Pat Buchanan made clear that he isn't a fan of Pope Francis, condemning the pontiff for his overtures to the LGBT community and women.

In his November 15 syndicated column, Buchanan - who popularized the notion of a “cultural war” with an inflammatory speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention - accused the pope of “non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the west.” Buchanan excoriated the pope “sowing seeds of confusion” for Catholics with his statements that he wouldn't “judge” gay people and that the church had grown too “obsessed” with social issues. Comparing the women's and LGBT movements to the mass slaughter of Mao's Cultural Revolution, Buchanan wrote (emphasis added):

“Pope Francis doesn't want cultural warriors; he doesn't want ideologues,” said Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, Wash.:

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Yet here is further confirmation His Holiness seeks to move the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.

There is a small problem with neutrality. As Trotsky observed, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” For the church to absent itself from the culture war is to not to end that war, but to lose it.

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The cultural revolution preached by Marxist Antonio Gramsci is continuing its “long march” through the institutions of the West and succeeding where the violent revolutions of Lenin and Mao failed. It is effecting a transvaluation of all values. And it is not interested in a truce with the church of Pope Francis, but a triumph over that church which it reviles as the great enemy in its struggle.

Indeed, after decades of culture war waged against Christianity, the Vatican might consider the state of the Faith.

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“Who am I to judge,” Pope Francis says of homosexuals.

Well, he is pope. And even the lowliest parish priest has to deliver moral judgments in a confessional.

The shift in tone ushered in by Pope Francis is merely the latest cultural development to provoke Buchanan's ire. In August, he fondly reminisced about the days of school segregation. Homosexuality, he believes, is “unnatural and immoral,” while marriage equality is an “Orwellian absurdity.” With LGBT people beginning to win basic legal protections and social recognition, Buchanan pines for the days when that was unthinkable - before society believed "[t]hat all races, religions and ethnic groups are equal," before , as Buchanan puts it, there were too many Jews on the Supreme Court. His model for a better, more “moral” society? Vladimir Putin's Russia.