Pope Francis shares this view.

In the United States, the pope may be known as a sharp critic of President Trump, but he has also been vocal about the trends that have led to populist backlashes in the Americas and in Europe.

In 2014, for instance, Francis said: "Europe is tired. We have to help rejuvenate it, to find its roots. It's true: It has disowned its roots."

Even for some non-Christians, Christianity offers a grounding for European culture that has become dangerously depleted.

The famously secular German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has admitted that the West, especially liberal democracy, depends upon Christians as a creative minority for key values of conscience and human rights.

Mr. Habermas argues: "To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

But a bastardized form of Christianity cannot provide this nourishment and may, in fact, hasten Europe's decline.

This is the risk posed by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to the Trump administration, who has embarked on his own project to rejuvenate Europe.

The politics he offers has only a veneer of Christianity, intended to justify his political aims. And his notion of Europe is perhaps just as shallow, ignoring the profound spiritual and intellectual challenges that predate the continent's latest demographic changes.

Inclusion and civility are often dismissed as pieties of procedural liberalism. But ut unum sint ("that they may be one") is the message of Christianity.

A politics that divides is not good politics. And it is not good for Chrisitanity.

Bannon's ‘Gladiator School' Takes Shape

Mr. Bannon has caused a stir with his plans to found near Rome what he calls the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West.

The imagination has run wild as many speculate about a "gladiator school" for neopopulist ideologues, even after the Italian government blocked plans to site the school at an ancient Carthusian monastery.

The political strategist is not starting from scratch.

He is building upon the work of the English political activist Benjamin Harnwell, who founded and runs the Dignitatis Humanae Institute.

Mr. Harnwell has advocated for Christian politics for several years in the European Parliament, including drafting a "Universal Declaration of Human Dignity."

The D.H.I. presents the imago Dei as the center of Christian politics and has promoted it by organizing members of the European Parliament and now by founding a school. (It is unclear how the academy would relate to "The Movement," Mr. Bannon's umbrella organization in Brussels for Euro-skeptic parties in the European Parliament.) Continue reading

Bill McCormick is a Jesuit priest, political scientist and regent at Saint Louis University.

Bannon says a message was sent to church-goers from CatholicVote, "...not to go vote for a specific guy, but for all Catholics to go out and do their duty and they're going to put out a thing to support President Trump."

The concession came from a now-deleted scene from The Brink, a documentary by Alison Klayman that focuses on Bannon's efforts to mobilise the far-right during the 2018 midterm elections.

Bannon told Klayman he worked with the conservative group CatholicVote to use location data to target ads to people who had recently been to Catholic churches in Dubuque, Iowa.

"If your phone's ever been in a Catholic church, it's amazing, they got this data," Bannon reportedly said. "Literally, they can tell who's been in a Catholic church and how frequently. And they got it triaged."

Bannon told Klayman he got the data from phone companies "and the data guys sell it."

Collecting data in this way is called geofencing. Although it is supposedly anonymised, privacy advocates say geofencing and other ways that companies collect and sell cell-phone location data have the potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users.

"This is terribly disturbing. This is like a total infringement on everybody," a Franciscan sister and longtime social justice activist in Dubuque says.

"I have not used it to target religious groups specifically, and I will say that, for me, morally that seems like a step too far," an advertising executive from a firm that regularly uses geofencing.

"But it doesn't surprise me."

Bannon, who is a Catholic, has worked to shift the political landscape inside and outside the church.

His aim is to attract Catholics to his brand of right-wing populism and link in with prominent Catholics who oppose the relatively progressive reign of Pope Francis.

Conservative activists working to attract Catholic votes is nothing new, says John Gehring.

About 20 years ago, Gehring says they would find ways to get parish directories.

"The political strategy to reach Catholics is clearly more high-tech now, but the goal of selling the Republican brand and the willingness to stretch ethical boundaries to do that is the same today."

Source

• The Verge
• Think Progress
• Image:Kim Komando Show

The Ministry says it will revoke the lease on the 800 year-old state-owned Trisulti monastery it leased to the Institute.

The Ministry says it can revoke the lease as the DHI has violated various contractual obligations including a failure to pay concession fees and do maintenance work on the monastery.

The DHI's original stated aim was to create an apolitical Catholic study and training centre at the monastery.

Bannon, who is a former Breitbart executive and chief strategist to Donald Trump, had been planning to train political activists at the monastery.

Benjamin Harnwell, Bannon's close associate in Italy who is spearheading the project, is the director of the monastery-based academy.

He says Bannon has been raising funds for the Institute and has also launched a campaign to build a populist movement across Europe.

His project drew criticism from the left and was also denounced by a top Catholic cardinal last month.

Local media had raised doubts over whether Harnwell's institute fulfilled the requirements of its agreement with the government.

Vacca, a member of the anti-establishment 5-Star party which has been ruling Italy in a coalition with the far-right League since last year, says there are no political motives behind the decision to revoke permission for the Institute.

He says the procedure to award the concession to Harnwell's association - whose board of advisers is chaired by Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading Vatican conservative - had been completed under the previous, center-left government.

Source

• Politico
• Reuters
• Image: artnetNews

Ramping up his message ahead of the European elections, Bannon said Francis should stay out of politics.

"He's the administrator of the church, and he's also a politician. This is the problem," Bannon - who lives in Italy - said.

"He's constantly putting all the faults in the world on the populist nationalist movement."

The Pope's remarks about social justice have long irked Bannon and those of his ideological mindset.

Swing back to April 2016, when Bannon suggested Matteo Salvini should start openly targeting Francis about migration, because Francis has made the plight of refugees a cornerstone of his papacy. (At that time, Salvini was the minister for the interior and the leader of Italy's anti-immigration League party.)

"Bannon advised [Salvini] ... the pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally," a senior League insider says.

Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming conservatives in the Vatican were on his side.

As an example, on 6 May 2016, after the pope's plea for compassion towards migrants, Salvini said: "Uncontrolled immigration, an organised and financed invasion, brings chaos and problems, not peace."

Salvini - who is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy's coalition cabinet - says he wants to bring the far right from across Europe into an alliance.

Last week, only days after meeting Bannon in Rome, Salvini revealed his "vision of Europe for the next 50 years", calling it the launch of a new right-wing coalition for the European parliamentary elections on 23 May.

Some say the timing of Italy's new coalition and Salvini's meeting with Bannon suggest Salvini has been handpicked as the informal leader of Eurosceptic populist forces in Europe.

According to Mischaël Modrikamen, the Movement's managing director, six months ago Bannon and Salvini tweeted that Italy's deputy prime minister "is in!"

Bannon also takes issue with the pope's warnings over resurgent populist movements.

"You can go around Europe and it's [populism] catching fire and the pope is just dead wrong," he says.

After Salvini and Bannon's 2016 meeting, Salvini was photographed holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Benedict is my pope."

The slogan refers to a Vatican version of the "birther" campaign waged by Trump against Barack Obama, claiming that Francis's papacy is illegitimate and that his predecessor Benedict XVI is the true pontiff.

The League source also alleged that Salvini would have attacked the pope harder but was restrained by his own party, predominantly by Giancarlo Giorgetti, the deputy federal secretary of Lega Nord who is close to senior figures in the Vatican.

Bannon has been building opposition to Francis through his Dignitatis Humanae Institute, based in a 13th-century mountaintop monastery not far from Rome.

In January 2017, Bannon became a patron of the institute, whose honorary president is Cardinal Raymond Burke, who believes organised networks of homosexuals are spreading a "gay agenda" in the Vatican.

The institute's chairman is former Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is presently on trial for corruption for accepting bribes from Azerbaijan. He has denied all charges.

Source

• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• Image: Daily Express

Bannon, who is a former adviser to president Trump, says he believes the church has been "terrible" to Mr. Trump on the issue of immigration.

He was commenting on the bishops' response to Trump's cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme.

DACA protects nearly 800,000 immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from being deported because they have no documents.

In his view the bishops are just supporting immigrants out of "economic interest" and because they are "unable to really come to grips with the problems in the church.

"To come to grips with the problems in the church, they [the bishops] need illegal aliens — they need illegal aliens to fill the churches," Bannon says.

"They have an economic interest in unlimited immigration, unlimited illegal immigration.

"As much as I respect Cardinal Dolan and the bishops on doctrine, this is not doctrine.

"I totally respect the pope, and I totally respect the Catholic bishops and cardinals on doctrine. This is not about doctrine, this is about the sovereignty of a nation and, in that regard, they're just another guy with an opinion."

Saying Banon might be right about just being "another guy with an opinion", Dolan says he was "rather befuddled" about his claim that the church's need for immigrants is economically motivated.

"I don't really care to go into what I think is a preposterous and rather insulting statement, that the only reason we Bishops care for immigrants is for the economic because we want to fill our churches and get more money," Dolan says.

"That's insulting and that's just so ridiculous that it doesn't merit a comment."

Source

• America Magazine
• America Magazine
• Business Insider
• CBS News
• Image: BBC.com