Tag Archives: St Gallen Mafia

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, The Left

The St Gallen Mafia – Paul Kengor’s review

Julia Meloni’s The St Gallen Mafia: Crucial Insights into Pope Francis

Paul Kengor, TAN Direction, 21 November 2021

Julia Meloni’s new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, is a fascinating work. Rarely do I push through a book in two days, but this time I did.

The research and writing are outstanding. A read of the text and study of the footnotes and bibliography make clear that Meloni seems to have read every book available (many in Italian) on the central figure of Pope Francis and the core figures that comprised the so-called St. Gallen Mafia, namely: Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini, Godfried Danneels, Walter Kasper, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and Achille Silvestrini. Meloni’s examination of these characters and the connections she draws from them to Francis is admirably skilled and splendidly executed. It’s also eminently fair.

I do not know Meloni, but I partly expected a book on this provocative subject to contain hyperbole and flashes of anger and more than a few digs and shots at the chief characters—or maybe a better word for this group, the chief plotters. Meloni doesn’t do that. She is charitable, level-headed, and allows the facts to drive the conclusions. She narrates exceptionally well.

There is much to take from this book, and yet also, as with any analysis of Francis, much to leave one scratching one’s head. Francis remains an enigma. It is so hard to know the real Francis, especially where and when the man is leading or being led, or frankly, where and when the man is perhaps deceiving or being deceived by those whom he has surrounded himself with at the Vatican.

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Catholic Church, Culture, Politics, Radicalism, Religion

The gang behind the elevation of Jorge Bergoglio

Julia Meloni’s book The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group within the Church, is one of the most important books published this year about the crumbling Catholic Church. I mean the visible Catholic Church.

It is a painstakingly researched book, loaded with references, that lays bare the manoeuvring, manipulation, and agitating of a small group of prelates on the Catholic far left to place Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio on the seat of Peter. Ms Meloni, in this article on her publisher’s website (TAN), provides some background to the writing of the book.

*****

Exposing the St. Gallen Mafia: Exclusive Interview with the Author

Julia Meloni, 12 November 2021, TAN

In discussing my new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, certain questions frequently come up. Here are some of them.

What made you want to write this book?

I still remember the moment when I first became captivated with the St. Gallen mafia, the secret group of high-ranking churchmen who used to meet at or near St. Gallen, Switzerland to plot their opposition to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It was winter, it was night, and I was reading Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope. When the first chapter turned to the mafia’s leader, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, I was arrested. I temporarily put down the book, downloaded Martini’s Night Conversations, and read late into the night.

When I finished, I knew I had wandered into a detective story.

A detective story?

Yes. At the center stood Martini—the man hailed as the next pope by the media in the 1990s. It is said that the mafia at this time wanted Martini as pope, too—but then Martini got sick with Parkinson’s. So Martini’s dream mutated in order to survive. No longer the “next pope,” Martini began in Night Conversations to call himself the “ante-pope,” the mysterious forerunner to some future pope.

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