Boniface notices another wrinkle of papal audacity:

The poor of the world oppressed by corrupt elites. The downtrodden encouraged to rise up and take their destiny into their own hands. The great leader, the pope, urging them on and joining his voices with those of the oppressed. A call to translate the popular emotional anxiety and social angst of the poor into community action. Is this language not dripping with populist rhetoric? And this speech is just one example; these types of statements from Pope Francis are legion.

The point is not whether Pope Francis is correct or not. In much of this, he certainly is. The poor of Latin America are oppressed. There is an elitist global cabal that would like nothing more than the economic enslavement of the downtrodden. That’s not the issue. The issue is that Pope Francis’ appeal is absolutely, definitively, without a doubt populist in nature.

Pope Francis is fundamentally a populist. It’s so intrinsic to his worldview he doesn’t even realize it. He recognizes demagoguery and populist appeals in leaders whose agenda is in conflict with his own, but fails to identify populist rhetoric in his own appeals. Steeped in the neo-Marxian populism of Latin America, his brand of Argentine populism does not seem like populism to him – to him it’s just, well, it’s just the way leaders speak.

Again, this is not a critique of the pope’s ideas or his initiatives. But it does demonstrate that his assertion that “populism” is essentially evil is untenable, for he himself is a populist, and populism cannot be “evil” when used by one’s opponents but Christlike when done by the pope – and Pope Francis is the world’s most prominent populist.