According to Thomas D. Williams, the “sweeping generalizations” of papal advisers and their “lack of familiarity with the complex religious landscape in the United States prompts concern about the quality of advice that Pope Francis is receiving from close advisers.” Williams has the details:
In a peculiar, rambling essay, papal adviser Father Antonio Spadaro SJ has caricatured white southern evangelicals as well as conservative American Catholics as ignorant, theocratic, Manichean, war-mongering fanatics anxiously awaiting the apocalypse.
It is “these religious groups that are composed mainly of whites from the deep American South” that push conflicts and justify belligerence, while favoring the Old Testament “rather than be guided by the incisive look, full of love, of Jesus in the Gospels.”
The article appeared in both Italian and English in the Vatican-vetted journal La Civiltà Cattolica, of which Father Spadaro is editor-in-chief. In it, the Jesuit priest says that U.S. Evangelicals and Catholics have engaged in “an ecumenism of conflict” that seeks to advance “a theocratic type of state.”