Arturo Marcelino Sosa Abascal SJ (born 12 November 1948) is the thirty-first and present Superior General of the Society of Jesus. He was elected Superior General by the Society's 36th General Congregation on 14 October 2016, succeeding Adolfo Nicolás. As a Venezuelan, he is the first person born in Latin America to lead the Jesuits.

Arturo Marcelino Sosa Abascal was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on 12 November 1948,[1] the son of Arturo Sosa, Sr. a Christian Socialist finance minister.[2] He entered the Society of Jesus in 1966 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1977.[1] He earned a licentiate in philosophy from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in 1972, and a doctorate in political science from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1990.[3][4]

In 2004, he was professor of Venezuelan political thinking at the Catholic University of Tachira and was invited to Georgetown University Center for Latin American Studies as a visiting professor to give a lecture.[6]

In Venezuela, he was strongly committed to left-wing politics, and was critical of the country's representative democracy in the 1990s. He supported the two coups d'état of Hugo Chavez, though he later distanced himself from Chavez following human rights violations.[8]

The Catholic Herald criticised Sosa for being one of over 1,000 signatories of a 1989 letter welcoming Cuban President Fidel Castro to Venezuela in 1989, Castro having repressed the Catholic Church in Cuba during his time in power.[13] George Neumayr of the conservative American Spectator described Sosa as a "Marxist", "a Venezuelian communist, and modernist".[14]

In October 2018, in an interview with EWTN, Sosa argued that "the pope is not the chief of the Church, he's the Bishop of Rome". This was opposed by Pecknold, who argued that it would be wrong to believe that Pope was "merely 'first among equals' ", and insisted that the pope has "supreme authority" over all bishops and the faithful.[23]

On 21 August 2019, Sosa declared in an interview that the Devil "exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because [he] is not a person, [he] is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life. […] Good and evil are in a permanent war in the human conscience and we have ways to point them out. We recognize God as good, fully good. Symbols are part of reality, and the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality."

So, maybe that's why they call this guy the Black Pope