More controversy surrounding Pope Francis

Daniel Burke, CNN religious editor writes that Pope Francis is about to officially recognize Palestinian statehood.

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, is scheduled to visit Pope Francis on Saturday, the day before the church canonizes two Palestinian nuns.

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In February of this year a jury in New York awarded $218.5 million dollars to families of victims of PLO terrorist attacks in Israel. Read more here.

In August of last year Pope Francis reinstated a priest after a 29 year suspension by anti-Communist Pope John in 1985. The priest's name is Miguel D’Escoto, who wrote a letter to President Obama in 2013 urging Obama to acknowledge

that U.S. foreign policy was being guided by Satan and constituted “terrorist, murderous and genocidal U.S. imperialism.” He urged Obama to have “the courage to acknowledge also that capitalism is, in fact, the most un-Christian doctrine and practice ever devised by man to keep us separate and unequal in a kind of global apartheid.”

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For decades, Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest, was treated with suspicion and even contempt by the Vatican’s hierarchy, which saw him as a dangerous Marxist firebrand who used faith as an instrument of revolution.

Gutiérrez was the founder of a progressive movement within the Catholic church known as liberation theology, and while he was never censured in the manner that some of his philosophical compatriots were, there were often rumblings that Gutiérrez was being investigated by Pope John Paul II’s doctrinal czar, a German cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger who would later become Pope Benedict.

But when the 86-year-old Peruvian arrives in Rome this week as a key speaker at a Vatican event, he will be welcomed as a guest, in a striking show of how Pope Francis – the first Latin American pontiff – has brought tenets of this sometimes controversial movement to the fore of his church, particularly in his pronouncements against the blight of poverty and the dangers of capitalism.

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In an unusual drop-in, Pope Francis on Sunday met for an hour with Cuba's Raul Castro, leaving the latter gushing. (Investors Business Daily)
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Thanks to Elizabeth Price Foley