The big difference, Bill, between the murder of Catholic (Jesuit)  priests in El Salvador in 1980 and the murder of Catholic  priests today by “our” new al Qaeda “allies” in Syria (“the Syrian rebels,” as they are called) is that the Jesuits in El Salvador were conspiring with communist rebels to take over the government.  They were participating in the “noble cause” of bringing totalitarian communism to Central America.  Of course, the Jesuits prefer the euphemism “liberation theology,” which was harshly condemned by Pope John Paul II and his successor when he was still known as Cardinal Ratzinger  .  Both of the popes believed that “liberation theology” was essentially Marxism masquerading as Catholicism.  Cardinal Ratzinger called it “a fundamental threat to the faith of the Catholic Church.”

The Jesuits haven’t changed much.  For the past twenty years that I have been employed by Loyola University Maryland, a Jesuit institution, they have held a two-week long memorial every November to their fellow communist rabble rousers who were murdered by government thugs in El Salvador.  During that time I do not recall a memorial to Saint Ignatius of Loyola ever being held — or any other Jesuit for that matter.  When they libeled Professor Walter Block several years ago one of these Marxist ideologues hiding behind a priest’s collar wrote to the student newspaper to protest that “He [Professor Block] even criticized liberation theology!” during his campus lecture.  Indeed he did, and good for him for doing so.  It took a Jewish libertarian to appear on the Loyola campus to support the viewpoint of the Catholic Pope in opposition to the university administration.  The reaction to Walter Block — libelous smears — was straight out of the Multicultural Marxist playbook, which is what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote about when he said liberation theology was a “fundamental threat” to the Catholic faith.  He wrote that the Marxist method of “debate” is to libel and smear intellectual opponents as “capitalist tools,” or worse, rather than honest intellectual debate.  They want to rewrite Catholic doctrine as a version of Marxism, said the future pope, and they want all debate over this to be censored by the tactic of character assassination.

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