This week brought the unpleasant, but not surprising news that Pope Francis reinstated as priest one Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann (the latter is his mother’s maiden name, added to his surname as customary in Spanish-speaking countries) who served as foreign minister for the Nicaraguan communists (the Sandinistas) from 1979 to 1990, later becoming president of the UN General Assembly. In 1984, John Paul II suspended the communist functionary from the priesthood. Currently, D’Escoto (one cannot force oneself to call this communist wretch a “priest” or refer to him as “Father”) is director for border issues and international relations of the Government of the President of Nicaragua – his old Sandinista boss Daniel Ortega.

D’Escoto, belongs to the Maryknoll Order, which was traditionally dedicated to overseas missionary activity. One of its martyrs, Bishop Francis Xavier Ford was born and raised in Brooklyn and was murdered, after much torture, by the Chinese communists in 1953.

The Los Angeles-born and Nicaragua-raised D’Escoto took a decidedly different path in life than Bishop Ford. Pat Buchanan knows D’Escoto back from Columbia school of journalism and devoted a few paragraphs to the Sandinista in his Right from the Beginning:

That my old friend, Miguel D’Escoto, was a Communist at Columbia, I do not believe; that he became one, as Daniel Ortega’s Foreign Minister and front man, I do not doubt. Either that, or he is a crass opportunist whose hatred of the United States has blinded him to his own betrayal of everything to which he dedicated his life when he took the vows of a Maryknoll priest. Today, a defrocked Miguel D’Escoto shills for a bogus and heretical little rump sect called the “Popular Church” of Nicaragua that is the creation of the Communist regime he has served for almost a decade . . . In Moscow in June of 1987, Miguel D’Escoto was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, a rare first for the Maryknoll Order.

Unfortunately, D’Escoto was not defrocked and excommunicated, but merely suspended. Right after his reinstatement, D’Escoto publicly showed his true color, a communist red:

The Vatican may silence everyone, then God will make the stones speak, and may the stones spread his message, but He didn’t do this, He chose the greatest Latin-American of all time: Fidel Castro . . . It is through Fidel Castro that the Holy Spirit sends us the message.