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Vatican-approved article attacks Steve Bannon and US religious right

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ROME: Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and Christian extremists that have sided with the US president have a dangerously “fundamentalist” world view, according to two confidants of Pope Francis.


In a Sunday comment on Italian daily La Repubblica, church historian Alberto Melloni said the papal aides have laid bare “an unprecedented conflict” between Francis, the “catho-evangelical religious cartel and the Trump clan.”


Their article, published on Saturday on La Civilta Cattolica, condemned the “ecumenism of hate,” espoused by “Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic integralists,” and “its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.”


Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of the influential Jesuit magazine, and Marcelo Figueroa, a Protestant pastor who edits the Argentinian version of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, were the authors. Both are personal friends of the pope.


They described Bannon, a Catholic who in a 2014 speech called for a new Christian holy war, as someone who wants to “submit the state to the Bible with a logic that is no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.”


They also singled out the “shocking rethoric” of US ultraconservative Catholic website Church Militant, which compared Trump’s victory against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the defeat of Diocletianby Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Ancient Rome.


“There is an enormous difference between these concepts and the ecumenism employed by Pope Francis with various Christian bodies and other religious confessions. His is an ecumenism that moves under the urge of inclusion, peace, encounter and bridges,” the authors said.


— dpa


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