Today I have to write about something that deeply disturbs me. Let’s start with a report at The Daily Caller.

“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” Sorondo told the Vatican Insider, applauding China’s efforts to follow the green initiatives spelled out in Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si. Sorondo also accused President Donald Trump of allowing himself to be manipulated by global oil firms and praised China for defending Paris Climate Accord.

The “Sorondo” above is Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. He’s the highest authority at the Vatican in charge of Catholic social teaching. Pope Francis never corrected him. So as of now, that’s the official Vatican position. Good luck getting people to take “Catholic social teaching” seriously after this.

Sorondo issued this statement after a whirlwind tour of China. He was carefully shepherded by Communist Party minders. Remember those glamorous pilgrimages intellectuals and clergymen once took to Stalin’s Russia? They returned full of praise for its “progressive” accomplishments. I thought they ended with the Cold War. I was wrong.

Abandoning China’s Catholics

Sorondo’s words came not long after the Vatican forged an agreement with the Chinese Communist government. In the words of retired Cardinal Joseph Zen, that deal was “an incredible betrayal … a church enslaved by the government is no real Catholic Church.”

The Vatican abandoned the underground, loyal Catholics of that country. It handed control of the Chinese church to Communist party puppets. The cleric who negotiated the deal? Now disgraced child-molester and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The former Archbishop of Washington D.C., he helped groom and choose many of America’s leading bishops.

In the wake of the deal, persecution of Christians has increased, not diminished. China is censoring bibles. Bulldozing churches. Replacing Christian images with pictures of its President XI. Meanwhile, China enslaves, imprisons, rapes and tortures more than a million helpless Uighur Muslims. Pope Francis says not a word. But he’s eager to pounce on every effort of Western countries to humanely regulate immigration.

Another Alliance Against the West?

I speculated here at The Stream that Francis’ hostility to “consumerist” Western economic freedom didn’t drive him to surrender to China. Instead he allied with it. And thus gained a great power backer against the West he finds so repugnant.

You know, the way Germany and Russia allied against the West in 1939. What few remember is what happened in the wake of that deal. Long-time ideological enemies Hitler and Stalin kissed and made up. Nazi speeches stopped citing “Bolshevism” as the great enemy. They focused on bashing the West.

The Comintern stopped trying to overthrow fascist governments. Stalin abandoned his own loyal followers in such countries, as Francis has in China. Stalin ordered compliant Communists in Britain and France to oppose all defense spending. They labeled efforts to hold back Hitler a move toward “imperialist war.”

In France, Communist unions even disrupted arms production, to make Hitler’s coming invasions easier.

Silence in the Face of Evil

Pope Francis isn’t shy about denouncing Western countries for executing murderers. Or even giving them life sentences. He denounces the manufacture of weapons as “un-Christian.”

But what have we heard from Francis about China’s routine executions of criminals and dissidents? Its massive military spending, which dwarfs Hitler’s rearmament in the build-up to World War II?

Crickets.

Even with his Vatican surrounded by Fascist Italian soldiers, Pius XII clearly condemned such evils. (And helped save 800,000 Jews from slaughter.) That’s what we expect from a pope. Or used to.

None of the above is exactly news. All of it is background to the really disturbing piece of news I came across this weekend. It took my breath away. It gave me the same kind of deep bone chill I’ve only experienced before outside abortion clinics. Or encountering real live neo-Nazis taunting Jews on the street. Prepare yourself. (My thanks to Eric Mader for reporting on this.)

China Trusts Pope Francis

According to Forbes magazine, its reporter Zak Doffman

found evidence of “forced organ harvesting” from Chinese prisoners, including Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims. The Tribunal’s final judgment concluded that this “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years… on a significant scale.” China has said that the practice has been outlawed, replaced with a system of voluntary donations. But a new report, published on November 14 in the BMC Medical Ethics journal, has refuted this, alleging that those claims of reform are being supported by the “systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets in China.”

…

The China Tribunal used first-hand testimony from former detainees and implausible transplant availability and short waiting times to shape its findings. The witness reports were horrific —including organ extractions on live victims, subsequently killed by the procedures. A 2015 documentary claimed China’s illegal organ transplant industry is worth $1 billion each year … . [emphasis added]

You Thought Planned Parenthood Was Bad

Have you got all that? Now here’s the punchline. Bishop Sorondo has gone to China again to praise its regime and promise closer cooperation with the Vatican. What event did he choose to attend, to offer Pope Francis’ backing? An organ harvesting conference.

Mader connected the dots. He found this report in The Global Times:

Speaking at an organ donation and transplantation conference held in Kunming, capital of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province over the weekend, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences said “Pope Francis has love and confidence in China; and China trusts Pope Francis.”

“In this dynamic, the next step is to reach [an agreement on establishing] diplomatic relations,” and especially the visit of Pope Francis to China and China’s leaders to visit the Pope as friends when the time is right.

So the next step is to abandon the people of democratic, free Taiwan, just like the Catholics of China. And the right place to announce this? A conference attended by the butchers who steal organs from persecuted believers and sell them. It’s … fitting, I’ll admit that.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, rebuke Satan and all the evil spirits who wander the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Through the same Christ Our Lord.

Amen.