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Karl Marx was not a Catholic, but Pope Francis is lookin’ more like a Marxist every day.

This became clear as a little glass bell to me last week when progressives were fairly wetting themselves over the pontiff’s first trip to America. All last week, try as I may to avoid them, I heard American progressives praising the bejeezus out of this little man who makes a huge display out of carrying his own luggage and riding public transportation. Our nation’s progs are shoveling so much praise upon Pope Francis’s humble, egg-shaped head, you”€™d think they all suddenly loved Christianity rather than hated it.

This is quite the surprise, seeing as the only things that liberals typically say about Catholics is that priests diddle kids and the Church is on the wrong side of history regarding abortion and the Gay Question.

But now with this new Poor Man’s Pontiff”€”hey, he’s the first Pope from Latin America!”€”American liberals are engaging in a fevered circle jerk about the Holy Roman Church’s capo.

This may be in some small way related to the fact that Pope Francis sounds more like Bernie Sanders than he does Jesus.

Oh, right”€”Jesus. Even though he’s supposedly Christ’s most visible PR agent on Earth, Pope Francis did not make so much of a whisper about Jesus during either of last week’s speeches before Congress and the UN. He mentioned “social justice,” though. “Social activism,” too. And “solidarity.” And about how we need to make things “modern, inclusive, and sustainable.”

At the UN, Il Papa asserted that a “right of the environment” exists. He gave a thumbs-up to “interdependence” and a thumbs-down to “exclusion.”

In front of the US Congress, whose members probably squeezed out at least 1,000 farts during his speech, Francis addressed immigration:

Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past….On this continent, too, thousands of persons are led to travel north in search of a better life for themselves and for their loved ones, in search of greater opportunities. Is this not what we want for our own children? We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.

“Thousands?”

In his speech to Congress, Francis also mentioned four of his absolute, like, totally favorite Americans. The first was Abraham Lincoln, presumably because he freed the Negroes. The second was MLK, because he, too, freed the Negroes. The third was Thomas Merton, who enjoyed a brief stint as a Young Communist League member. And the fourth was communist sympathizer Dorothy Day.

To recap: The Pope didn’t make a peep about Jesus in his speech before Congress, but he spoke glowingly of two communists and two Negro-freers.

Would it be completely bananas to suspect that he’s being used as a tool?

Some of America’s more, erm, impassioned broadcasters have suggested as much. According to bile-gargling radio star Michael Savage:

He has been selected”€”hand-selected”€”by the New World Order….Well, the pope is a Marxist. I stand by those words. He is a wolf in pope’s clothing, he is an eco-wolf in pope’s clothing. He is a stealth Marxist in religious garb….The man sounds like the false prophet in Revelation. He sounds just like the false prophet in Revelation”€”an ecumenical spiritual figure directing mankind to worship the Antichrist.

And according to Alex Jones, who seems like he’s going to blow a gasket at any moment and probably should take some deep breaths, do some sit-ups, and get on some kind of heart medicine, “the Pope is a part of the globalist plan to destroy the world and usher in a one-world government.”

Others have noted the eerie similarities between Pope Francis and the humble-living Latin American pope depicted in Jean Raspail’s prophetic and dystopian immigration horror novel The Camp of the Saints.

But holy moly, the leftists can’t get enough of this new guy!

The Nation urges us all to work along with Pope Francis and the UN to fight climate change.

Bernie Sanders is so excited about the Pope, he’s working himself into a shvitz. The rumpled little socialist called Francis “one of the great moral and religious leaders of our time and in modern history.” He was especially enthusiastic of the pontiff’s nod to Dorothy Day:

She was a very, very progressive…socialist who organized working people and the poor to stand up to the wealthy and the powerful and to fight for social justice….The fact that he cited her”€”not to mention Martin Luther King Jr.”€”as one of the people he appreciated tells you where this man is coming from in the global world.