Scholas Occurrentes… Another Vatican-Soros Connection?

By MAIKE HICKSON

(Editor’s Note: This commentary by Maike Hickson was first published by OnePeterFive.com on February 28, 2017 and is reprinted here with permission. All rights reserved.)

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Following reports about Pope Francis’ praise of a Soros-funded left-wing organization called PICO — People Improving Communities through Organizing — we have been informed by some Spanish-speaking sources about a connection between Pope Francis’ papal foundation Scholas Occurrentes and one of George Soros’ close allies in Argentina, Eduardo Elsztain.
Scholas Occurrentes is a papal foundation created in 2013 by Pope Francis in order to promote educational projects around the world. As I wrote earlier, in March of 2016, I was in contact with one of the representatives of Scholas Occurrentes, Maria Paz Jurado. She at the time sent to me booklets for children which bear the name of Scholas Occurrentes. This is what I then reported:
“Upon request, Maria Paz Jurado sent me a collection of Spanish-language booklets for children which Scholas has already produced. Titled Con Francisco a mi lado (‘With [Pope] Francis at My Side’), they display a strong and unmistakable moral relativism.
“The booklets, which each contain several pictures and quotes of Pope Francis, are dedicated to themes such as: Family; Diversity; Self Esteem; and Creativity. In the booklet on Diversity, for example, different forms of family — ambiguously including homosexual couples with children — are presented in a neutral tone, without moral distinctions or definitions, asserting a fluidity in family structure that is alien to Catholic teaching. It says: ‘There are children who have a father and mother. One of each. Others two of each. Others one and two. Or two of the one [same]. Or one. Or none. . . .’
“Is this not LGBT propaganda? (Indeed, further German-language research reveals that an earlier edition of this booklet was even more explicit; displaying a picture with two women and two children together as a ‘family.’)
“Yet another booklet, titled Self Esteem, promotes the notion of variably choosing one’s own identity. As an example, there is a cat that wants to be a dog. At the end of the story, a donkey supports the cat in this desire, and the cat is shown sitting in a doghouse with a bone in front of it. The message here is that one may choose what one wishes to be, implying also the choice as to whether one wishes to be male or female.
“Another message, coming from the booklet Creativity, implies that God Himself is changing His own immutable Laws: ‘Jesus Christ can also break the tedious fixed limits in which we attempt to confine him and we are surprised by his constant divine creativity.’
“As one theologically well-informed reader of this text has commented: ‘This is a slap at those who hold to the traditional view on the immutability of dogma.’ The same observer — the Catholic author, sculptor, and expert in Gnostic and New Age philosophies, H. Reed Armstrong — whom I asked to read and assess all 15 Scholas booklets for children, concludes:
“ ‘There is nothing remotely Catholic in these texts. There is little reference to God, a couple of fleeting but ambiguous references to (Our Lord) Jesus, no mention of Mary or the saints nor prayer, mortification, and self-denial. It is difficult for me to even begin to know where to start’.”
The publishing house of this set of booklets, Clarin, has clearly described the collaboration with Scholas Occurrentes (SO) on its own website. In light of this papal project with its seemingly secularizing and liberalizing content, it is important to note who Scholas’ public collaborators and supporters are. The IRSA Fundacion is one of the official “National Cooperators” of Scholas Occurrentes which accompanies Scholas “in its mission to reach children and young people through inclusive education.”
The IRSA Foundation was founded by the largest Argentine real estate company, called Inversiones y Representaciones Sociedad Anonima (IRSA). IRSA’s chairman, Eduardo Sergio Elsztain, built this firm up with heavy funding from George Soros, who also partnered with him in the 1990s. Elsztain has been repeatedly called “Soros’ Golden Boy” because he successfully helped increase Soros’ income and they both together had a successful working relationship. Eduardo Elsztain knows Pope Francis from Argentina and called him “a friend” when visiting Rome for a soccer event organized also by Scholas Occurrentes.
IRSA, through one of its own shopping malls (Alto Palermo — Elsztain is its owner), is also linked to a feminist group called La Casa del Encuentro. Alto Palermo and La Casa del Encuentro together in 2015 published a promotional video clip about women’s questions in which it is openly stated that Alto Palermo funds the La Casa del Encuentro. La Casa del Encuentro, on its own website, defends the practice of abortion, speciously saying that “every woman has the right to decide over her own body, life, and desires, when and at what time she wants to have daughters and sons, and when not.”
In that same link the organization supports and speaks about the Argentine “National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion” (started in 2007) — for abortion is not legal in Argentina. In 2015, Alto Palermo also donated funds to La Casa del Encuentro, according to its own statement, as well as according to a statement of La Casa del Encuentro itself. (“In the month of December 2015, La Casa del Encuentro was the beneficiary of a donation given by the IRSA Commercial Properties Group.”)
It is in this context worthwhile to note that when George Soros visited the then-Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in September of 2014, José Maria del Corral, the director of Scholas Occurrentes, was also present. During that meeting, according to the Argentine financial newspaper Ambito Financiero, Kirchner and Soros talked about “the educational project promoted by Pope Francis called Scholas Occurrentes and that the pontiff delegated Cristina [Kirchner] to present it to the UN [United Nations.].”
At that time, Kirchner had already legalized so-called same-sex marriages in 2010 and had herself become the godmother of a child of a lesbian couple baptized in a Catholic church. Yet, she still was, in Pope Francis’ eyes, the right person to present his new educational foundation to the United Nations.
Thus, may we reasonably conclude that allies of George Soros are funding papal projects which tend to attenuate the Catholic message in children’s booklets, and which are also helping to inject and to spread the “gender theory” into and throughout the world?
This is, of course, not the only evidence about the apparently developing collaboration between George Soros and Pope Francis. LifeSiteNews early on — in 2015 — reported on the Soros collaborator Jeffrey Sachs’ being present at several Vatican conferences. As I reported also in 2015, Sachs himself has been for a long time promoted and supported by George Soros. In 2006, Soros contributed $50 million to Jeffrey Sachs’ worldwide projects.
Moreover, The Remnant’s author Elizabeth Yore reported in 2016 about the repeated visits of Jeffrey Sachs to the Vatican.
As I have asked before: What has Pope Francis — the Pope who is so attentive to the poor — to do with major financial investors who at the same time promote the killing of the unborn children and other expressly anti-Catholic agendas?
OnePeterFive made a request for comment to the Vatican, but at last report had received no response.