As I tried (along with the rest of the Church) to process the horror of Charlie Kirk’s public murder by a supporter of transgender madness, I saw something happening that first made me really hopeful. Then it got me angry. But in the end what it left me was sad.
Mere hours after Kirk’s assassination, before he’d even been laid in hallowed ground, dozens of Catholics on social media were posting claims that Kirk had been “very close” to converting from Protestantism to Catholicism. (I won’t cite these posts because my purpose here is to correct people, not shame them.)
At first I thought, “How nice. I’m glad such a good man came to appreciate the treasures my church has passed along through the millennia. I hope it helped him grow closer to God.” That’s it. But the claims kept coming, becoming more emphatic. Soon some Orthodox believers began to make comparable claims about Kirk’s interest in their tradition.
Pulling People Apart
At this point I couldn’t help remembering what happened to Saint Francis Xavier, the fearless Jesuit missionary who evangelized Japan. Upon his death, zealous Catholics eager to possess a first-class relic pulled Francis’s body to bits — leaving only a single arm, which his fellow Jesuits preserved, coated in gold, and sent to Rome. (I had a whole chapter about this ghoulishly humorous incident in my book The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living.)
That was what these online apologists were figuratively doing to Charlie Kirk. As their claims fell to pieces instead, I went on social media to apologize to the Kirk family on behalf of my misguided fellow Catholics. Their motives weren’t wicked, but actually kind of tragic (as I’ll explain below).
Then Protestants came on and offered solid evidence in the form of direct quotes from Kirk expressing his discomfort with important Catholic claims, such as the sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Catholic theology of the Eucharist. These are no small issues; in fact, the Reformation partly hinged on them. The Council of Trent anathematized entire national churches for rejecting these beliefs. But the most pivotal issue for Kirk was the figure of Pope Francis, as he made clear in this video interview:
Charlie Kirk revealed the #1 reason why he didn’t become Catholic was POPE FRANCIS pic.twitter.com/gpZ3dH9HDm
— John-Henry Westen (@JhWesten) September 17, 2025
Pope Francis Helped Keep Charlie Kirk Protestant
Kirk said briefly and concisely what many faithful Catholics have been saying for a decade: Pope Francis was a Marxist who infused his statements and actions with a deeply un-Christian, fundamentally atheist worldview. I’ve speculated here that Jose Bergoglio was never a believer, but joined the priesthood on orders of his local Communist party — as thousands of young men did, according to ex-Communist agent and Catholic convert Bella Dodd. She testified to that conspiracy under oath before the U.S. Congress.
Bella Visono Dodd
– In her 1954 book *School of Darkness* (an autobiography detailing her communist activities), Dodd described how the Communist Party deliberately placed ideologically aligned individuals to subvert the Church from within.https://t.co/IwzlN6mX2G pic.twitter.com/vO9t5vEj5e— KB (@Barrky_3) September 16, 2025
I can’t prove that Pope Francis was one of those infiltrators. I don’t need to. By his fruits you shall know him. I won’t bore the reader with a rehash of the many thousands of words I wrote here about Francis’s relentless hijack of Christian ethics on behalf of globalist, leftist causes. I wrote a whole book on the subject, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, intended to immunize readers against the Marxist pathogens that Francis was introducing into the church’s bloodstream. But this old piece inspired by Megan Thee Stallion, “Woke As the Papacy,” offers a solid summary.
The point is that Kirk found it impossible to reconcile Catholic claims about the papacy with the reign of a leftist pope — who didn’t rebuke Joe Biden for his pro-abortion policies, presiding over a same-sex “wedding,” or even his direct persecution of pro-life U.S. Catholics. But Francis did claim that then-candidate Donald Trump was “not a Christian” for wanting to build a border wall.
Are Bears Catholic? Does the Pope Go in the Woods?
The Catholic Church teaches solemnly that abortion is murder, and advocacy of it is sufficient to warrant excommunication. It also teaches that nations should control immigration, and immigrants are obliged to obey nation’s laws (including their immigration laws). Pope Francis flouted both these articles of faith, then went even further: falsely teaching that capital punishment, demanded by the Covenant of Noah and accepted by the Church for 1,900 years in solemn formulas of faith, was always evil. (Presumably even when God prescribed it to Noah — wrap your head around that one if you can.)
Francis also approved of blessings for same-sex couples in church, nearly provoking a schism with faithful churches in Africa.
At this point, faithful Catholics can correctly point out that Pope Francis never taught any of his heretical positions invoking his infallible authority, as laid in the First Vatican Council. And that much is true. Technically the Church’s claim regarding the papacy has not been empirically disproven, thank God.
The Marxist Pope Blew Up Papal Stalinism
But another problem arises. For Catholics, the pope’s authority doesn’t end with infallible statements. In fact it begins there. As I wrote here last year, we Catholics are
not just bound by what the pope teaches infallibly. The official teaching of the Catholic Church, in a dogmatic constitution of the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, demands much more of Catholics. Intended by the bishops who wrote it to try to tamp down the chaos afflicting the Church in the 1960s, this document actually imposes what I have dubbed “Papal Stalinism,” which is servile obedience to even the fallible opinions of any pope … including the globalist, open-borders, quasi-Marxist politics of the present pontiff, Francis. Read it and weep. (I did.) [As Vatican II teaches]:
In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.
We’re in the very same boat as Protestants embattled by woke, Soros-funded leaders — only worse. We can’t vote out heretical pastors, switch denominations with a clear conscience, or exert any earthly influence to nudge our Church off its wicked path. Indeed, this is the ironic reason that the pro-life movement has long been led and dominated by Catholics: Helpless to change what’s happening to our church, at the mercy of whichever dim-bulb, faithless lavender bishop the distant pope appoints, we put our energy into an arena where laymen aren’t condemned to learned helplessness. If we can’t help save our Church, we think, maybe we can save babies.
Where Are the Catholic Leaders?
Not that saving babies will get us praised by our own bishops. Quite the contrary: One of the most powerful churchmen in America, Cardinal Blaise Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, is bestowing a lifetime achievement award on Illinois Senator Dick Durbin — an advocate of legal abortion all the way up through birth (among many other evils).
On the plus side, some eight faithful Catholic bishops in America have spoken up to denounce this suppurating scandal and called on Cupich to revoke this award. Given the lockstep, Stalinist uniformity that usually pervades the Catholic clerical establishment, that’s a tiny sign of hope.
But only a little glimmer, like a star peeking through the clouds of poisonous smoke over Mordor.
Through most of the Western world, Catholics don’t look to our bishops as teachers or leaders. It wouldn’t be safe to, not when some of them are comparing embattled ICE agents to Nazi war criminals. Personally, I don’t know my local bishop’s name, and I don’t plan to find out. That doesn’t stop me from faithfully receiving the sacraments it’s his job to make available.
So I can understand how patriotic, faithful Catholics feel abandoned. On a human level, we have been. It’s only human to crave reliable, principled leadership and look for genuine heroes. Charlie Kirk was both of those, and I’m confident he’s now with the One head of the Church, adding his prayers to ours for the future of this beleaguered, beloved country.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
