"Jesus affirms that you cannot serve two masters, God and wealth," Francis said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa. "Is it pauperism? No, it is the Gospel."

Pope Francis said that "Markets and financial speculation cannot enjoy absolute autonomy. We cannot wait any longer to resolve the structural causes of poverty in order to cure our society of an illness that can only lead to new crises."

"The Gospel does not condemn the wealthy, but the idolatry of wealth, the idolatry that makes people indifferent to the call of the poor," Francis says in "Pope Francis: this economy kills" ("Papa Francesco. Questa economia uccide") a study of the pope's economic and social teachings written by Andrea Tornielli, director of the La Stampa's Vatican Insider, and the Italian daily's Vatican beat reporter, Giacomo Galeazzi,

"Jesus tells us that it is the 'protocol' on the basis of which we will be judged, it is what we read in Chapter 25 of Matthew: I had hunger, I had thirst, I was in prison, I was sick, I was naked and you helped me: dressed me, visited me, you took care of me."

Given how many feathers Pope Francis has already ruffled at the Vatican and beyond with a series of statements emphasizing income inequality, and his attempt to rid the Vatican of old Catholic officials whose main mission appears to be to stifle change and protect their privileges, it is nevertheless still surprising that some critics would claim that the first Latin American pope is a Marxist.

As for accusations that he supports Communism, Francis said: "This attention to the poor is in the Gospel, and in the tradition of the church, it is not an invention of Communism and [we] need not ideologize it, like sometimes happened in the course of history."

"I recognize that globalization has helped many people to lift themselves out of poverty," Francis said, "but it has condemned many others to starve."

"It is true that in absolute terms the world's wealth has grown, but inequality has also increased and new [forms of] poverty have arisen," he added.

The Wall Street Journal's Liam Moloney noted that "The 78-year year old pope -- the first non-European pontiff in about 1,300 years -- has often criticized economic systems that center on greed and focus on making money at the expense of the poor and the weakest. He has labeled this the 'throwaway' culture."

In his younger days, Father Jorge Bergolio (now Pope Francis) went on record as opposing liberation theology. Blase Bonpane, a former Maryknoll father and founding director of the Office of the Americas, told Dennis Bernstein writing for Consortium News, that "The new pope has not been comfortable with liberation theology." However in recent months there appears to be some movement towards reconciliation.

However, it is possible that he more than familiar with Thomas Piketty's surprise best-seller "Capital in the 21st Century," which, as Santiago Zabala pointed out last year, is critical "of income inequality," and is not very different from Pope Francis's views on capitalism in his apostolic exhortation "Evangelii Gaudium."