Is the pope a religious leader or a partisan politician?

Well, you can decide.

On Friday, the pope said he viewed a Sept. 12 video of the Argentinian authorities chasing out protestors against President Javier Milei's budget cuts with pepper spray.

He stepped right up to criticize them like an opposition socialist pol.

According to Insider Paper:

Pope Francis on Friday criticised the recent crackdown on protesters by Argentine President Javier Milei’s government, in a rare statement about the social tensions in his home country.

“They showed me a repression filmed a week ago… Workers. People demanding their rights in the streets,” the pope said in Spanish at an event with social movements from across the world.

“The police pushed them back. With the most expensive thing there is: top-quality pepper spray,” Francis said, according to a video of the event published by the Vatican.

He did not name Argentina or its president by name, but appeared to be referring to a September 12 Buenos Aires protest over a pension increase veto, during which police used tear gas and plastic bullets.

Francis’s comments made headlines in Argentina on Friday.

“Why didn’t they have the right to claim what’s theirs? Because they were undisciplined? Communists? No, not at all,” the pope said during the meeting at the Holy See’s department for economic, labour and social justice issues in Rome.

“The government did not budge. Instead of paying for social justice, it paid for pepper spray,” Francis said.

What's theirs? The government is out of money. Whatever was "theirs" was spent by the Peronists a long time ago. Argentina's protestors are famously entitled, with some protesting as a lifestyle choice, and in the past they have been subsidized by the Peronist governments. As a result, they can be very aggressive, often shutting down the entire country until their demands are met.

Milei's government clearly can't give them what they don't have, but they do have an obligation to maintain order for the rest of the country.

Oh, and nobody died.

The pope's complaint about Argentinian goverment "repression" was particularly galling because of his near-complete silence on what's going on elsewhere in South America, in Venezuela, where in the wake of a nakedly stolen election which really was "theirs" as Venezuelans, many Venezuelans have been gunned down by government thugs as well as hunted down, beaten, tortured, and imprisoned. The actual man who won the Venezuelan election, Edmundo Gonzalez, has been forced to flee the country.

Pretty much every leader in the hemisphere and Europe, including Milei's Peronist predecessors, has weighed in on the horrible specter of Venezuela in the wake of the stolen election. Only the communist dictatorships (and Mexico, which is getting there) have stayed silent.

As I noted here three weeks ago:

In fact, the pope was one of the few leaders who refused to take a stand on Venezuela, unlike virtually all of Latin America, save for the other socialist hellholes of Cuba, and Nicaragua, plus increasingly dictatorial socialist Mexico. Even the weakling U.S. under Joe Biden generally made it clear that Maduro's electoral theft was unacceptable

...

So the pope effectively joined Russia's Vlad Putin, China's Xi Jinping, and the mullahs of Iran in sticking up for, and propping up Maduro.

He did come out with a days-late statement on Venezuela, which was astonishingly mealy-mouthed, leaving observers, "perplexed" as the National Catholic Reporter put it:

A few days after that statement, Pope Francis made “a heartfelt appeal to all parties to seek the truth, to exercise restraint, to avoid any kind of violence, to settle disputes through dialogue.” 

That kind of “all parties” Vatican response, which has marked the Holy Father’s Venezuela policy for more than a decade, causes deep upset in Venezuela. It is not the opposition that is causing violence, and dialogue with a repressive regime looks to many like appeasement. 

The Vatican has repeatedly chosen not to reinforce, or even echo, the strong statements of the Venezuelan bishops. Indeed, at many times Maduro himself has taunted the Venezuelan bishops that they should be more like Pope Francis and ease off their criticism.

I wrote this on August 4:

 goes into "dialogue" as if Maduro and the opposition have not been dialoguing, and intensely dialoguing for the past 20 years. The dialogue ended with the election, and the voters delivered their dialogue to the government through the ballot box and their votes were stolen.

Thou shalt not steal.

It also goes into the need for "both sides" to avoid violence, as if the guns were on both sides, which they were not.

It calls on "both sides" to seek the truth, as if the actas, or vote tallies, gathered showing that the opposition won don't tell us anything.

After that, nothing, even as the situation got worse and worse.

Prompted by a reporter a few weeks ago, he added this:

I have not been following the situation in Venezuela, but the message I would give to authorities is to dialogue and make peace. Dictatorships are useless and sooner or later, they end poorly. Read the history of the Church. I would say that the government and the people should do everything to find a path of peace, for Venezuela. I can't give a political opinion because I don't know the details. I know that the bishops have spoken and the message of the bishops must be better.

Dictatorships are useless? That's a philosophical argument. Compare and contrast with his claims about "repression" in Argentina over protestors who refused to stop blocking highways?

As for the bishops, I believe he defers to them in this statement as having made better statements than he could -- the local bishops issued utter thunderbolts against the Maduroite electoral theft.

But he must have known that or he wouldn't have brought it up. Why didn't he cite the bishops outright or at least paraphrase the contents of their statements condemning the electoral fraud?

It just goes to show a double standard. Milei is a libertarian and ferocious budget cutter who's determined to rake his country out of its Peronist mire and restore its rightful place as one of the world's richest nations. The pope can't stand that, because it's so necessarily anti-socialist. The pope also ventured into partisan politics this week, when he called for a "universal basic income," a bad idea that rewards non-work and penalizes work and which is inherently "unsustainable" as the lefties like to say.

Maduro on the other hand, who's a naked socialist-communist election cheat, gets nothing but indirect and infrequent criticism as well as kid-glove treatment. No outright condemnations from the pope, which puts him in the same league as Putin, the Castroite oligarchs, and Kim Jong-il. Does he get condemned as "repressive," too? So far, have not seen it.

That looks pretty partisan. And it's terrible to see that in a pope, who is expected to identify evil and stay out of politics. If Maduro isn't evil to him, he has no business criticizing Milei.

Image: Zebra48bo, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed