Dark Money Aligned with Neofascists in Catholic Church – Matthew Fox (former Catholic priest) part 2/2

Talia Baroncelli
Hi. You’re watching theAnalysis.news, and I’m Talia Baroncelli. You’re watching part two of my interview with American priest Matthew Fox. We’re discussing his newly published book called Trump & the MAGA Movement as Antichrist.

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Joining me now is Matthew Fox. He’s an American Episcopal priest as well as theologian. He was formerly a member of the Dominican Order within the Catholic Church, and it was Cardinal Ratzinger who led an inquiry, a so-called imposition, if you will, into Matthew Fox’s writings and his work, and decided to silence him and then kick him out of the Catholic Church in 1993.

Matthew Fox has written numerous books, 43 books on culture and spirituality, including Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Spirituality Named Compassion, and The Reinvention of Work. Much of his writings are characterized by a pro-environmental, climate-conscious, Christian spirituality.

He’s here to speak about his new book, which was just published, and it’s called Trump & the MAGA Movement as Antichrist. Thanks so much for joining me today, Matthew.

Matthew Fox
Thank you, Talia. Happy to be with you.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, in your book, you also mentioned Project 2025. ProPublica, which is an investigative journalism outfit, recently published some of the secret training videos of Project 2025. One of the videos showcased former Trump official Bethany Kozma. She used to work for USAID. She was talking about how it was necessary to get rid of all mention of climate change in federal documents. This is also outlined in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. They don’t even see climate change or the climate crisis as being a threat to society. They don’t even want to acknowledge it. They see climate change as simply a set of policies that are trying to create energy scarcity and that these policies of energy scarcity are benefiting certain elites. They have a completely different view when it comes to climate change.


Why don’t we speak about Kevin Roberts, who is the President of the Heritage Foundation and plays a huge role in 2025? Can you speak about his ties to Opus Dei? And then we’ll also get to Steve Bannon.

Matthew Fox
Well, again, there is this fascist wing of the Catholic Church. Steve Bannon, who you mentioned, Leo Leonard, who’s very effective, who really gave us this Unsupreme Court that we currently have, all six of the extremists on it were nominated by him and cleared by him. He’s within the bowels of the Heritage Foundation, and that’s where Kevin Roberts is on the same team.

Also, these people, these far-right and many of them very rich Catholics, have taken over a lot of the Catholic education. They’re investing, if you will, in Catholic schools. Of course, the Catholic Church has undergone a tremendous economic collapse in my lifetime because of the pedophile priest thing. There’s this vacuum, and they’re filling it or trying to. They chum up to a lot of bishops because the bishops have to pay the bills. These bishops are not looking at it from the point of view of justice and injustice, but just from the point of view, who can give me some money to fill our coffers?

The fact is that the Catholic bishops had for two years, their headperson was an Opus Dei bishop from Los Angeles. It’s just amazing, really, that the head of the bishops was Opus Dei because Opus Dei is a fascist, literally a fascist organization. The founder was a fascist priest in Spain in the 1920s who became very close to Franco and all the rest. I write about that in my book, The Pope’s War.

The impact of those people with money and influence, and some of them are very skilled. And, of course, within that coterie is the Koch brothers, who are not from the Catholic but from the Protestant wing, if you will. But as you start looking at where the money is flowing and who it’s coming from, there are strong ideologies in many of these billionaires, and they love to wrap it in a so-called Christianity or something else, or Catholicism. These same Catholic people are very anti-Pope Francis, and he’s come after some of them. For example, Cardinal Burke, who was their overall champion within the Ecclesial structure, one of the first things Pope Francis did was to fire him from being head of the Knights of Malta. The Knights of Malta is where Leo Leopold–

Talia Baroncelli
Leonard Leo is who you’re referring to.

Matthew Fox
I’m sorry. Leonard Leo, I’m sorry.


Talia Baroncelli
No worries.

Matthew Fox
Where he hangs out, that’s his source. Theologically, these people are Neanderthals. They, like [inaudible 00:06:19] himself, hated the Vatican Council II. So do all these others. They resent it and think all the answers were, let’s make phallicism great again by backing up to before Vatican II because Vatican II called for justice. Out of Vatican II, the liberation theology movement was born, and so forth, and the creation of the spirituality movement that I’m part of.
America is, what can I say? It’s spiritually and religiously illiterate. By that, I mean it’s been called fundamentalism Christianity in the newspapers and on TV. For decades, they’ve identified Christianity with fundamentalism. In fact, fundamentalists are not, what should I say, the plurality of Christians in America. Vatican II, it was not fundamentalist. It was about ecumenism, and it was about justice and so forth. It set things in motion, but of course, two popes followed that were very much in the far-right wing corner of Catholicism, and they destroyed liberation theology, deliberately working with Ronald Reagan and the CIA under Ronald Reagan. I’ve proven all that in my book The Pope’s War. They set out the CIA and the entire community of national security in America under Reagan, set out to destroy liberation theology in South America. They put our document, the Santa Fe document, about how to do it. They realized they couldn’t do it in totality. But what they could do was they could split the church. So that’s what they did, and they did it very effectively. They went to Rome with, and by they, I mean the head of the CIA, who was a far-right-wing Catholic, [Joseph] Casey. He went to Rome with, I think, 29 trips with satchels full of cash to give to Pope Paul, John Paul II, to give to solidarity. But in exchange, Pope John Paul II and Ratzinger, who was his hatchet man, went after liberation theology in South America. So they did split the church.

Talia Baroncelli
And also after Aristide in Haiti, right?

Matthew Fox
That, too. Yeah. And, of course, even Archbishop Romero now declared a saint who was martyred. The Vatican hated Romero. Romero was too close to the people, and he took on the military in El Salvador. Yet, Pope Francis canonized him and thereby opened the door to a realization that the values pronounced in Vatican II, which also gave birth to liberation theology, were the values of a Christian like Óscar Romero.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, the dark money you refer to is incredibly important because you were speaking about Citizens United in your book, which is a decision passed in, I think, 2008, which allowed for all sorts of undocumented, untransparent transfers of money to political groups, to political parties. It’s much harder to track who is actually giving all of this money.

You mentioned Leonard Leo and how he was from the Federalist Society, and he was picking or suggesting which judges Trump should appoint to the Supreme Court. Of course, he favored John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, who were all incredibly corrupt. They’ve also narrowed the definition of corruption in the United States context by essentially making it legal to bribe someone on a political scale, saying that political gifts or gifts of money are not bribery and that they don’t constitute corruption. The definition of corruption has been changed, the legal definition, at least. There are all sorts of instances of corruption by the, as you call them, Unsupreme Court. Where is this money actually coming from? You mentioned Opus Dei and Steve Bannon, but where is the actual money coming from?

Matthew Fox
Well, I remember they’ve also redefined the immunity of a president. It’s not just those three, but they were first. The most recent three also were handpicked by Leonard Leo, who, by the way, is frequently in pictures with the sugar daddy, who gives so much money to Clarence Thomas and keeps taking them on vacations that we learn about only years after they’ve happened that Thomas, for some reason, never mentions on his taxes, I guess.

Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, he didn’t think it was an important point to mention.

Matthew Fox
Let me point out that 2008 was Citizens United. That was John Roberts doing. It precedes Trump, of course, and that’s my point. Trump is not everything. He’s just a very successful articulator in bringing the masses into this whirlwind of corruption that is becoming clearer day by day. Now, Leonard Leo is a billionaire himself. A billionaire gave him $1.6 billion a couple of years ago, just straight cash like that. Now that he’s been so successful in taking over the Supreme Court, he is now applying it to Congressional races. He wants to do to Congress what he’s accomplished in the Supreme Court. These people have to be watched and watched carefully.

Talia Baroncelli
I was asking about where the money is coming from because-

Matthew Fox
Where it’s coming from, yeah.

Talia Baroncelli
There are huge donors.

Matthew Fox
Huge donors, yeah. Well, again, the Koch brothers have been huge donors to all these projects for decades. That’s well buttressed by facts and books, even. Of course, one of them is now deceased. Of course, their big thing was to fight environmental laws because they were making their money in Texas oil and other things, and they didn’t want the daughter of the environmental laws. That’s the thing that we now have, what, a thousand billionaires in America. Some of them have a conscience and are trying to do good things, but some of them have a project. They have a goal, and a lot of it is to deconstruct democracy.

This fellow who gave Vance, the Vice President on the Republican side, $15 million for a Senate campaign has declared that democracy for him is dead. Democracy and freedom, he says, are incompatible. By freedom, he means the freedom of a billionaire to do whatever advances their goals of making more money on their billions. So, it advances their goals of greed.

Talia Baroncelli
You’re referring to Peter Thiel, probably.

Matthew Fox
Exactly.

Talia Baroncelli
Who funded J.D. Vance’s rise.

Matthew Fox
Right. He has a philosophy. He’s honest about putting it out there, but he thinks that democracy is passe because it interferes with his goals, and of course, I think Musk feels the same way.
When you can buy half the Congress, and because of the Citizens United gamemanship– remember, behind Citizens United is this amazing philosophical statement that corporations are persons. I just think that’s so amazing because Chief Justice Roberts claims to be a Catholic, too. That’s pretty far from Catholic philosophy. Catholic philosophy has been pretty strong on what a person means and it’s never been defined as corporations before, except by this particular Supreme Court.

Once you define corporations as people, you’re making a lot of trouble. For one thing, corporations are immortal. People die. We die. Our corporations keep going. They keep going. We’ve not only given them immortality, we give them the rights of persons. That’s quite a jump. There’s a lot of chicanery going on. You do see some bright senators in the judicial committees who are standing up, and I cite several of them in my book, of course, to what’s going on and have figured out how we could solve it if we had the will to solve it.

I think the whole MAGA structure begins with denial. Denial is a decision. Meister Eckhart, the great mystic of the Middle Ages, said, “God is the denial of denial.” I just love that. He could have just said, God is the opposite of denial. God is a denial of denial. That means if you’re in a context of denial, like the entire one whole party in America is about climate change, it pretends to be on the front, but if you’re in denial that God is nowhere in the picture, the truth is nowhere in the picture, then you can do whatever you want. Of course, that is a big part of the tradition of the archetype of the Antichrist, that Satan is a father of lies.

When you have a president who’s been counted to have told over 35,000 lies as a president, that feeds the archetype, too, you see. All politicians lie to a point, I think, but not to the extraordinary achievement of that particular successful politician. That’s one more example of the powers of the Antichrist that are to be found.

I want to point out, too, that I’m using the word Antichrist; as I said, I’m trying to take it back from the fundamentalist. But remember, [Martin] Luther used it. It was very big for Luther. In the year 1520, he started to use it of the curia. But then, as things got tougher for him, he also applied it to the papacy. From 1520 till he died, I think that was 1545, 25 years, he was using the term Antichrist very strongly. The other reformers, [Huldrych] Zwingli, [John] Calvin, and John Knox, got on board and used it, too. So there’s a precedent for what I’m talking about. Applying the archetype, it’s an archetype of the Antichrist, to cultural moments and cultural movements, and the heads of these movements are a precedent for this.

Of course, when it was used in the first century in the Book of Revelation, it was applied to the Roman Empire. It was out trying to literally throw Christians to the lions. It was a true story. Some emperors were doing that. That’s where this whole archetype was applied in the first century in the Bible itself. But of course, they got it from the Book of Daniel and so forth in ancient Israel.

[Carl] Jung says, “Archetypes arise when we need them.” I’m saying that to summarize the evil of Citizens United and misogyny, and denial of climate change, which is matricide because it is killing our mother earth, and all these other issues that I’m talking about, to summarize it we have a language for it, and that language is Antichrist. It is a powerful archetype, as Caroline Myss points out in her forward to my book. She’s a student of archetypes.

Talia Baroncelli
Your chapter on Jesus as well. You speak about Jesus’s opposition to the Roman Empire, and a lot of people today would say that Jesus was basically a Marxist. He was concerned with the well-being of everyone and didn’t want there to be huge inequalities in society—one final question on J.D. Vance.

Matthew Fox
Of course, Karl Marx comes out of the same tradition as Jesus, the Jewish prophetic tradition. Of course, they had a lot in common: that justice matters and that compassion means justice, not just being sorry for people.

Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, you also speak about what you mean by justice.

Matthew Fox
Creating structures where love is possible, creating structures that limit greed, put guard wheels on greed, so that love and fairness are possible.

Talia Baroncelli
This seems to be completely at odds with what J.D. Vance is talking about because J.D. Vance also has his own vision of Christianity. He’s, as you mentioned, funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire, and he seems to have a very distorted view of Christianity. How do you identify J.D. Vance’s view, and would he be more along the lines of Steve Bannon and that sort of Catholicism? How do you characterize J.D. Vance?

Matthew Fox
Well, very much so. I wrote an article in my Daily Meditations a few weeks ago comparing J.D. Vance’s Catholicism to Joe Biden’s because Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are definitely Vatican II Catholics. They listened to what was being said about shifting more into the arena of justice-making. They did something about it in their lives and in their vocations as politicians. I commend them for that. It doesn’t mean they were right all the time.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, Joe Biden, who calls himself a Catholic, is currently enabling Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, so I wouldn’t call him a holy man either.

Matthew Fox
Well, yeah, I think that’s definitely his biggest mistake, is that he’s been played by Netanyahu time and time again. I don’t know why he hasn’t stepped away from that. Again, we all fall short. That’s the point. What are your basic North Star, your basic values? I think his, gently said, are many of the values that I was trying to talk about to Catholics.

Now, Vance has come on board, you see, in this time, where there is this strong, not in the sense of numbers, but in the sense of finance, this strong right wing, I would call it neo-fascist wing of the Catholic Church, and those are the ones who have taken him under his wing. He’s only been Catholic for five years, but it is a strange Catholicism. You see it in these movements I’ve been talking about that we came to strength under Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They wanted to destroy base communities and liberation theology in South America, and they substituted Opus Dei. They literally declared all these bishops and cardinals in South America to be Opus Dei, and many bishops now in America, too.

This has really tainted the church so that in North America, Pope Francis himself has talked about how conservative American bishops are, how they’re actually, I think he actually said they’re committing suicide. He has a running fight with these people. Of course, he just excommunicated one of their heroes, who was the Archbishop, who was nuncio here, which is the diplomat from the Vatican for six years; this guy was appointing bishops for six years. He had this say, the final yay and no, about bishops. He had tremendous influence. He denied Vatican II also. It’s very unusual to excommunicate an archbishop, especially when there’s been a diplomat, a nuncio in many countries over many decades. But that’s how, what should I say, fed up Pope Francis is with this corner of the church, which is overly represented in the United States, overly represented because of the appointments of young bishops of that philosophy is like the appointments of these young members of the Supreme Court who could be there forever, carrying on the ideologies of Donald Trump and his companions.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, Matthew Fox, it’s been really fascinating speaking to you and speaking to you about your new book, which was just published, and I hope people read it. I thought it was really interesting. We didn’t get to speak about Thomas Aquinas, but I think his writings and philosophy and his attempts to reconcile reason, science, faith, and those things also played a huge role in how you approach this particular topic and how you wrote about it. I thought it was a really fascinating read, and I hope people read it. So thank you.

Matthew Fox
Well, thank you. He has some powerful things to say about politicians, about tyrants, and about democracy. He has this one amazing insight. He says, “A politician must know more about the human soul than a doctor knows about the human body.” It’s an amazing statement. When you think about it, Hitler knew the soul of the Germans in the 1930s very, very well. He could appeal to its sense of resentment and so forth. I think Donald Trump, too, is very gifted in reading the soul of wounded people in America and getting them stirred up and providing them with a language that is hostile and really laden with hatred, but that appeals not to the better angels, but to the worst angels, which we call demons, bad spirits of people. I think he’s very good at that, and we should not deny that’s part of the Antichrist. Like in this great fresco painting we’re talking about, a lot of people were listening to him. This was a popular guy. There are even pictures of him doing miracles in the background, raising something from the dead as well. That is the tradition of the Antichrist, that he has powers, and these powers can be very effective, and they mesmerize people.

As Jung says, “There’s something fascinating about a negative archetype. It draws people. It’s alluring.” Jung applies that to the Antichrist, that there’s a fascination there. I think the media has given Trump so many free rides because they’re allured by it, too. Of course, they’re allured by their bottom line because the more people who look at these strange stories going on, the more money they make. I think that Tim Walz, by calling it weird, this weirdness draws people to television at times. I think that is part of what’s going on here. The previous name for that might have been an allurement to him.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, I think maybe next time we could speak about how to give people an alternative because Hillary Clinton famously called some Trump supporters Basket of Deplorables. I think it’s accurate to label some of them as racist, fascist, and Antichrist, but some people are just average people who have experienced such grievances and economic despair and all sorts of disillusionment with elite politicians and the government. Of course, overdoses of [crosstalk 00:28:39]. 

Matthew Fox
I don’t apply those words. I’m not talking about individuals either. That’s why I talk about the archetype. There’s this languaging that tells the truth of things that we need to look at, as Jung says, and as you started out in the third conversation. Without looking at it, it metastases. It’s not just an American problem. Obviously, the rise of fascism is happening in many countries around the world because of modern liberalism and neoliberalism. We’re in a postmodern time, and we don’t have the politics for a postmodern time. We don’t have the structures. We don’t have an education or academia for a postmodern time, and we don’t have religion for a postmodern time.

You could look at this as something negative, or you could say, hey, what an invitation to give birth to something new. Pete Buttigieg talked last night about new politics, and I think that’s really what can be borne out of what I see happening in the Democratic Party today. With someone like Harris and Walz as leaders, I think it’s possible. Bringing joy back is very important because joy, after all, is related to love. If you talk about joy, you’re also talking about love. There’s not a lot of either in the Antichrist movement today or in the past.

Talia Baroncelli
Matthew Fox, thanks so much for joining us, and thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. See you next time.