked for her as an assistant at Hickethier-Bachmann Laboratory in Buenos Aires.)

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Profile picture for user Bert Perry
Bert Perry
Tue, 05/02/17 8:15 am

….that the economic disasters that befell Argentina would have sobered the Pope’s enthusiasm for socialism, but no such luck. He’s a lot like a former community organizer from Chicago in that way—I grew up an hour away and periodically had the chance to visit those same streets, and exactly how Mr. Obama failed to figure out that his politics weren’t exactly helping is beyond me.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.