'When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a

[pampango]

communist."

So said the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. His adage exposes one of the great fissures in the Catholic church, and the emptiness of the new pope's claim to be on the side of the poor.

The bravest people I have met are all Catholic priests. Working in West Papua and then in Brazil, I met men who were prepared repeatedly to risk death for the sake of others. When I first knocked on the door of the friary in Bacabal, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, the priest who opened it thought I had been sent to kill him. That morning he had received the latest in a series of death threats from the local ranchers' union. Yet still he opened the door.

The priests belonged to a movement that had swept across Latin America, after the publication of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1971. ... The assault began in 1984 with the publication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the body formerly known as the Inquisition) of a document written by the man who ran it: Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict. It denounced "the deviations, and risks of deviation" of liberation theology.

But at least Ratzinger has the possible defence that, being cloistered in the Vatican, he had little notion of what he was destroying. During the inquisition in Rome of one of the leading liberationists, Father Leonardo Boff, Ratzinger was invited by the archbishop of São Paulo to see the situation of Brazil's poor for himself. He refused – then stripped the archbishop of much of his diocese. Ratzinger was wilfully ignorant. But the current pope does not possess even this excuse.

Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires's Villa 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader Argentina's Jesuits, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/war-on-pope-francis-modern-inquisition
Looks like Francis to his credit may have lived a simple life in touch with common people but has done and will do little to help common people deal with the problems they face.

[a la izquierda]

1. Kick

This is important for people to understand if they actually care about the plight of the poor worldwide. The murder of priests and nuns happened because they dared to demand that the poor be treated with justice and compassion.

[baldguy]

2. There certainly are people - not just Catholics - who deserve praise for their actions

in support of social justice.

But - if they are Catholic, don't expect the Catholic hierarchy to praise & support them. In fact, you should expect the Church authorities to criticize, demote, ostracize and eventually excommunicate them.

Criticism of the Church is not to be twisted to imply criticism of an individual.