A spate of headlines this week have surfaced about Trump adviser Steve Bannon and his views on Pope Francis. The stories center on allegations that Bannon, a Catholic, has joined forces with the pope's conservative critics within the church in order to torpedo the pontiff's agenda. A look at some of the coverage:
- The story driving the conversation is a front-page piece in the New York Times that says Bannon "bonded" with one of Francis' fiercest critics, a US cardinal named Raymond Burke, on a trip to Rome in 2014. The gist of the piece: "Just as Mr. Bannon has connected with far-right parties threatening to topple governments throughout Western Europe, he has also made common cause with elements in the Roman Catholic Church who oppose the direction Francis is taking them." Bannon and these critics see Francis "as a dangerously misguided, and probably socialist, pontiff," while the pope's opponents in the church view the rise of Bannon and President Trump as "potentially game-changing."
- NPR provides more background and highlights a speech Bannon gave at the Vatican in 2014 before a conservative Catholic group: "We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict," he said, urging those in the room to join together against a "new barbarity." He then spelled it out: "We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it."