Tag Archives: Pope Francis

Catholicism, Culture, Radicalism, Religion

St Gallen ‘Mafia’

The St Gallen ‘Mafia’ Is the ‘Skeleton Key’ Helping to Unlock Many Riddles of Francis’ Pontificate, Says Author

By Edward Pentin, 31 December 2023

Although the “St Gallen Mafia” is well known to most who follow the papacy and the Vatican, the vast majority of Catholics are unlikely to have ever heard of it.

And yet this group’s influence on the direction of the Church and all of the current and recent upheavals of this pontificate cannot be overestimated.

Founded in the mid-1990s, the clandestine group of high-ranking churchmen gathered in the Swiss city of St Gallen to oppose a Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger papacy.

Hosted by St Gallen’s then-bishop, Ivo Fürer, its members included Cardinals José da Cruz Policarpo, then Patriarch of Lisbon, Carlo Maria Martini, Godfried Danneels, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Achille Silvestrini, Lubomyr Husar, Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann.

Their efforts at the 2005 conclave to install a heterodox, progressive candidate failed, thanks in large part to strong resistance led by Cardinal Joachim Meisner.

The group, which Cardinal Danneels jokingly referred to as a “mafia,” then appeared to cease meeting from 2006 but its influence lived on in the form of a looser network that paved the way for Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ascendance to the Chair of St Peter less than seven years later.

Now Julia Meloni has produced a compelling, well-researched and vital book describing exactly how this “mafia” came to influence the leadership of the Church, precipitating much of the prevailing structural, spiritual, and moral destruction of the past nine years of Francis’ pontificate.

Well-written in a captivating style, The St. Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church (TAN 2021) is required reading for anyone with an interest in today’s Church, for those concerned about the direction her leaders are taking her, and to future historians wishing to examine this tumultuous period in the Church’s history.

Read the rest . . .

Australia, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, Law, Media, Religion

A bad pope? – the evidence

If anyone is still left with doubt about Pope Francis, then Henry Sire’s evidence in his article below should remove that doubt.

I was particularly interested in Henry Sire’s suggestion that figures in the Vatican were critical in the raising of the preposterous charges against Cardinal Pell of child sexual abuse, charges the High Court of Australia dismissed. The Pell persecution by colluding figures in government and church was one of the most shocking political episodes in Australia.

‘The most notorious aspect of this clamp-down was the way Cardinal Pell was got rid of. In 2017 he had to return to Australia to face historic charges of sexual abuse, for which he was sentenced to prison, until his conviction was quashed on appeal three years later. By that time it was too late for him to resume his post at the Vatican. There is every reason to believe that the Australian prosecution was instigated and assisted by figures in the Vatican as a means of stopping his reform, and Cardinal Becciu has been specifically named as the agent of this policy.‘

*****

Pope Francis: How much lower can we sink?

 Henry Sire, OnePeter5, December 11, 2023

When Joseph Shaw proposed this talk to me in early September, I suggested the title “Pope Francis: how much lower can we sink?”, but the fact is that since then we have been overtaken by events. Over the past eleven years we have all seen Pope Francis’s pontificate in a trajectory of accelerating descent into more and more overt betrayal of Catholic doctrine, but I must say I did not foresee the Gadarene rush we have seen just within the last three months. If we want to assess the very grave events that are happening around us, we need to try and understand the man we now have sitting on the throne of Peter. So before I comment on recent developments I would like to add some details to the picture of Pope Francis which I gave in my book The Dictator Pope, which was first published six years ago.

To give you some background on this book, I should explain that I arrived to work in Rome in April 2013, less than a month after the election of Pope Francis, and I lived there for the next four years. I was working for the Order of Malta, an organisation which has close links to the Holy See, and I quickly began to hear the reports that were privately coming out of the Vatican. They showed a very different Francis from the genial, liberal figure, who was being presented by the world’s media. Insiders were saying that, as soon as the publicity cameras were off him, Francis became a different figure: arrogant, dismissive of people, given to foul language, and notorious for furious outbursts of temper which were known even to the Vatican chauffeurs. Over the next couple of years I continued to hear inside information, for example from the late Cardinal Pell about the internal politics involved in the two Synods on the Family in 2014 and 2015. Let us bear in mind that in his first years Pope Francis had barely shown his hand and that people assumed he was the liberal reformer that the Church supposedly needed. Early in 2016 I wrote an article for Angelico Press titled “Pope Francis: Where is the reformer behind the media idol?” I was beginning to think that somebody needed to write a book disclosing the gulf between the public image of Pope Francis and the reality as seen within the Vatican; but at that stage I did not think that I would be the one to write it.

Besides the information gulf I have described, there was another one stemming from the language barrier. There was in fact a great deal of information which had been available for years about Jorge Bergoglio and his career in Argentina, but it simply had not come through to the rest of the world because it had not been translated into English. Since I am half-Spanish, this was another of the factors that pointed to my shouldering the task that was needed. When I decided to start work on the book, the first thing I did was to make a trip to Argentina, which I did in March 2017, to speak to people who could tell me about Bergoglio’s past record. This was the information that had been sadly lacking to the cardinals when they elected Bergoglio in 2013. In particular, there was a very revealing book which had been written shortly after the papal election, but which had been quickly stamped on, and had since become almost unavailable. The title was El Verdadero Francisco (The Real Francis), by Omar Bello. The author was a public-relations executive who had known Bergoglio personally over the past eight years, having worked for him in a television channel run by the archdiocese of Buenos Aires. As a professional in the field of public relations, Bello was quick to recognise in Bergoglio a master in self-promotion. He also described a man who was accomplished in the covert exercise of power and the manipulation of people.

Read the rest here . . .

Catholicism, Feminism, Radicalism, Religion

Woke Pope to feminize the Church

The ordinary Catholic faithful is left stunned by what this present pope is perpetrating in Holy Mother the Church. Among other things, he is imposing participatory democracy on the Church, a form of government totally incompatible with the hierarchical government of the last two thousand years. He ruthlessly banned the traditional Mass that goes back centuries, showing an appalling lack of charity. He condemns those adhering to the traditional Church as sinful and schismatic. Now he recognises a new sin: masculinity.

He declares there is too much sinful masculinity in the Church and calls upon theologians, particularly feminist theologians, to ‘demasculinize’ the Church. It’s hard to believe these words and actions emanate from the Vicar of Christ.

To demonstrate the need to rid the Church of sinful masculinity he reminds people that “The church is woman. And if we do not understand who women are, what the theology of a woman is, we will never understand what the church is.”

One assumes that Bergoglio is referring to Ephesians 5:22-33 in which St Paul calls the Church the Bride of Christ. Is this symbolic depiction the same as claiming the ‘Church is woman.’ I suppose it is if you’re an agitating feminist theologian. For the rest of us, it shows the pope is sadly confused.

In the same feminist mode of explanation, Bergoglio goes on to refer to two principles in the Church: a “Petrine principle” and a “Marian principle” . He then asserts these two principles ‘describe the important but different roles women and men play in the Catholic Church.’ What?

Don’t the two principles rather refer to two different ways men and woman live out their Catholic faith – one based on Christ the redeemer and the other on the Blessed Virgin Mary, the way of charity and humility?

May I remind His Holiness that Mary declared in the sublime Magnificat that ‘my spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior for He has regarded the humility of his handmaid …’ Mary is a model of humility and compassion for men and women

To claim that the Petrine Principle and the Marian Principle describe roles, one exclusive to men, and one exclusive to women, is, it seems to me, to proclaim a new teaching.

But then again feminists are all about flipping things on their head. Our feminist pope is merely following their theological fantasies.

*****

Pope asks theologians to help ‘de-masculinize’ the church

Meeting members of the International Theological Commission, a body appointed by the pope and that works with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Francis noted how few members are women.

Cindy Wooden, USCCB, November 30, 2023

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Asking pardon for speaking plainly, Pope Francis told members of the International Theological Commission that “one of the great sins we have had is ‘masculinizing’ the church,” which also can be seen by the fact that only five of the commission members are women.

The pope, who appoints the 28 members of the commission, said the church needs to make more progress in balancing such bodies because “women have a capacity for theological reflection that is different from what we men have.”

Pope Francis met members of the commission at the Vatican Nov. 30. He handed them a prepared text, which he described as a “beautiful speech with theological things,” but said that because of his ongoing respiratory problems due to bronchitis, “it’s better that I don’t read it.”

But greeting members of the group, the pope said that perhaps his conviction about the importance of women theologians comes from the fact that “I’ve studied a lot the theology of a woman,” Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, and her work on Father Romano Guardini, a German priest, philosopher and theologian, who died in 1968.

Coincidently, Gerl-Falkovitz is one of four German women who wrote to Pope Francis about their concerns regarding the German Catholic Church’s Synodal Path. In a letter published by a German newspaper Nov. 21, Pope Francis responded to the women saying, “I, too, share this concern about the numerous concrete steps that are now being taken by large parts of this local church that threaten to move further and further away from the common path of the universal church.”

Pope Francis told members of the commission that at the next meeting of his international Council of Cardinals, “we will have a reflection on the feminine dimension of the church.”

Providing no other details, he repeated what he has said in the past: “The church is woman. And if we do not understand who women are, what the theology of a woman is, we will never understand what the church is.”

The problem “is not solved in a ministerial way, that’s another thing,” he said, repeating his belief in the concept that in the church there is a “Petrine principle” and a “Marian principle” that describe the important but different roles women and men play in the Catholic Church.

“You can debate this, but the two principles are there,” the pope said. “It is more important to have the Marian (dimension) than the Petrine,” because the church is the bride of Christ.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Radicalism, Religion

The apostate pope

Archbishop Viganò: Catholics must seriously consider the possibility that Francis isn’t the pope

Archbishop Vigano, Tue Oct 3, 2023 LifeSiteNews

We must ‘take seriously, very seriously, the possibility that Bergoglio intended to obtain the election by means of fraud… in order to do the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ gave a mandate to Saint Peter and his Successors to do.’

Featured Image

(LifeSiteNews) –– Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has released the following statement on the ongoing theological debate over the status of Pope Francis and the papacy. In many ways, this is his most pointed criticism yet. His Excellency argues that given the devastation caused by “Jorge Mario Bergoglio” on the universal Church — which stems from his embrace of the “cancer” of Vatican II — and given the role the Saint Gallen mafia played in the 2013 conclave, Pope Francis does not have and never did have the intention of serving as the head of the Catholic Church.

Rather he hid his intentions from electors with the end goal of using the authority of the papacy to undermine the Church and to make it the “handmaid” of the New World Order. “I believe instead that his acceptance of the papacy is invalidated, because he considers the papacy something other than what it is,” Viganò remarks. He continues: “I would like us to take seriously … the possibility that Bergoglio intended to obtain the election by means of fraud, and that he intended to abuse the authority of the Roman Pontiff in order to do the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ gave a mandate to Saint Peter.” The Archbishop also states that he disagrees with Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s view that “universal acceptance” of Francis as the pope makes him the pope. His Excellency points to the historical example of Clement VII in the 14th century to support his argument. While admitting the current situation is “humanly irremediable,” his goal in publishing the letter is to “get to the root of the question” and to find a common starting point that can lead to a “remedy [to] the disconcerting, scandalous presence of a pope who presents himself with ostentatious arrogance as inimicus Ecclesiæ, and who acts and speaks as such.”

VITIUM CONSENSUS

A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos.
Numquid colligunt de spinis uvas aut de tribulis ficus?
Sic omnis arbor bona fructus bonos facit; mala autem arbor fructus malos facit.
Non potest arbor bona fructus malos facere, neque arbor mala fructus bonos facere.
Omnis arbor quæ non facit fructum bonum exciditur et in ignem mittitur.
Igitur ex fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos.

By their fruits you will know them.
Does anyone pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Just so, every good tree bears good fruit; and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.
A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit.
Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
Therefore By their fruits you will know them.

Mt 7:16-20

In this speech I will not try to give answers, but to pose a question that can no longer be postponed, so that we bishops, the clergy, and the faithful can look clearly at the very serious apostasy present as a completely unprecedented fact, one that cannot be resolved, in my opinion, by resorting to our usual categories of judgment and action.

The evidence of the ‘Bergoglio problem’

The proliferation of declarations and behaviors completely foreign to what is expected of a pope – and indeed in contrast with the Faith and Morality of which the Papacy is the guardian – has led many of the faithful and an increasingly large number of bishops to take note of something that until some time ago seemed unheard of: the Throne of Peter is occupied by a person who abuses his power, using it for the opposite purpose to that for which Our Lord instituted it.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Radicalism, Religion

Pope Francis’s obfuscation

Below Our Sunday Visitor reports on Pope Francis’s reply to the ‘Dubia’ about Church teaching five cardinals sent to him. The report shows (whether the reporter meant it or not) the Pope’s usual tactic of stating Church teaching but then adding qualifications that undermine it or at least provide a platform for agitation to undermine it.

*****

Pope responds to cardinals on blessings for homosexuals, female priests

by Justin McLellan, Our Sunday Visitor, October 2, 2023

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church, in pursuit of “pastoral prudence,” should discern if there are ways of giving blessings to homosexual persons that do not alter the Church’s teaching on marriage, Pope Francis said.

Writing in response to a “dubia” letter delivered to him by five cardinals seeking clarification on doctrinal questions, the pope addressed issues surrounding the authority of the synod, women’s ordination and blessing homosexual unions in a letter made public Oct. 2.

Marriage is an “exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to conceiving children,” wrote the pope. “For this reason, the Church avoids all kinds of rites or sacramentals that could contradict this conviction and imply that it is recognizing as a marriage something that is not.”

But pastoral charity also is necessary, and “defense of the objective truth is not the only expression of that charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness, encouragement,” he added. “For that reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern if there are forms of blessing, solicited by one or various persons, that don’t transmit a mistaken concept of marriage.”

Pope Francis added that decisions made in specific circumstances should not necessarily become a norm regulated by a diocese or bishops’ conference, noting that “the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to regulatory frameworks.”

The pope’s comments came in response to a “dubia” letter dated July 10 seeking clarification on doctrinal questions written by five retired cardinals: U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, Mexican Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah and Chinese Cardinal Joseph Zen.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Radicalism, Religion

Pope Francis is challenged

Five cardinals write Dubia to Pope Francis on concerns about Synod, Catholic doctrine

Cardinals Burke, Brandmüller, Sarah, Zen, and Íñiguezto have published a new Dubia to express grave concerns to Pope Francis about the Synod on Synodality and possible attacks on Catholic doctrine.

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Five prominent cardinals have submitted dubia to Pope Francis about the Synod on Synodality, asking five urgent questions about possible attacks on the Church’s doctrines, including the possibility of homosexual blessings, the weight of teaching afforded to the synod, female ordination, and the necessity of repentance in sacramental Confession.

Broken to the Catholic public on October 2, news of previously private correspondence between five cardinals and Pope Francis, expressing grave concerns about the upcoming Synod on Synodality, was revealed. They highlighted the urgency of the synod as a catalyst for the intervention, noting the synod as an event “which many want to use to deny Catholic doctrine on the very issues which our Dubia concern.”

The Dubia have been written and submitted by Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, former prefect of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences; Raymond Leo Burke, former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura; Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, former Archbishop of Guadalajara; Robert Sarah, the former prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; and Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong. Both Brandmüller and Burke were signatories of the previous Dubia submitted to the Pope in 2016 about Amoris Laetitia.

Veteran Vatican journalist Sandro Magister wrote that the five cardinals recognized the late Cardinal George Pell “shared these ‘dubia’ and would have been the first to endorse them.”

READ: Vatican and Cardinal Fernández fire back at cardinals’ new dubia about the Synod on Synodality

Background

Magister provided a copy of the letters and a history of the events which led to the correspondence emerging now. (The correspondence is also found on Messa in Latino, on the site of America TFP, and is produced below.)

The five cardinals first wrote to the Pope on July 10, presenting him with five Dubia. This, according to Magister, Pope Francis responded to in writing on July 11, which was received by the cardinals on July 13. 

According to Magister, the seven-page letter in Spanish bore Francis’ signature but “the letter displayed the writing style of his trusted theologian, the Argentine Victor Manuel Fernández,” who was made cardinal on September 30 and assumed control of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on September 11.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Radicalism

Cardinal Pell speaks about the ‘Synod’

The following is taken from the Facebook page George Pell, Victim Soul

*****

The Synod begins this week! Cardinal Pell, of blessed memory, wrote a scathing attack on it for the ‘Spectator’ Magazine on January 11 this year, where he called it a ‘toxic nightmare’ and three days later, he was dead. Some see that as a little too convenient.

I publish the text of that final article that Pell wrote here, in full, as its often hidden behind a paid subscription wall and can’t be accessed. I hope that you will share it, so that people can be as alarmed as he was, and pray that God will act to save our church, before it’s too late!

*****

“The Catholic Church must free itself from this ‘toxic nightmare’”

by Cardinal George Pell, Spectator Magazine, January 11, 2023

The Catholic Synod of Bishops is now busy constructing what they think of as ‘God’s dream’ of synodality. Unfortunately this divine dream has developed into a toxic nightmare despite the bishops’ professed good intentions.

They have produced a 45-page booklet which presents its account of the discussions of the first stage of ‘listening and discernment’, held in many parts of the world, and it is one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome.

While we thank God that Catholic numbers around the globe, especially in Africa and Asia are increasing, the picture is radically different in Latin America with losses to the Protestants as well as the secularists.

With no sense of irony, the document is entitled ‘Enlarge the Space of Your Tent’, and the aim of doing so is to accommodate, not the newly baptised —those who have answered the call to repent and believe — but anyone who might be interested enough to listen. Participants are urged to be welcoming and radically inclusive: ‘No one is excluded’.

What is one to make of this potpourri, this outpouring of New Age good will?

Continue reading Cardinal Pell speaks about the ‘Synod’ →
Catholic Church, Political correctness, Radicalism, Religion, Western Civilization

Political thuggery in the Church

I baulk at charging Pope Francis with vicious political thuggery over the Motu Proprio Traditiones Custodes, the papal document whose objective is ‘to disappear’ the Mass of the centuries. There remains in me a modicum of respect for the papacy despite Francis’s papal profligacy. But I am less reluctant to refrain when it comes to Professor Andrea Grillo at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome who Dr Peter Kwasniewski calls ‘The Mind Behind the Motu Proprio’ in another outstanding article in OnePeter5.

Indeed, if Andrea Grillo is the virtual author of Traditiones Custodes, I have no hesitation in calling him not only a political thug, in the worst sense of the phrase, but a two-faced hypocritical scoundrel. He, and those like him, don’t have the honesty and backbone to state exactly what their views mean. The image he projects of concern for the same Church of the ages is pretence.

It is only necessary to read Dr Kwasniewski’s first paragraphs in summarizing Grillo views on the Catholic liturgy to know that Grillo belongs to the Church of Rupture. He is a paid-up member of the apostate mob of middle and high Church managers who despise and ridicule those refusing to become members of his brilliant new church.

There are, of course, thousands like Grillo feverishly working to destroy the Church that won’t be destroyed no matter how far they sink their claws into it. They are recognizable by the Marxist dialectic always implicit in their rhetoric. It’s the idea that history proceeds in sets of truths that constantly supersede each other in their advance towards the Omega Point, where all conflict is resolved in an earthly paradise.

The destroyers within the Church are the same as the destroyers outside the Church, seeking to realign humanity with their Marxist ideas. They are the same ferrets and weasels that occupy Toad Hall (an image I have frequently used.) We need a Badger, Rat and Mole with the courage to really take the fight up to Toad Hall occupiers. What does that mean?

It means all bets are off. It means using similar tactics to those occupying the visible Church. It means taking the Church underground with priests refusing the treasonous apostate path of working with the destroyers. It means the faithful supporting those courageous priests. It means Masses in homes, halls and other such venues. It happened in the 1970s when the dissenters suppressed the Mass of the centuries. It should happen again. It must happen again.

*****

Continue reading Political thuggery in the Church →
Catholic Church, Law, Political correctness, Religion

The Pope is a typical ‘Liberal’

Francis’s Illicit War on the Latin Mass

Dr Kwasniewski argued in two previous comments that the Pope’s Motu Proprio, Traditionis Custodes, is so outside his competence as Pope that no Catholic is obliged to obey his directions.

In John-Henry Weston’s discussion with Chris Ferrara, Unpacking Pope Francis’ war on Latin Mass Catholics and why it matters for everyone else, well-known Catholic lawyer Ferrara goes into the nitty-gritty of Traditionis Custodes and the just-released answers to a series of concocted ‘dubias’ to show how absurd it all is. I am in full agreement with Ferrara’s analysis. It is precisely what I think of the Motu Proprio and it is the stance I have adopted towards it.